Dretske on Epistemic Entitlement

Abstract

According to Fred Dretske, the debate between externalists and internalists in epistemology is about Whether there are epistemic rights (to believe) without corresponding duties or obligations (to justify what is believed). Externalists believe and internalists deny that there are such unjustified justifiers. Dretske's first fundamental thesis is: externalists are right. Unjustified justifiers can be thought of as given, not because they are certain or indubitable, but because they are free of justificational encumbrances. Even knowledge-the supreme entitlement-requires no justification. Some externalists-Mad Dog Reliabilists-go further. They hold (a) that one is entitled to accept the deliverances of a de facto reliable belief-forming process (let's say epistemicc procedure), despite being justified in rejecting them (because one has reason to think the procedure unreliable); and (b) that one is not entitled to accept (though perhaps justified in accepting) a proposition when using an unreliable process, even if justified in thinking it reliable. But Dretske says that he loses his grip on what an entitlement, a right to believe, is supposed to be if it can survive a fully rational and completely justified rejection of what one is entitled to accept. So Mad Dog Reliabilism must be rejected. This is his second fundamental thesis. While I agree with a lot of what Dretske says, I think that his way of talking about justification blurs distinctions that ought to be made. Briefly (and dogmatically), there are two ways of looking at the epistemic status of a person's beliefs: