Religious Experience, Testimony, and Skepticism, Part 2 (A Very Rough Draft)

3. Multiple persons and multiple testimonies

If something like (A2) is correct, then surely another principle is true. It seems to me fundamentally obvious that if S1’s receiving T from S2 counts as evidence for his belief in the veracity of T, then surely if S1 receives the same sort of testimony from other persons, S3, S4, S5, etc… S1 has better evidence for his belief in the veracity of the report than he did when he received just S2’s account. Just how much more evidence should this count for? It seems to me impossible to calculate precisely, but surely if a person receives testimony about an event or experience from two or three people, he or she will have much less evidence than if he or she receives accounts from, say, one or two billion other persons.

Before we formulate a rule about justification of beliefs occasioned by testimony from multiple persons, a proviso seems necessary. When receiving a report from multiple persons about their individual experiences or perceptions, I hold that one’s belief about the reports’ veracity is justified in proportion to the degree of coherence exhibited by the testimonies. The classic case of accident witnesses should illuminate this distinction. Suppose that four people claim to have recently seen a car accident; each one, however, reports something slightly different. The first person claims to have seen three cars involved in the accident, while the second person claims to have only seen two. Perhaps also the third person attests to hearing a loud screeching sound before the collision, while the other three testify only to hearing a loud boom at the moment of impact. The fourth witness disagrees with the other three about the color of the automobiles involved, while all four present the accident as happening at different times, perhaps as many as fifteen minutes apart. Suppose that our generic person S1 has been listening to these testimonials. Upon recognizing the incongruities in the four witnesses’ accounts, what does S1 remain justified in believing? Ought he totally disbelieve that the entire incident took place?

In the absence of any defeaters (see below), it seems to me that S1 ought to, in accordance with the (A2) form two beliefs, one that the four witnesses experienced what they claimed to experience (that is, they are not lying to him) and second that something, x, caused them to experience what they claimed to experience. Now, obviously (all other things being equal; assuming the witnesses have about the same level of reliability and S1 has no other justified beliefs about the nature of the event) he cannot justifiably adopt four mutually exclusive stories about what took place. He can, however, use what I will call the LCD (or lowest common denominator) approach in forming his beliefs. If I receive conflicting testimonies about an event, I ought to look for a common core of description. In the case of our four witnesses, although their versions of the story appear markedly different, there exists a number of commonalities between the four accounts; first, they all agree that there certainly was an event, an event that seemed to them to involve more than one but less than four automobiles. Further, they all agree that there was in fact a collision, that it happened on the road, and that it happened sometime within a fifteen-minute time-span. Note here that while some details are mutually exclusive (the precise times given for the accident, for example, or the color of the individual automobiles) others appear incompatible but upon further investigation we see that it is coherent to suppose them to have happened. For instance, witnesses one, two, and four all only heard the sound made by the collision while witness three claimed to hear a screeching sound, S1 need not view these as mutually exclusive accounts. Perhaps witness three was situated in just the right location to hear the screeching while one, two and four were not. Maybe witness three was paying close attention to her surroundings and was attentively listening to the noises going on around her while the others were distracted at the time of the screech. The LCD approach to incoherent testimonies will be broached further below.

With the notion of coherence of multi-person testimony in mind, let us formulate one more principle of testimony that can be conjoined to (A2), yielding a more precise examination of justification, testimony, and multiple persons:

(R1) Multi-person testimony (MPT) that occasions S1’s beliefs B1 and B2 justify S1’s holding of those beliefs more strongly than does single-person testimony (SPT). The degree of justification enjoyed by those beliefs occasioned by MPT rises in proportion to the coherence of the testimonies and falls in proportion to the mutual exclusivity of the testimonies.

IV. Externalist constraints and proper function

(A2), with the addendum of (R1), although close to being right, is open to serious criticism from the externalists. I have already worded (A2) so as to exclude cases of a true belief occasioned by a break in the right causal chain; if you testify to me that it seems to you a chair is sitting in the room and just at that moment I am struck soundly over the head, giving me neurological damage, and occasioning the serendipitously true belief in me that there is a chair sitting in the room, I remain unjustified in my believing despite both your testimony and the truth of the belief. In this case, it was the blow to the head that occasioned in me the belief, rather than your testimony. The reason I am unjustified, Alvin Plantinga would say, is because of a facultative malfunction.[1] When I receive a blow to the head, my belief-forming faculties (perception, memory, induction, and the like) ceased to function the way my design plan specifies.

A very short summary of Plantinga’s form of externalism should suffice. The distinguishing feature of Plantinga’s epistemology is that he views proper function as a necessary condition for a person’s having warrant (roughly equivalent to epistemic justification) for her beliefs. With a number of caveats and slight adjustments that will take too long to adequately treat here, Plantinga summarizes the conditions under which a true human belief has warrant: “a belief has warrant for me only if (1) it has been produced in me by cognitive faculties that are working properly… in a cognitive environment that is appropriate for my kinds of cognitive faculties (2) the segment of the design plan governing the production of that belief is aimed at the production of true beliefs, and (3) there is a high statistical probability that a belief produced under those conditions will be true.”[2]

Plantinga’s criteria for epistemic warrant can help us understand why an externalist constraint is needed for our principle, (A2). Suppose that instead of S1 having a cognitive malfunction, S2 (the person delivering the testimony) experiences a dysfunction of some sort. Perhaps S2 is suddenly struck with a neurologically damaging radiation that causes it to seem to S2 that some object, x, is present itself to him as such-and-such. In such a case, even if it just so happened that an object actually was present and indeed was presenting itself to S2 as such-and-such, we would not ordinarily say that S2 would be externally justified in his believing that an object was presenting itself to him as such-and-such. Such a case is an exception to the aforementioned Alston-Swinburne principle of rationality, that if “it seems (epistemically) to a subject that x is present (and has some characteristic), then probably x is present (and has that characteristic)…” In cases of cognitive malfunctions that produce perceptual hallucination or delusion, its seeming to a person that something is the case does not count toward externally justifying her belief that something really is the case, since her faculties are not functioning the way they ought to.

