Abstract

There is a traditional dispute over the question of the difference between having reasons for a belief or knowledge claim and being caused to believe something. Some recent work has attempted to bridge the gap between the two by arguing that there may be cases of having reasons for a belief where the reasons both justify and cause the belief. Marshall Swain’s Reasons and Knowledge is an example of the latter sort of work. Swain presents what he calls a “causal version of a defeasibility analysis” of knowledge. He acknowledges that the book grew out of what originally were, for him, issues raised by the Gettier-type counterexamples to the traditional “justified true belief” analysis of knowledge. According to Swain, “the character of the causal process by which one comes to have beliefs is vital to the question whether those beliefs are instances of knowledge”. Swain also defends what he calls a “reliability theory” of justified belief. Crucial to Swain’s analysis is the notion of a “reason-based belief.” In Chapter Three, Swain presents and defends a definition of what it is for a belief to be based on a definite set of reasons at some time. The definition’s key component is that there be an “appropriate causal connection” between each of the reasons one has and one’s believing what one believes. Swain distinguishes between what he calls “causal reasons” and “evidential reasons.” The former enter into the causal explanation of the having of the belief in question. Evidential reasons may be propositions believed and may enter into the justification of belief. Swain defends the possibility that some reason-states may be both causal and evidential. Evidential reasons are belief-states, but reason-states may be reasons on which a belief is based without themselves being belief-states. Examples are perceptual-states and sensation-states. These can be links in causal chains leading to beliefs.