Mylan Engel Jr

In “Armchair Luck” (2007a), Nenad Miščević argues that Duncan Pritchard’s safe-true-belief anti-luck epistemology cannot rule out a priori veritic luck. Since a priori necessary truths are true in all possible worlds, Pritchard’s safety condition is satisfied in clear cases of knowledge-destroying a priori veritic luck. Thus, Pritchard’s modal anti-luck epistemology is mistaken. Nenad’s diagnosis is that Pritchard puts too much focus on the world and not enough focus on the epistemic agent. The solution, he argues, is a strong virtue-based epistemology that puts the focus on the epistemic agent. While I agree with his refutation of Pritchard’s anti-luck epistemology, I disagree with his diagnosis. The problem lies with Pritchard’s modal account of veritic luck. The kind of veritic luck that is incompatible with knowledge is the sort of evidence-based veritic luck that I identified when I originally introduced the distinction between evidential luck and veritic luck. Once that is recognized, we can see that there are two reliability constraints on knowledge—S’s reasons need to be reliable-indicator reasons and S needs to be a reliable interpreter of those reasons. While Nenad is right to recognize the important role played by the epistemic agent, virtuous epistemic agency is not enough. The would-be knower also needs the right kind of reasons.

Keith Lehrer (2019) identified the significant role played by exemplarization—a distinctive kind of representation of experience—in justification and defense of knowledge claims, including in the process of scientific change. He also highlighted the freedom of choice involved in the use of exemplarization in scientific contexts (Lehrer 2024). In this paper, I build on these insights and consider the roles of exemplarization in two notable tools of scientific research: electron and probe microscopy. I then examine the form of scientific self that needs to be in place for exemplarization to play these roles and the corresponding objectivity that results (Daston and Galison 2010). An interesting kind of empiricism emerges.

In this paper I take up two points that Keith Lehrer has made about the hard problem of consciousness. First, he argues that the mistaken impression that there is a hard problem results from a faulty metaphysics of properties. If properties are understood as tropes rather than as universals, the alleged hard problem goes away. Second, he argues that the integration of phenomenal properties–understood as tropes rather than as universals–does not pose a particularly difficult problem for the materialist. In reply to the first point I argue that the force of Lehrer’s argument does not derive from the distinction between tropes and universals, but rather from the manner in which we conceive of the tie between thing and property. In reply to the second point I suggest that Russellian Monism may afford the most natural way of a smooth integration of phenomenal properties into a materialist framework.

Keith Lehrer has had a major influence on contemporary epistemology, and he has played a vital role in renewing interest in the philosophy of Thomas Reid. Not coincidentally, the same type of common sense epistemological orientation as we find in Reid is evident in Lehrer’s epistemological writings, including in his most recent book, Exemplars of Truth. This chapter begins with a brief appreciation of both Lehrer and Reid, indicating some of the distinctive – and, I think, attractive -- features of Reid’s work, especially his epistemological views, features that Lehrer has helped to bring to light, and that are present in his own work. I then turn to one particular Reidian idea that has featured prominently in Lehrer’s writings. This is Reid’s First Principle 7 (FP7), which is closely related to Lehrer’s own principle of trustworthiness. I raise questions about Lehrer’s interpretation of this principle, about what (if anything) makes it special, and about the role that it plays in both Reid’s estimation and Lehrer’s. The hope is that the discussion will serve to highlight some of the most central and distinctive aspects of Lehrer’s epistemological views and also some points on which, in spite of the strong affinities between them, he and Reid appear to diverge.

Foundationalism and coherentism are typically seen as competing views. I argue that there is a way of fusing them together. A key principle of coherentism is that there can be no justification without meta-justification. It tells us that, when we form beliefs on the basis of perception, they are unjustified unless we have justification for taking perception to be reliable. This principle seems to make basic beliefs—beliefs whose justification doesn’t come from other beliefs—impossible. I argue that it doesn’t. The principle makes basic beliefs impossible only if nothing but beliefs can provide meta-justification. But basic justification remains possible if meta-justification can come from appearances. Assume you see and thus believe that there is an apple on the table. Foundationalists would say that your belief is justified by a visual apple appearance. A coherentist like Lehrer would say that your belief is justified only if you have justification for taking the apple appearance to be reliable. Suppose having such meta-justification ultimately comes from, not beliefs, but appearances that justify the attribution of reliability. In that case, Lehrer’s view is compatible with the claim that your apple belief is basic. In this paper, I explicate and defend a version of foundationalism along these lines.

