I'm not a wizard

Even if I wish I was

Recently, a war has been brewing. On one side: the Silly Slayers. Clad in very cool, serious, business casual attire, they stand proud, holding the line against the horde of Sillarians. On the other side, in tie-dye jeans and frill coats, are the Silly Defenders (the Sillarians). They uh… also know that they defend something silly but they think that the Silly Slayers have no good methods of preventing the silliness and really want us (I’m a Silly Slayer) to notice.¹

On the side of the Silly Slayers we have myself, Both Sides Brigade , Plasma Bloggin' , ppan , and others, valiantly resisting the onslaught of the Sillarians (Hesara Gunaratna and Pete Mandik ). What have the battle lines been drawn over? Well, the silliest philosophical view of all: CAUSAL FINI- wait sorry, wrong post. Trivialism. We are arguing over Trivialism. In this article, I want to articulate what I consider the strongest version of the Sillarian’s argument (as they’ve presented it), explain why I think it fails, and why even if it doesn’t, the argument is largely boring.

Exhibition

First, what is Trivialism? Trivialism is the view that all propositions are true.

Trivialism is true <=> Every proposition is true

“Wait, so like, that the moon is made of cheese?” Yea. “And that there are purple hippos?” Yep. “And that to exist is to be the value of a bound variable?!” That too (though idk why that example belongs in this list since it is true!). Trivialism is very silly. Everyone knows it’s silly. No party to the debate, at the moment, disagrees that it’s silly. The question is not, then, whether or not Trivialism is true. The question is whether we can know if Trivialism is true, and more specifically whether we can know if we are a Trivialist. The famously unpersuasive contingent of the anti-Qualia Beard Brigade² has recently released a post where he argues that we cannot. Mr Mandik thinks that we cannot know whether we believe Trivialism is true. I’ll largely follow his exhibition of his argument, with necessary addenda from other members of the Silly Defenders, for the purposes of constructing my reply.

What is my evaluation of the Silly Defenders argument? As I will argue, it fails. Yet, worse, even if the argument succeeds, I think it does so for such boring reasons that the argument itself is rendered rather uninteresting. All the action will happen elsewhere.

Bolstering the Ramparts of Silly Castle

Let’s begin by quickly sketching the main argument from the Silly Defenders. I linked it before but you really should read Pete's most recent article, what I present here is a sketch in my own words that attempts to capture the broad thrust of the Silly Defender’s argument, so if you think I misrepresent them (which you can only find out by reading Pete’s blog post!) then maybe you should be on the side of the Silly Slayers.

First, another definition: A trivialist is anyone who believes Trivialism.

T is a trivialist <=> T believes Trivialism is true.

Plugging in some equivalences:

T is a trivialist <=> T believes Trivialism is true <=> T believes every proposition is true.

So when is someone not a trivialist?

T is not a trivialist <=> It is not the case that T believes every proposition is true.

In other words, T is not a trivialist if, and only if, there is some proposition which they do not believe.³

The problem for the non-trivialist is this: how do you know you are not a trivialist? Suppose, for instance, you say “Well, I don’t believe the earth is flat! But the trivialist does.” The trivialist also thinks that they believe the earth is flat. “Me too!” they will say, “I agree!” So you haven’t actually distinguished yourself from the trivialist. We will be able to repeat this story for any belief you try to appeal to, because by definition the trivialist will also believe whatever belief you point to that is supposed to justify your claim that you do not believe something.

Thus, no matter how hard you try, you can never assault silly castle! None of your beliefs supply sufficient ammunition. Their walls are impregnable. Trivialism is inevitable.

Appearances and Magic Powers

Too bad I have MAGIC. Yea, that’s right, I’m a wizard. Or that’s what Mr Mandik is accusing us Silly Slayers of being, anyway; but I’m jumping the shark. Why is the above line of thought wrong? Simple: I don’t argue that I lack a belief by pointing to some other belief that I lack the belief. That would be stupid. I know that I lack the belief because, upon introspection, I notice that I lack the belief. The belief does not appear to be amongst the set of beliefs I have. I see that I don’t believe the earth is flat.

This, apparently, makes me a wizard. See:

Wow. Good job. That was really impressive. You claim to know that you lack a belief because you possess and are able to exercise the magical power that allows you to know that you lack a belief. Nice. Please allow me to present you with this sarcastic slow clap.

And now, let’s get serious. Please consider the following: How do you know that you haven’t confused the PRESENCE of a belief that you don’t believe the Earth is flat for the ABSENCE of a belief that the Earth is flat?

A similar point is raised by the other most prominent Silly Defender, Hesara:

“Even if the trivialist has every belief that I do, it does not follow that I hold every belief the trivialist does. The trivialist, by definition, endorses every proposition, and since there are propositions I don’t endorse, I am not a trivialist”. This objection only works if we take it to be the case that we have exhaustive access into our beliefs upon introspection.

