Living Under the Epistemic Law

Clearly, it is plausible to claim that warrant is what separates true belief and knowledge.   The received view in epistemology is that knowledge just is justified, true belief, and while the post-Gettier literature has tried to tweak this a bit so as to avoid unintended counterinstances, the central idea remains intact: Something more than true belief is needed for knowledge, and this something more is what warrants the epistemic agent holding that true belief at all.  But what is this warrant?

Many hold that warrant connects generally to deontology as follows:  x is warranted for Y if and only if Y concludes x when acting on the basis of properly performing all of his/her epistemic duties.   The idea is that a proper concluding of x is somehow internal to Y-- that the relevant warrant-conferring properties are internal to Y, i.e., that Y's mental states are pertinent in concluding x. There are many ways to be an internalist, but normativity usually figures into to all of them in some way.   If one, broadly speaking, manifests proper doxastic practice, then one will have a greater probability in ascertaining truth.  Acting due to the proper rule or law of proper doxastic formation adds warrant to true belief and thus issues in knowledge.   (I am skipping over many philosophical details here in order to get at the theological issue.)  

Famously, William Clifford argued that it was always wrong everywhere to hold a belief without proper grounds or evidence.  In so arguing, Clifford committed himself to the importance of the epistemic law in achieving knowledge.   One's ship might make it across the ocean or it might not.   To say that one knows that it will do so without having proper evidence - - without properly performing one's pertinent epistemic duties - - is the mark of epistemic waywardness.   One only knows that it will so make it if one has done the relevant research, believes it will make it and it does so.  Absent the relevant research, even if it happens to make it across, one cannot say that one knew it, though one did believe it deeply.  The idea is that one is responsible for what one claims to know.   One cannot know that which one has not examined deeply.  Simply put, it can be clearly irresponsible to say one knows that the ship will make it even if it does, while one might responsibly hold claim to know that the ship will make it even if it does not.  Such epistemic responsibility is tied to the proper performance of epistemic duty.

There is thus a parallel between the proper formation of belief and the proper performance of an action, a parallel eschewing of consequentialism.  Just as the ethical deontologist holds that acting due to a moral principle in performing A clan be right even if the consequences of A are in fact deleterious, so does the epistemic deontologist claim that forming a belief due to properly performing one's epistemic duties is right even if the belief turns out to be false.  Everything rests upon the intentionality of the act.   Was the moral act done solely on the basis of the moral law?  Was the epistemic act done solely on the basis of the epistemic principle?  Deontology in epistemology makes knowing a matter of the law.  One must properly perform one's epistemic duties if one is ever to achieve knowledge.  Simply put, if one is to know x, one must do what one ought to do.   

But human beings have not been successful in doing what they ought to do.   While Bob should act on the basis of moral principle P, he does not so act.  Why?  Christians confess that there is a basic existential disruption that does not allow Bob to act as he ought.   Sin is that which prohibits the total consonance of "is" and "ought."

But what is true of moral action is true also of epistemology.   Why would anyone expect epistemic agent Bob always to act due to the proper epistemic principle?   There same is/ought gap exists in epistemology as it does in moral action generally.   "Oh, sinful epistemic agent that I am, those things I claim to know, I do not really know!"  Descartes famously argued that epistemic turpitude rests upon human beings having freedom to assert P or not assert P, and that unfortunately they do assert one (or the other) without adequate grounds.   (God does not have this failing having always adequate grounds.)   Epistemic waywardness is built into the fabric of human existence.    

Lutherans claim that the nature of the Law is always to accuse.  While I try to live my life in accordance with the proper moral principles, I cannot do so.   Thus, I am guilty.   Similarly and in an epistemic key, while I try to live my life in accordance with proper epistemic duties, I cannot do so.   Thus, I am guilty.

To be guilty is finally not to be who one deeply is.   As sons and daughters of God created in imago dei, we ought always to do that which would properly issue from one created in imago dei.   But we don't so act and thus we aren't so constituted.