I argue that Lehrer’s account of personal justification does not match what we normally mean when we say that a person has a justified belief. It’s too subjective. According to Lehrer’s account of justification, a person could be justified in believing in astrology or that the earth was created a thousand years ago. His account of knowledge suffers from a similar defect. According to it, a person could know that someone in his office owns a Ferrari based on misleading evidence offered by another person in his office who is trying to trick him. Finally, I argue that Lehrer is really a closet foundationalist, not a coherentist, because his theory of knowledge is driven by an attempt to explain our intuitive judgments in a few key examples for which he is justifiably famous. We must go beyond coherentism to find an adequate theory of justification and knowledge.

In both editions of his Theory of Knowledge (1990, 169–70 and 2000, 196), Keith Lehrer presents a case of a racist who becomes a racist medical doctor. Lehrer took the case to show (contrary to others’ arguments) that beliefs do not have to be based on the evidence in order to be justified, or count as knowledge. But there has been a mixture of responses to Lehrer’s thought experiment: not everyone who has considered the case has been ready to draw the same conclusions from it as Lehrer did. In this paper, I will give a kind of diagnosis of what may have led to resistance. I suspect that at least some of the resistance is the result of not accepting (or perhaps not understanding) the way in which Lehrer conceived of the case himself, because one essential ingredient of the case, as Lehrer conceived it, was not recognized or acknowledged by those who were left unconvinced.

In Exemplars of Truth, Keith Lehrer presents an impressive new epistemological theory. He continues to emphasize that knowledge and epistemic justification depend upon the capacity to rely upon a background system of beliefs, preference, and reasoning in a defense against potential objections. New to his theory is an attempt to explain how experience dynamically affects one’s background system by a process of exemplarization and generalization. Lehrer resists characterizing his view as foundationalist or as reintroducing the notion of an epistemological given. I argue that he has not adequately explained, however, how the truth security he finds in the possession of self-representing experiential exemplars is compatible with the corrigibility of all of our empirical judgments. I also argue that uncertainties in how to interpret his nominalism make for difficulties in figuring out how we reasonably generalize on these experiential exemplars. Nonetheless, I conclude by arguing that Lehrer’s central thesis that epistemic justification relies upon a background system facilitates a satisfactory response to Goodman‘s riddle regarding reasonable generalizations on observed samples.

In this chapter, I explore three ways our epistemic relationships with ourselves can be damaged by epistemic injustice. First, we can be blocked from a proper understanding of ourselves by conflicts between our own experiences and a dominant narrative. Jennifer Lackey has argued that extreme examples of this conflict can violate our “right to be known.” Second, continued denial of one’s own experiences by the larger culture can undermine self-trust. The central importance of self-trust can be appreciated through Keith Lehrer’s concept of the keystone loop. When one loses self-trust, one loses the keystone of reasoning that enables one to trust all one’s other judgements and thereby loses one’s epistemic agency. Third, Lehrer’s views on philosophy of language illustrate how continued epistemic injustices can cut us off from our very participation in public language. This rupture brings the justification of one’s assertions in the communal language into question, because they are not appropriately connected to and grounded in one’s own experiences. In response to these three harms, I propose that we develop epistemic reparations that can restore the epistemic relationship with oneself. Epistemic reparations reflecting a right to be known can be extended to a right to be known by oneself. A focus on self-knowledge and self-evaluation can help the recipients of epistemic reparations develop Nancy Daukas’s virtue of epistemic trustworthiness. This virtue can play an essential role in epistemic reparations aimed to heal the above harms of epistemic injustice and to reestablish a state of appropriate self-trust.

I begin with appreciation to an editor of the current volume Mylan Engel. Now I have the chance to express gratitude to him for having arranged conferences about my work in progress, that, with any defects remaining, resulted in improving the final version of Ultimate Freedom: Beyond Free Will (2024). I am also grateful to another editor of the current volume Joseph Campbell for encouraging my latest work on freedom by organizing an APA meeting to discuss that work and to develop it within his philosophy. I add my special thanks to Mylan for the thoughtful and skillful editing of this book and encouraging revision of my replies that kept me at philosophical reflection in my 88th year. I am most grateful to both editors to find at this time of life that I have benefitted from philosophical inquiry with such outstanding philosophers as have contributed to this volume, especially Mylan and Joseph. Finally, I am grateful to my wife Adrienne who proofread all my replies with me. My cup runneth over.