Uhhh, hey guys. Guess what? I’m not a wizard. Check this out: right now, I’m looking out of my window and see a man in a yellow raincoat walking his dog. I believe that there is a man in a yellow raincoat outside my house. “How do you know there is a man in a yellow raincoat outside your house?” Oh, well, because I saw him. “WIZARD! INVOCATION OF MAGIC CHICANERY! SUCH EPISTEMOLOGICAL SORCERY IS ONLY ABLE TO BE ACCOMPLISHED BY THOSE FAMILIAR WITH THE CARTESIAN MAGICS!”

What my imagined inquisitor is missing here is that I can know some proposition to be true despite having evidence that is compatible with the proposition being false. Belief inspection works the same way that looking at something does. I have self monitoring faculties, faculties to monitor what is going on inside my body. I have nerves that detect when I suffer internal damage, I have the ability to tell when my muscles are fatigued, and I have the ability to detect when stuff happens in my brain. The trivialist agrees that they can introspect and recognize that they believe things. Clearly, introspection of this sort is already kosher in the dialectic. But the idea of introspecting to see you lack a belief? MAGIC, WITCHCRAFT, SORCERY! Thou hath violated the immaculate Cartesian Theatre, the sanctum of Churchland, and summon the wrath of the Flaming Laser Sword Razor of Newton (it’s a thing, look it up)!

Nuh uh. I don’t buy it. I can see things. No problems. I can detect things in my body. No problems. I can detect when I believe things. No problems. I can detect when I don’t believe things? WOAH WOAH WOAH BUDDY, sounds like you’re in hogwarts. Seems like a special kind of pleading to me…

Eliding the rest of the polemics: The analogy with vision is important. Every time you see Silly Defenders ask a question about belief, run the question with perceptual cases. How do I know that I’m not seeing a potato right now? Because I don’t see a potato right now. That’s not wizardry, that’s just how I know things in cases of perception. If such appeals are kosher in perceptual cases, why think that belief cases are so weird? Why label the faculty of noticing what is going on in my mind “wizardry” but ‘seeing’ is off the hook?

But what about Pete’s challenge?!?!

Despite including the quote, I say nothing in the preceding about Pete’s challenge. How do I know that I haven’t confused the presence of a belief that I don’t believe that P for the absence of a belief that P? Recall the upshot of the last section. How do I know that I see a man in a yellow coat rather than confusing said appearance with the mere belief that I see a man in a yellow coat?? I think the same answer suffices: because I see him, stompin’ around. But Pete has another reply!

If you notice that you lack a belief or if you are aware that you lack a belief, then you believe that you lack that other belief (…) Your mission was to establish the absence of some belief. Your secondary mission was to make sure that you weren’t confusing the presence of one belief for the absence of some other belief. By citing your noticing an absence or being aware of an absence, you are introducing a candidate presence of belief for you to confuse with an absence of some other belief. The candidate is a belief in the absence. It’s right there, just waiting for you to confuse it with something else. So, how do you know that you haven’t already done so?

What you need to do is to find some evidence of the absence of belief, some indicator of the absence of belief, that isn’t itself the presence of a belief. This is because every belief that you produce will simply be something that fails to distinguish you from the trivialist.

Now, we already know what I’m going to say about that last paragraph (something something appearance something something not a belief, etc. etc. etc.) so let’s not thump the table over consumed milk.

What about the first paragraph? Let’s just grant to Pete that something appearing some way to me, or my noticing something, entails that I believe it. I don’t really see why I’d accept this universally, but I think it’s plausible that if I come to believe something on the basis of some appearance, then I believe that appearance; that is to say, if an appearance plays a justificatory role in my thinking, I probably believe that appearance. Anyway, don’t want to quibble about that.

Pete’s further worry is that, if we grant this principle, then appearance and belief always co-occur, so I always could mistake the one for the other. Now, you know what I’m gonna do. You’re probably bored of it at this point. Here comes the magic trick: When I see the man in the yellow raincoat, per Pete’s principle, I always form the belief that he’s there. So the belief and the appearance always co-occur. So it’s always possible that I confused the appearance with the belief. “So how do you know you have the appearance?!?!” Because I can tell I have it.

Even if you disagree with all of that, the argument is probably just boring

Now, the coup de grace. The worst thing you can call a philosophical argument. Not wrong, but boring. There is a move that the Silly Defenders may now make, but if they make it, the jig is up. Ironically, they will prove to be the spiritual Cartesians in this dispute. They may now proclaim: “Yea well none of what you said gives you contrastive evidence! It can appear to you that P, while P is false! So you haven’t shown that you know P!”

