"Reasons, Attenuators, and Virtue: A Novel Account of Pragmatic Encroachment" - Eva Schmidt (TU Dortmund)

Analytic Philosophy, 2025

By Eva Schmidt

Pragmatic encroachment is motivated by examples like the well-known bank cases. Here, a pragmatic, nonevidential factor affects whether Hannah’s belief that the bank will be open on Saturday is knowledge, and is all things considered epistemically justified. The scenario goes as follows: Hannah is considering whether to deposit her check in the bank immediately despite the long lines in front of the bank. She remembers that the bank was open last Saturday. This is solid evidence that the bank will be open tomorrow, on Saturday. In the low-stakes variant, it is of no importance that the money is deposited quickly. Intuitively, then, her belief that the bank will be open on Saturday is justified. In the high-stakes variant, it is of great importance that the money is deposited before Sunday, since a large mortgage payment will be taken out of Hannah’s bank account then. Here, she intuitively isn’t justified to believe that the bank will be open on Saturday, exactly because the stakes are high – if she were to falsely believe that the bank will be open on Saturday, and act on this belief, this would have extremely negative practical consequences. Call the fact that a lot hinges on Hannah being right that the bank will be open on Saturday the ‘encroaching factor’.

If we accept that there is pragmatic encroachment, this leaves the question of how exactly the encroaching factor impacts epistemic justification. There are at least three mechanisms – and corresponding views – that one might propose. On the Threshold View, that a lot is at stake raises the threshold for all things considered justification. Evidence that suffices for justification when little is at stake may fail to reach the threshold for epistemic justification when stakes are high, so that the belief is unjustified. The Reasons View treats the encroaching factor as just another epistemic reason that speaks against believing, leading to all things considered unjustified belief in high-stakes scenarios. Finally, my own Attenuators View proposes that the encroaching factor is an attenuator that weakens the subject’s epistemic reasons to believe, so that belief is unjustified on balance, in high-stakes cases. Attenuators are conditions that reduce, or attenuate, the favoring strength of reasons. To illustrate, the fact that Juan is in trouble is a reason to help him. By contrast, the fact that it’s all his own fault is not a reason against helping him, but rather attenuates or weakens the given reason to help him.

To my mind, the Attenuators View provides a good match for the encroaching factor: Intuitively, the fact that a lot hinges on Hannah’s getting it right with respect to whether the bank is open on Saturday is, for instance, not something that epistemically speaks against believing. (Contrast this with the fact that a sign has been put up by the bank saying ‘the bank will be closed this Saturday’, which is a clear example of an epistemic reason against believing.) Instead, the encroaching factor appears to change how good Hannah’s evidence would have to be to amount to a favoring reason that is strong enough to justify her belief. This suggests that the encroaching factor impacts the justification of belief by attenuating the subject’s evidential reason to believe.

But how exactly does an encroaching factor attenuate epistemic reasons? And what explains why it attenuates? Here is my proposal: In high-stakes scenarios like the high-stakes bank case, it is of great importance that the belief in question is indeed the correct doxastic attitude for the subject to have. And so she needs to be especially diligent in forming her belief. Being especially diligent involves making extra sure that the belief is true. It involves being especially careful in weighing one’s epistemic reasons and in particular one’s reasons to believe, making extra sure to give proper weight to possible limitations of these reasons. That Hannah is especially diligent could mean that she worries that maybe she misremembers that the bank was open last Saturday; or that maybe it was a one-time occurrence that the bank was open on a Saturday; or that maybe she made a mistake somewhere. These are considerations that weaken the epistemic strength of her memory-based reason to believe that the bank will be open on Saturday. They do so either by casting doubt on the reliability of her memory, on her cognitive abilities or performance, or by questioning the strength of her inductive inference. Quite generally, when a subject exerts special diligence in weighing her reasons, she treats them as being weaker than she would ordinarily, in virtue of an increased sensitivity to the possible limitations of these reasons.

This way of thinking about high stakes cases makes appeal to competences to context-sensitively weigh and combine reasons so as to come to the doxastic attitude that is justified in the circumstances. However, I don’t suggest that agents in high stakes cases actually have and employ such competences, but that the actual strength of their reasons to believe is weakened to the extent that they would treat them as weaker if they had and employed these competences. My proposal then is that epistemic reasons to believe are weaker in high-stakes cases to the extent that a competent, duly diligent reasoner would accord them less weight in such circumstances.

I spell this proposal out further by leaning on an exemplarist virtue-theoretic proposal of how encroaching factors attenuate. A perfectly virtuous reasoner, one who has perfect reasoning competences – or wisdom – both recognizes what is at stake in a situation, and matches her diligence in forming beliefs to what’s at stake in the situation. She exercises due diligence in her reasoning. This means that she does not treat evidence of the same strength as epistemic reasons of the same weight when a lot hinges on belief being the correct doxastic attitude. Rather, when stakes are high, she pays closer attention to considerations that weaken her reasons to believe, such as ways in which the sources of her reasons may be unreliable or in which her reasons may lend less support to her belief than one might ordinarily think. Overall then, in manifesting her reasoning competences, the perfectly virtuous reasoner treats her reasons to believe as attenuated.

So, in a high-stakes situation, an epistemic reason to believe is weakened to the extent that, and because, a perfectly virtuous reasoner, who wisely exercises diligence in her reasoning and therefore attaches greater relevance to considerations that weaken the reason, would treat it as weaker. The strength of a reason to believe is in part determined by the weight that a perfectly virtuous reasoner would treat the reason as having, and this partly depends on how important it is to believe correctly in that situation. In this way, where a lot hinges on getting it right with respect to one’s belief, the encroaching factor attenuates the epistemic reasons for the belief.

One nice feature of my virtue-theoretic Attenuators View is that it correctly describes the encroaching factor, in cases of pragmatic encroachment, as an epistemic factor bearing on epistemic justification, and thus as contrasting with practical reasons for or against belief. In particular, it does not conceive of the encroaching factor as the practical costs of falsely believing. For the proposed view, what impacts the belief’s justification is how important it is for belief to be the correct doxastic attitude, and thus how diligent a perfectly virtuous reasoner would be in reasoning to the belief – that is to say, how salient possible limitations of her epistemic reasons would be for her. Encroaching factors are not conceived as reasons, and thus also not as cost-based practical reasons.

So much for a brief sketch of my recently proposed Attenuators View. The natural next question at this point is whether the Threshold View or the Reasons View might not still be more attractive. If you would like to find out what I have to say against them, you now have a very good reason to read the paper.