In this essay, I argue that Keith Lehrer’s account of freedom of choice, when allied to the Performance/Competence distinction commonly deployed in Cognitive Science helps us distinguish the human capacity for freedom, which looks free and “uncaused”, as Sartre influentially puts it in Being & Nothingness, from the external/performance aspects of freedom. Analytic philosophers have been hitherto preoccupied with the latter, performance aspect of freedom.Attending to the internal aspect, that is, the capacity for freedom helps us form a richer and more complete picture of the possibilities of human freedom. This approach ties Lehrer’s innovative account of free will with the broader rationalist tradition in Cognitive Science and Philosophy, and allows us to better appreciate the Sartrean strain in Lehrer’s work.

In Ultimate Freedom: Beyond Free Will, Keith Lehrer remarks that he was sceptical of Carl Sagan’s claim that some of our responses are controlled by the reptilian part of the brain (2024, 30). I was equally sceptical of Lehrer’s claim that reason is the hero of free choice (2024, 11). My reaction to reading about power preferences was to think that I rarely have such preferences, and that the contexts in which I do have them comprise a fairly limited and mundane part of my life. Further, I don’t think that I am unique in this respect. Lehrer’s account is very elegant; the reflexivity of the explanatory loop is a nifty solution to the vexed issue of how to make sense of agents as the source of action. But the more I read about Lehrer’s ideal of freedom under optimal conditions of choice, the more I felt that he was describing an ideal that I neither meet nor aspire to. So, what I aim to do here is to motivate why I had that reaction. I am going to talk about two kinds of choice situations—ones where I think we can appeal to character rather than deliberation and power preferences to explain the choices; and ones that I think of as “big choices” where I think there might be something that looks like deliberation, but to describe it as reason-based seems a stretch. Such choices might include but are not limited to transformative choices (cf. Paul 2014).

In UltimateFreedom: Beyond Free Will (2024), Keith Lehrer contends that human beings possess a unique metamental capacity for robust freedom of choice—a capacity not possessed by any other animals. Lehrer argues that when a person S has a power preference concerning option A and that power preference is the ultimate explanation of S’s choosing A, then S’s choosing A is free in the sourcehood (“it’s up S”), leeway (“S could have chosen otherwise”), and agency (“agent causation”) senses of freedom (2024, 8). Lehrer also argues that freedom of choice so understood is logically consistent with determinism. In what follows, I challenge this consistency claim. In particular, I argue, first, that power preferences, as Lehrer characterizes them, aren’t (typically) “up to us” in any robust sense; second, that if a power preference is the ultimate explanation of my choosing A, then, given that power preference, I couldn’t have chosen otherwise; and third, that even if a power preference for my preference structure concerning A is the ultimate explanation for my choosing A (such that my choosing A “is up to me” in the sourcehood sense), the power preference itself isn’t free (in the leeway sense) if determinism is true. I begin by explicating the paradox of freedom and determinism as traditionally construed. I then present Lehrer’s power-preference-based metamental conception of freedom and his master argument for the consistency claim. I then turn to the challenges mentioned above. I conclude by questioning whether the metamental ability to reflect on first-order desires is unique to humans.

In my book An Essay on Free Will I present and defend several versions of the “Consequence Argument” for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. In his recent Ultimate Freedom: Beyond Free Will, Keith Lehrer gives two counter-arguments to the Consequence Argument—that is, arguments for the conclusion that the Consequence Argument is unsound. One of these counter-arguments (“Lehrer’s Principal Argument”) contends that one of the premises of the Consequence Argument—to wit, that no one is able to render false a law of nature—is false. I point out that an argument that is in all essentials Lehrer’s Principal Argument was considered and answered in An Essay on Free Will. Lehrer’s other counter-argument to the Consequence Argument is an argument for the conclusion that the Consequence Argument requires that if a person with free will is unable to render the laws of nature false, that person is able to render a statement about the past false. I explain why in my view he fails to show this.

In Ultimate Freedom, Keith Lehrer presents his most comprehensive analysis of the nature of free will and its related concepts such as freedom, autonomy, free choice, preferences, and power preferences. It is in significant part a synthesis of his many previously published works on the topic stretching over several decades, though it contains considerable elaboration of his previous thinking. In particular, he both epistemologizes and metamentalizes his analysis of free will to a greater extent than he had done in the past, placing greater emphasis than many free will theorists have done on considerations of knowledge and metacognition. He also distances his analysis of freedom from certain leading competing theories, such as Peter Strawson’s, Harry G. Frankfurt’s and John Martin Fischer’s.