Uh-oh-spaghetti-o’s! What have we done? We’ve invoked infallibilism? Yea…, we invoked infallibilism. The idea that I have to provide contrastive evidence, that is, evidence that cannot be true if the negation of a proposition is true, just implies infallibilism. But I’m a fallibilist. I think I can know something while my knowledge allows the possibility of error. The famous philosophical arguments that we cannot know things for certain are well trodden. If the trivialist argument succeeds in showing us this, they succeed in showing us what was known since Descartes and Hume. Woop-dee-doo, knowledge we got from the French and the Scots.

The Silly Defenders now face a dilemma. They might accept my analogy between vision and belief detection, and deny that we know when we see something. Arguments of this sort aren’t going to have anything to do with trivialism, they will be the classic sort of skeptical argument we have seen for decades, in which case, the Silly Defenders case is parasitic on ancient philosophical discourse. YAWN. They might also deny the analogy between vision and belief. They might say “yea, it’s sufficient t justify the claim that you don’t see something by appealing to a lack of noticing that you see it. But that doesn’t work with belief!” My question is: why? Remember our constraints! However they answer this question, it cannot be “because noticing you don’t have a belief is compatible with having it.” This is also true of vision, and if it means I don’t know something, it assumes infallibilism. So then I’ll just deny infallibilism.

The Upshot with NO Polemics

The preceding has been highly polemical, mostly because Pete is very snarky, and thus I must be twice as snarky in turn. But here is a no polemics summary as I see things:

• It is an analytic truth that a trivialist believes all propositions; thus, any justification for our belief that we are not trivialists that appeals to our beliefs will be able to be mirrored by the trivialist. They will believe the same things.

• I claim we can figure out we are not trivialists without appealing to beliefs. We can appeal to our introspective faculty to seeing what is going on in our head. This is a fallible faculty, I grant. It can be wrong. But introspection reporting that I don’t believe something is pretty good evidence that I don’t believe it. Why? One reason is that when it delivers the ‘no’ verdict everything else seems to line up. If I don’t believe that P according to introspection, I will often believe that ~P, I’ll act in ways consistent with a lack of belief in P, and so on. I think similar arguments can be made for the reliability of visual perception, speaking of…

• There is an important analogy between introspection and vision. If one is magic, or mystical, then so is the other. I think neither is. If the Silly Defenders want me to think I’m appealing to magic, they must break the analogy, but…

• They can’t break the analogy by appealing to another super controversial thesis (like infallibilism, or skepticism). Further, this seems to point towards this being a species of the problems associated with these historical heterodox views, rather than its own interesting puzzle.

So I know I’m not a Trivialist, and even if I don’t, the argument that I do is a bit boring.

1. Is the a polemical exhibition? Definitely. Is it funny? I don’t care. This is MY blog and you’re just livin’ in it.

2. With his most famous co-star Dan Dennett and, if I anachronistically add another philosopher to my intellectual tradition for genealogical brownie points, David Lewis.

3. There is, here, a very large caveat. James Diacoumis, Quiop, and Silas Abrahamsen had a very helpful discussion in this comment thread which inspired the following thoughts.

One may worry that this is a bad definition of Trivialist. The Trivialist does not, so this thought goes, believe every proposition. They merely believe the proposition that every proposition is true. This only entails that they believe every proposition if you append the principle that we believe the entailments of all our beliefs, which is obviously a false principle. Thus, you might get off the boat here with respect to the rest of my argument against the Silly Defenders.

Sorry to slay your silly, but if you define Trivialism this way then Pete’s argument won’t work, indeed the key idea motivating the thought that a Trivialist will believe everything I could appeal to distinguish myself from them is lost. Why? Call this alternate definition of a Trivialist a Trivialist2. It is sufficient for being a Trivialist2 that one believes that: All propositions are true. So long as someone believes that position they are a Trivialist2. Now, consider a person named John who is a Trivialist2 and has the following beliefs: Every proposition is true, and grass is green. John believes no other propositions. How do I know I am not John? Because I also believe that the sky is blue. I can differentiate myself from John by appealing to the presence of a belief. The unique thrust of Pete Mandik’s argument appeals to the fact that no positive belief can differentiate you from someone who believes everything. Once the Trivialist loses this feature, it is no harder to distinguish yourself from them than it is to distinguish yourself from any other view.

The upshot? A key premise in Pete’s argument is the analytic connection between being a Trivialist and the possession of all possible beliefs. If you redefine Trivialism in a way that removes this analytic entailment, you also obviate the problem of differentiation. There is no longer a question of how to differentiate yourself from a Trivialist.

Notably, I also take this to be an answer to Hesara Gunaratna’s second point in this note.