Moreover, if S2, the giver of the testimony about his experience, remains (externally) unjustified, then I posit that so does S1. In cases of malfunction on the part of the testifier, the receiver of the testimony may be internally justified (and also rational) in adopting B1 and B2 in accordance with (A2), but remains externally without justification for those beliefs. Beliefs occasioned by the testimony of a person whose cognitive faculties are malfunctioning remain unjustified from a Plantingian standpoint. Plantinga may see this as a failure of warrant transfer from S2 to S1, but I will speak of it as a basing error; that is, S1’s B1 and B2 are based on the wrong kind of testimony, the kind that is delivered by a person whose own perceptual beliefs are externally unjustified. Robert Audi makes a similar point in “The A Priori Authority of Testimony”: “…even if the recipient is justified on some ground or other in thinking the attester is justified in believing p, the latter’s justification could still be grounded on such inadequate bases as plausible but unsound reasoning, or on hallucination, or on false but credible testimony.”[3] Thus, a further developed principle is required for cases in which a person is both internally and externally justified in accepting the veracity of another person’s testimony:

(A3) For some person S1, two beliefs, B1 and B2, about the veracity of the testimony, T, of another person, S2, are justified by virtue of their being occasioned by T in S1, where B1 is the belief that S2 is not deceiving S1, and B2 is the belief that that something, x, is, indeed, causing it to S2 to seem that x is present only if both S1 and S2 have properly functional cognitive faculties.

V. Defeaters and overrider systems

Defeaters, says Alvin Plantinga, are “reasons for giving up a belief b you hold.”[4] Defeaters may be either rebutting defeaters (beliefs that turn out to be inconsistent with the defeated belief) or undercutting defeaters (beliefs that remove one’s reasons for holding to the defeated belief.) Moreover, there are, says Richard Swinburne, four kinds of special considerations that defeat perceptual claims. Here I quote him at length:

“First one may show that the apparent perception was made under conditions or by a subject found in the past to be unreliable…. Secondly, one may show that the perceptual claim was to have perceived an object of a certain kind in circumstances where similar perceptual claims have proved false…. The third consideration then that defeats a claim to have perceived x involves showing that on background evidence it is very very probable that x was not present…. Fourthly, S’s claim to have perceived x may be challenged on the grounds that, whether or not x was there, x was probably not a cause of the experience of its seeming to S that x was there.”[5]

William Alston renders a broader understanding of defeat, arguing that attached to each doxastic practices (perception, reason, memory, and the like) is an overrider system of beliefs and procedures “that the subject can use in subjecting prima facie justified beliefs to further tests when that is called for.”[6] A belief, then, for Alston is what we can call prima facie justified simply when it is formed on the right basis and produced by a practice that is generally reliable and is unqualifiedly justified “provided it is prima facie justified… and there are no sufficient overriders…”[7] This seems correct. A belief for me is immediately justified just by being produced in me by a practice that is reliable in producing true beliefs (and properly functional cognitive faculties) and by being based as such in the right way, while it may not be unqualifiedly justified until I check it against my other beliefs, those that I already justifiably believe. If the belief in question has been in me produced by faculties subject to no dysfunction in the right cognitive environment and I can find no belief that can defeat it within my overrider system, it is justified.

How do defeaters and overrider systems relate to testimonial evidence? First, let us note that our principle (A3) is a statement about prima facie justification. Here, then, let us elaborate by introducing the notion of defeaters in order to determine when a person might be unqualifiedly justified in taking the testimony of another person about his or her experience or perception to be veridical:

(A4) For some person S1, the two beliefs, B1 and B2, about the veracity of the testimony, T, of another person, S2, are justified prima facie by virtue of their being occasioned by T in S1, only if both S1 and S2 have properly functional cognitive faculties. The prima facie justification of B1 and B2 can be defeated by S1’s justifiably believing any of the following four propositions: (1) That S2 is a generally unreliable reporter of his own cognitive states, (2) That S2’s purported perception is markedly similar to other cases which have been in the past shown to be unreliable (3) That on the background evidence, it is improbable that the object exists or else was present at the time, and (4) That it is not probable that the purported object could have appeared to S2 in such a way so as to make it seem to S2 that it was present as such-and-such, even if it was present.

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[1] See Alvin Plantinga’s full treatment of warrant, proper functionality, and knowledge in his Warrant: the Current Debate, Warrant and Proper Function, and Warranted Christian Belief.

[2] Warrant and Proper Function, p. 46,47.

[3] Audi, “The A Priori Authority of Testimony”

[4] Warranted Christian Belief, p. 359

[5] The Existence of God, pp. 310-14

[6] Perceiving God, p. 159

[7] Ibid.