In Ultimate Freedom: Beyond Free Will, Keith Lehrer offers a defense of the consistency claim: the compatibility of freedom of choice and scientific laws covering all choice. Ultimate Freedom is also a book about scientific law and explanation, and Lehrer proposes a view in contrast to the covering-law model promoted by Carl Hempel. The covering-law model lends support to the determinism-explanation assumption: given determinism, there is an ultimate explanation of human choice and action in terms of factors beyond the agent’s control. The determinism-explanation assumption conflicts with the consistency claim. Using Lehrer’s theory of explanation, I provide reasons for rejecting the determinism-explanation assumption. I begin by examining accounts of explanation in general and the covering-law model in particular. Arguments and examples from Lehrer, supplemented with the work of Sylvain Bromberger, are used to critique the covering-law model and the determinism-explanation assumption. The determinism-explanation assumption is connected to the consequence argument for the incompatibility of determinism and freedom of choice. After contrasting Lehrer’s criticisms of the consequence argument with those of David Lewis and John Perry, I provide a summary of my results.

In his forthcoming Ultimate Freedom: Beyond Free Will, Keith Lehrer offers an account of freedom which he calls “ultimate freedom.” Since Lehrer’s account offers only sufficient but not necessary conditions for freedom, it remains an open question as to whether actions that are overlooked by his account should also be considered free. In this essay, I will address this question by examining what concepts of freedom we have interests in endorsing for the purpose of practical reasoning. In my theoretical framework, when engaging in practical reasoning, we should endorse different concepts of freedom when we consider a potential action from a forward-looking perspective and when we consider a past action from a backward-looking perspective. In a nutshell, when we consider a potential action from a forward-looking perspective, a concept of freedom that we have interests in endorsing is one that can serve as an aspirational ideal. On the other hand, when we consider a past action from a backward-looking perspective, a concept of freedom that we have interests in endorsing is one that allows us to accept the ownership of the action and improve upon it. As I will argue, whether we consider a potential action from a forward-looking perspective or a past action from a backward-looking perspective, we have reasons to consider many actions outside the scope of Lehrer’s account of freedom free. Lehrer writes that his account of freedom “might be called…defensible freedom” (2024, 9). Accordingly, this essay is intended to offer a defense of what might be called “indefensible freedom”—a theoretical framework that allows actions outside Lehrer’s account of freedom to be considered free.

A stalemate exists between two metaphysical models of freedom. Where sourcehood is a matter of acting in the right sort of way (e.g., autonomously or reasons-responsively) and leeway is a matter of being able to act otherwise in the right sort of way, leeway models hold that we act freely just in case we act with sourcehood and leeway. On the opposing side, source models hold that we act freely just in case we act with sourcehood. Exposing a false choice between these standard models, this essay develops a new metaphysical model of freedom: the dual model, which holds that we act freely just in case we act with sourcehood or leeway. On the Lehrerian (preference-based) specification developed, the dual model holds (roughly) that we act freely just in case we do what we prefer or are specifically able to do otherwise as we prefer. Providing greater explanatory power than standard models, the dual model effectively accounts for freedom in a wide variety of cases: those exhibiting both sourcehood and leeway, source cases (e.g., Frankfurt cases), leeway cases (e.g., weakness of will), and cases of unfreedom (e.g., compulsion and manipulation).

In his sixty-plus years of publishing philosophy, Keith Lehrer has made groundbreaking contributions to epistemology (developing and defending a coherence theory of justification and knowledge), to the free will debate (introducing, critiquing, and defending compatibilism), and to philosophy of mind (defending metamentalism). Those working in these respective fields tend to be quite familiar with Lehrer’s contributions to their own field, but less familiar with his work in these other fields. We (the editors) believe that those working in epistemology will gain a deeper understanding of Lehrer’s epistemology by examining his views on freedom and metamentalism, and those working on freedom and metamentalism will gain a deeper understanding of Lehrer’s metaphysical views through exposure to his work on epistemology, because of the overarching role that metamental ascent plays in his philosophy.

Knowledge of human uses of animals is an important, but understudied, aspect of how humans treat animals. We developed a measure of one kind of knowledge of human uses of animals – knowledge of factory farming. Studies 1 (N = 270) and 2 (N = 270) tested an initial battery of objective, true or false statements about factory farming using Item Response Theory. Studies 3 (N = 241) and 4 (N = 278) provided evidence that responses to a 10-item Knowledge of Factory Farming Scale predicted a reduction in consumption of animal products (rs = −.17- −.27) and approval of political actions aimed at factory farming (rs = .2 – .24). Path models from Studies 3 and 4 suggested that different kinds of knowledge uniquely predicted different outcomes. The Knowledge of Factory Farming scale was a unique predictor of approval of political actions concerning factory farmed animals but not animal consumption. Knowledge of Animals Used as Food predicted animal consumption but not political actions concerning farmed animals. These results highlight that different kinds of knowledge can be relevant for different animal related outcomes.

