In Defense of Clutter

Gilbert Harman’s famous principle of Clutter Avoidance commands that “one should not clutter one’s mind with trivialities” (1986: 12). Harman appeals to this principle in the course of his well-known argument against logical closure, the view that one ought to believe all the logical consequences of one’s beliefs. Harman’s rationale for the principle is that one’s cognitive resources are limited, and ought to be used wisely; one ought not waste them by forming and maintaining beliefs that are in some sense trivial. Many epistemologists have been inclined to accept Harman’s principle, or something like it.1 This is significant, because the principle appears to have significant implications for our overall picture of epistemic normativity. Jane Friedman has recently argued that one potential implication is that there are no genuine purely evidential norms on belief revision—that “evidence alone doesn’t demand belief, and it can’t even, on its own, permit or justify belief” (2018: 576). Rather, genuine norms of belief revision must “combine considerations about one’s interests with more traditional epistemic sorts of considerations in issuing normative verdicts” (2018: 576).2 Even if we insist on keeping purely evidential norms, Friedman argues, the need to avoid clutter forces us to acknowledge that the verdicts of such norms can be overridden by consideration of our interests: even if one’s evidence requires (or permits) one to believe that p in a certain situation, it might still be the case that one is in fact not permitted to believe that p because doing so would violate the clutter avoidance principle. Either way, Friedman argues, accepting the principle leads to a picture of epistemic normativity that is highly “interest-driven,” a picture according to which our practical interests have a significant role to play.