Some Musings on Wisdom and the New Evil Demon Problem

Imagine that a team of extraordinarily gifted scientists can do the following bizarre thing: they can (through the powers of, say, “lasers”) duplicate your body (including brain), atom from atom, and cause it to appear—a perfect intrinsic duplicate of your right now—in a parallel universe. Call your duplicate in the parallel universe “You2.” Suppose further that You2 is not only your physical duplicate but also your psychological duplicate, and suppose further that the parallel universe looks to You2 just like ours does to you, and in fact, everything there is perceptually indistinguishable from how things seem to you here. There is just one catch: everything in the parallel universe is an illusion, created by the gifted scientists’ cohort, an equally gifted malicious demon, who feeds your psychological duplicate with images of all the same things you see in the actual world, only for your duplicate, these are all mirages. The situation I am describing here is used in various guises by contemporary epistemologists under the heading of the “New Evil Demon” problem. This thought experiment has typically been employed as a way of committing reliabilists about epistemic justification to an absurd consequence. Reliabilists about justification claim that a belief p is epistemically justified for S just in case p is produced by a reliable belief forming process of S. A belief forming process is reliable just in case it typically produces true beliefs and avoids error. To see how the gist of the New Evil Demon argument against reliabilism (about justification) goes: Suppose you are looking at a goldfinch, and your psychological duplicate, You2, is having an indistinguishable experience , though for You2, it is a goldfinch-mirage. Plausibly, as the line goes, if you are perceptually justified in believing “There is a goldfinch,” your psychological duplicate is also justified in believing “There is a goldfinch” when looking at the goldfinch-mirage, given that you and your duplicate are psychologically identical and form the belief “There is a goldfinch” on the basis of perceptually indistinguishable experiences. According to reliabilism, though, only you are justified; your counterpart You2 did not form the belief via a reliable belief-forming process; this is because all of You2’s belief forming processes are (unlike your own) maximally unreliable. Although reliabilists have used different strategies to try to show that this thought experiment isn’t ultimately problematic for their position, most all reliabilists are at least in agreement that You2 does not have a reliably produced belief. I want to abstract a bit from the scenario as one that threatens reliabilism about justification and consider that You2 fails to have any factive state; all of You2’s beliefs are false. You2, of course, fails to have any knowledge; knowledge is factive; one knows p just in case p is true. Also plausibly (though perhaps a bit more controversially), You2 fails to have any understanding. We think that understanding is factive in a way that is slightly different from how knowledge is factive. Whereas the object of (propositional) knowledge is a proposition (that must be true for the agent to know it), the object of one interesting sort of understanding—objectual understanding—is rather than a proposition, a subject matter. For example, following Kvanvig’s example, “The Comanche’s dominance of the North American plains between the 17^th and 19^th centuries”. Understanding a subject matter requires (plausibly) that one grasp the explanatory relationships between a range of true propositions one believes about a subject matter. (After all, I fail to understand the Comanche’s dominance of the North American plains if all or most of the propositions I believe on the matter are false).  While “You” understand the Comanche dominance, let’s say that You2, in virtue of failing the factive requirement of understanding, merely has an “intelligibile picture” (or something weaker than understanding), which involves a grasping of explanatory relations between a coherent set of believed propositions, which turn out to be false. If this is right, you understand the Comanche dominance of the North American plains between the 17^th and 19^th centuries, but your intrinsic duplicate doesn’t. After this rather long set-up, I have now made my way to the actual question I want to ask: presumably, like understanding, wisdom is a cognitive achievement that has at least some factive element. I’ll capture this idea as uncontroversially as I can: an individual cannot achieve wisdom without at least some correct beliefs. If this factive element of wisdom is right, then we should expect that the New Evil Demon scenario will be one in which your recently created counterpart (You2) in the demon world would fail to be wise. After all, You2 has all false beliefs, courtesy of the demon. However, this seems somehow wrong: it seems that anyone who is a psychological duplicate of someone who is wise is also wise. Take, for instance, Aristotle or Gandolf, or whomever you revere as a bastion of wisdom. Now suppose the scientists create an intrinsic duplicate (that is also a psychological duplicate) of Aristotle and Gandolf and put them in a demon-world, where their beliefs about the world are all false. Aristotle2 and Gandolf2 inherit the wisdom of Aristotle1 and Gandolf1, don’t they? If you think they do, then how can this much be reconciled with the plausible thought that wisdom is (in some sense) factive and the demon strips Aristotle2 and Gandolf2 of any facts to correspond with their beliefs about the world.  I have a few ideas about what to say at this point, but will stop for now and encourage readers to weigh in.