Lutheran theology proclaims grace to all who stand guilty before the Law.   While we are not now who we ought to be, in God's sight - - i.e., the highest sight - - we become again who we should be.   The accusing Law is quelled through the effects of God's love of us.   Through Christ we are again who we really are even though, and despite the fact, we are not who we should be.  The way that grace makes us who we truly are, while we yet remain who we are not truly, is a subject of great controversy in the theological tradition.   The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic grace is important in examining these ways.  Is the grace which heals the disrupture something that human beings in some sense have (and on the logical basis of which a divine judgment is proffered), or is it some change of the divine judgment (on the logical basis of which human change is possible?   (We shall not go into all of the views here, but readers of the blog probably are familiar with most.)  

The question, however, of this post is this:  If there is a parallel between the moral and epistemic waywardness of human beings in that both the morality and epistemology ultimately depend upon the law, and if this law always accuses us because we are not the moral (and epistemic agents) we ought to be, and if our healing from the guilt of moral sin is due to grace (however, finally considered), then would it not be important for Christians (of a deontological internalist persuasion) to reflect upon what the contour of what epistemic grace might be?  If we cannot live up to our paridisical epistemic lights, and if living in accordance with these lights is what it is to have true knowledge of truth, then what divine grace might we expect in knowing truth?

On this way of viewing things, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil really symbolizes a fall into the deontological, both moral and epistemic.  Thinking through what knowledge could be before such a Fall is the theme of a later post.   It seems clear, however, that it cannot be a matter of deontology.

On Contra-Causal Freedom to Accept of Reject Grace

I received a very thought-provoking response which asked me to rethink my "Fundamental Seven" (http://www.wordalone.org/docs/wa-fundamentals.shtml) saying that "The Holy Spirit works monergistically, not synergistically, upon sinners effecting saving grace." The response said that I had perhaps been not as precisely confessional as I should have been because my description of this tends to deemphasize the role of human acceptance and denial of grace, something that Lutherans have traditionally understood as important. I am quoting my reply to this response below because I think it gets at a very important issue:

"The material question you ask is a very important one. Know that I readily affirm that human beings cooperate with grace. This is done, of course, out of their own phenomenological freedom. The question is, of course, whether human beings have any contra-causal agency with respect to the divine. That is to say, do human beings qua human beings have an intrinsic causal power to accept grace were it not for the agency of the divine already at work in that acceptance? The test for ascertaining contra-causal agency is this: X is contra-causally efficacious in producing Y if and only if in an exactly similar causal situation where X had not occurred, then Y would not have occurred either. Thus, human free-will is causally efficacious in the reception of grace if and only if, in an exactly similar causal situation, were human free-will not to have been present in receiving grace, grace would not have been received. When I speak of ‘an exactly similar causal situation’ I mean that the descriptions of the two situations are exactly the same (including the same state of divine grace, and the same state of all causal features external to the putative human free-will). [I shall leave open for now the question whether or not the human act of free-will is realized by underlying neurophysiological causal forces sufficient for producing the allegedly free act.] I think we agree on these matters, so, as you say, it is a question of a possible misunderstanding of the fundamental to mean that salvation is wholly external and finally magical. Luther always rejected ex opere operatum accounts of grace, and would surely reject Fundamental Seven if he thought it would me misunderstood as compatible with such an account."

In my opinion, Lutherans have not been as courageously clear as they should be about the causal situation with respect to salvation. While Luther follows Augustine on operant grace, does he follow him on cooperant grace? Is there some power in human beings to either accept or reject the grace available to human beings in Christ?

A close reading of Luther and the Confessions convinces me that there is no efficacious causal power in the human such that divine grace can be accepted. While we might say that the human will is causally relevant in accepting grace, we must deny that it is causally efficacious in accepting grace. One could say that human free-will would not accept grace unless the human being is regenerated by the Holy Spirit. This would be to say, 'If the Holy Spirit had not been regenerated by the Holy Spirit, the human free-will would not accept grace'. This is also to say, 'If the free-will accepts grace, the human being has been regenerated by the Holy Spirit'. Accordingly, one might claim that because the free-will accepting grace is sufficient for the human being being regenerate by the Holy Spirit, the free-will accepting grace is causally relevant for the mediation of such grace. But while 'causal relevance' is grounded in conceptual linkages, 'causal efficacy' depends upon the actual causal situation. While much more work needs to be done to clarify above the notion of 'causal situation', I think we are on the right track to use that concept in understanding divine causal efficacy.