In this chapter, Mylan Engel Jr. argues that animal experimentation is neither epistemically nor morally justified and should be abolished. Engel argues that the only serious attempt at justifying animal experimentation is the benefits argument, according to which animal experiments are justified because the benefits that humans receive from the experiments outweigh the costs imposed on the animal subjects. According to Engel, the benefits we allegedly receive from animal-based biomedical research are primarily epistemic, in that experimenting on animal models is supposed to provide us with knowledge of the origin and proper treatment of human disease. However, Engel argues that animal models are extremely unreliable at predicting how drugs will behave in humans, whether candidate drugs will be safe in humans, and whether candidate drugs will be effective in humans. Engel concludes that animal-based research fails to provide the epistemic, and thereby moral, benefits needed to justify its continued use.

Keith Lehrer has had a major influence on contemporary epistemology, and he has played a vital role in renewing interest in the philosophy of Thomas Reid. Not coincidentally, the same type of common sense epistemological orientation as we find in Reid is evident in Lehrer’s epistemological writings, including in his most recent book, Exemplars of Truth. This chapter begins with a brief appreciation of both Lehrer and Reid, indicating some of the distinctive – and, I think, attractive -- features of Reid’s work, especially his epistemological views, features that Lehrer has helped to bring to light, and that are present in his own work. I then turn to one particular Reidian idea that has featured prominently in Lehrer’s writings. This is Reid’s First Principle 7 (FP7), which is closely related to Lehrer’s own principle of trustworthiness. I raise questions about Lehrer’s interpretation of this principle, about what (if anything) makes it special, and about the role that it plays in both Reid’s estimation and Lehrer’s. The hope is that the discussion will serve to highlight some of the most central and distinctive aspects of Lehrer’s epistemological views and also some points on which, in spite of the strong affinities between them, he and Reid appear to diverge.

This book contains eighteen original essays engaging with Keith Lehrer’s contributions to philosophy. The first nine chapters focus on Lehrer’s work in epistemology and philosophy of mind. These chapters examine the role of meta-justification in Lehrer’s (and Thomas Reid’s) epistemology, explore the epistemological significance of self-trust and how to restore self-trust to victims of epistemic injustice, challenge Lehrer’s solution to the hard problem of consciousness, question Lehrer’s account of the basing relation, and discuss the important role that experience and exemplarization play in Lehrer’s coherence theory of justification and in philosophy of science more broadly. The second nine chapters focus on Lehrer’s work on freedom and determinism. These chapters explore the nuances of Lehrer’s theory of ultimate freedom, discuss the role of power preferences in his account of free choice, explore whether free choices must be explained by power preferences, discuss Lehrer’s views on scientific explanation, explore his claim that freedom of choice is consistent with determinism, challenge his response to the consequence argument, explore whether choices explained by adaptive preferences are free, and investigate whether plural subjects can choose freely. The book concludes with Lehrer’s masterful responses to each of the essays. Those interested in epistemology, philosophy of mind, freedom and moral responsibility, and the intersection of these fields should find the book of great interest.

When it comes to second-order knowledge (i.e. knowing that one knows), internalists typically contend that when we know that p, we can, by reflecting, directly know that we are knowing it. Gettier considerations are employed to challenge this internalistic contention and to make out a prima facie case for internalistic metaepistemological skepticism, the thesis that no one ever intemalistically knows that one internalistically knows that p. In particular, I argue that at the metaepistemological second-order level, the Gettier problem generates three distinct problems which, taken together, seriously undermine the possibility of anyone possessing second-order internalistic knowledge.

A course-grained theory of event individuation is defended by arguing that events are spatiotemporal particulars with an ontological affinity to coarse-grained physical objects and by demonstrating that the metalinguistic correlate to one set of adequate identity conditions for events is most plausibly iterpreted as coarsely individuating events. Such coarse-grained events, it is argued, do admit of divisibility proliferation, much like the proliferation of physical objects entailed by Goodman's calculus of individuals. This coase-grained, divisibility proliferation account of events is then used to resolve Davidson's paradox concerning the poisoned space traveller who is killed long befor he dies.