untrustworthy, and thereby shows that the disposition to trust CNN’s reporting is highly improper, this new evidence does not defeat the ex post justifiedness of Nyambi’s belief that Russian forces bombed civilian targets in Syria, even though, as we’ve stipulated, and unbeknownst to Nyambi, it is his disposition to trust CNN’s reporting which explains his having that belief. It’s tempting to suppose that, in the case I’ve just described, Nyambi’s belief that Russian forces bombed civilian targets in Syria must be based on something other than merely his disposition to trust CNN’s reporting – perhaps it’s based on his apparent recall of hearing this news reported on Al-Jazeera. But our stipulations about the case rule this out: the case is such that Nyambi’s belief is the exercise of a disposition to accept what he actually hears on CNN and not the exercise of any disposition to accept what he apparently recalls hearing on Al-Jazeera. Even if Nyambi actually has the latter disposition, we stipulate that his belief about Russian forces does not result from the exercise of that disposition. If this stipulation is not consistent with the rest of our stipulations about the case, then that very fact is something that the dispositionalist needs to explain. The dispositionalist might try to explain such an inconsistency by modifying (D1) in something like the following way: (D1’) basing C on R involves the agent’s exercising a disposition to C when both of the following conditions obtain: R, and the rest of the agent’s beliefs cohere with the proposition that R justifies C’ing. Here’s how this version of dispositionalism might handle our present case. Nyambi’s beliefs don’t cohere with the proposition that his belief about Russian
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88: 314 - 45. ---. Forthcoming. “Enkrasia or Evidentialism? Learning to Love Mismatch.” Philosophical Studies. Lavin, Douglas. 2011. “Problems of Representationalism: Raz on Reason and its Objects.” Jurisprudence 2: 367 - 78. Lehrer, 1971. “How Reasons Give Us Knowledge, Or the Case of the Gypsy Lawyer.” Journal of Philosophy 68: 311 – 3. Leite, Adam. 2004. “On Justifying and Being Justified.” Philosophical Issues 14: 219 – 53. ---. 2008. “Believing One’s Reasons Are Good.” Synthese 161: 419 – 41. Levy, Neil and Timothy. 2004. A Will of One’s Own: Consciousness, Control and Character. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 27: 459 – 70. Lohse, Keith, Sherwood, David, and Healy, Alice. 2010. “How Changing the Focus of Attention Affects Performance, Kinematics, and Electomyography in Dart Throwing.” Human Movement Science 29: 542 – 55. Lord, Errol. 2016. “On the Intellectual Conditions for Responsibility: Acting for the Right Reasons, Conceptualization, and Credit.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 92: 436 – 64. Lord, and Sylvan, Kurt. Forthcoming. “Prime Time (for the Basing Relation)” in Well-Founded Belief: New Essays on the Basing Relation, eds. Carter and Bondy (Oxford University Press: Oxford). Longino, Helen. 1978. “Inferring.” Philosophy Research Archives 4: 19 – 26. Mantel, Susanne. 2017. “Three Cheers for Dispositions: A Dispositional Approach to
Black, 282 – 303. Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY. Titelbaum, Michael. 2015. “Rationality’s Fixed Point.” Oxford Studies in Epistemology 5: 253 - 94. Tolliver, Joseph. 1982. “Basing Beliefs on Reasons.” Grazer Philosophische Studien 15: 149 – 61. John. 2009. “On the Ontology of Epistemic Reasons.” Nous 43: 490 – 512. ---. 2010. “On the Relationship between Propositional and Doxastic Justification.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 80: 312 – 26. Peter. 1975. Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism. Clarendon Press: Oxford. Valaris, Markos. 2014. “Reasoning and Regress.” Mind 123: 101 – 27. Wedgwood, Ralph. 2012. “Justified Inference.” Synthese 189: 273 – 95. Wegner, Daniel. 2002. The Illusion of Conscious Will. MIT Cambridge, MA. Wietmarschen, Han van. 2013. “Peer Disagreement, Evidence, and Philosophical Review 122: 395 – 425. Winters, Barbara. 1983. “Inferring.” Philosophical Studies 44: 201 – 20. Worsnip, Alex. 2018. “The Conflict of Evidence and Coherence.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 96: 3 – 44. Yarrow, Kielan, Peter, and Krakauer, John. 2009. “Inside the Brain of an Elite Athlete: the Neural Processes that Support High Achievement in Sports.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10: 585 – 96.