Conference Madness

Blimey - three conferences in a row is a bit of a strain. Last week, it was Norms and Analysis then Probability, now it's the AAP. Here are a few of my highlights so far.

Roy Sorensen gave a talk on whether you should open an envelope that you know to contain misleading evidence which will dislodge a piece of knowledge that you now possess. This is a very interesting question - or rather, there is a swathe of interesting questions in the vicinity, and I'm not quite sure I managed to pin Roy on which one he intended to ask. One is about the epistemic rationality of opening the envelope, but it is controversial to suppose that norms of epistemic rationality apply to actions like opening envelopes (as opposed to beliefs and degrees of belief). Another batch concerns various instrumental norms: what you should do if you want to maximize your knowledge, what you should do if you want to make sure you're taking account of all the evidence, etc. But the answers to these are kind of obvious. Another one conerns practical rationality, but Sorensen told us he intended a different question to this (at least initially).

Al Hajek gave a fun (and very informative, for me anyway) paper on relationships between the debates about, on the one hand, the claim that the probability of a conditional is the corresponding conditional probability and, on the other, the claim that the expected value of A is the probability of 'A is good'.

David Braddon-Mitchell and Caroline West discussed their - courageous! - view that personal identity over time is a matter of caring about one's future stages. So drastically failing to care about your future stages means you do not continue to exist. Total imprudence is impossible - conceptually impossible by their lights, in fact. One thing I didn't get clear on (I should remember to ask them about this) is whether merely caring that one have some future stages is supposed to count, or whether I must have desires about them in some more robust sense.

Reports from the AAP soon ... and hopefully some photos!

Modern-Day Convention'list

This comes from Penelope Mackie's 1990 review (Mind 99, available on JSTOR) of Alan Sidelle's Necessity, Essence and Individuation: A Defense of Conventionalism.

I am the very model of a modern-day convention'list;
Though thoroughly empiricist, I'm also an essentialist -
Accept de re modality, and hold (with the majority)
Necessity can co-exist with a posteriority.

I'm well disposed to much of Putnam's teaching on modality:
Think water must be H20 in each eventuality;
On essences I find my views with much that Kripke said agree,
And hold a man's identity depends upon his pedigree.

I show that, though such doctrines may seem realist in tendency,
On analytic principles they all have a dependency;
And since the analytic comes from rules of our invention, all
The modal in my model can be thoroughly conventional.

My argument persuades, I hope, the reader who'll address it, he
Should recognize the mind-dependent status of necessity,
And take my anti-realist empirico-essentialist
To be the very model of a modern-day convention'list.

(Sing to the tune of the Major General's Song.)

Quine's Holism - Confirmational and Semantic

Quine takes the smallest units of empirical confirmation to be, not individual propositions, but total theories (i.e. large collections of propositions). And the issue of what to take as a unit of empirical confirmation, for Quine, seems to be intimately bound up with the question of what to count as a unit of meaning. He writes (1951, pp. 39-40):

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs ... is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges ... A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field ... But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience ... If this view is right, it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement ...

And again, in a similar vein (1951, p. 42):

The idea of defining a symbol in use was ... an advance over the impossible term-by-term empiricism of Locke and Hume. The statement, rather than the term, came with Frege to be recognized as the unit accountable to an empiricist critique. But what I am now urging is that even in taking the statement as unit we have drawn our grid too finely. The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science.

If this is a correct reading of Quine, one reason he might have for rejecting the analytic is that it requires us to acknowledge a smaller unit of meaning (and sameness-of-meaning) than a total theory, and Quine does not think it makes sense to talk about such smaller units of meaning because there are no smaller units of empirical confirmation. This is a pretty radical kind of semantic holism: it's not just that the meanings of our individual statements (or other smaller chunks of language) depend on the meaning of the total whole theory containing them, but that these less-than-theory-sized chunks don't have meanings at all; only whole theories do. Nonetheless, it is strongly suggested by certain passages.

Here's my question. Suppose Quine is right that the smallest units of confirmation are theory-sized. And suppose, like him, we are keen to tie meaningfulness to confirmability in some way. This could motivate taking theory-meaning to be primary and sentence-meaning to be derived. But what additional motivation does/could Quine have for taking the further step of denying meaning to anything other than whole theories?

LolNol

Wer In Ur Antipodeez

Following the spate of lolcats and variants over at Metaphysical Values, here is one of my favourites.

Epistemology Workshop

There was an epistemology workshop here on Friday, at which the speakers were Nico Silins, me, Declan Smithies and Jim Pryor. Some photos taken by Ole Koksvik are already online.

Nico talked about (and rejected) a new argument for the view that visual experience only provides justification for a proposition p in virtue of one's having independent reason to reject defeaters for that justification. The argument held that this view would supply the best explanation of why defeaters of experience are defeaters. Nico eventually rejected the argument, arguing both that this explanation would not be a good one and that others are available which are at least as good and involve no commitment to the target thesis.

Declan talked about the epistemic role of acquaintance, which (if I understood him right) he identified as concept-based conscious attention to (aspects of) percepual experience. His aim was to identify something that could provide knowledge both of things and of truths, i.e. to fill (some of) the role that Russell attributes to 'acquaintance'.

Jim talked about warrant transmission failure and the Moorean argument from 'I have hands' (as justified by experiences as of hands) to the existence of an external world. He said that the appearance of "fishiness" in this argument is not due to transmission failure. Rather, he said, there are other features which explain the fishiness, namely that doubts about the conclusion tend to undermine your experiential warrant for the premise that you have hands, and that having an open mind about the conclusion "activates" doubts of this kind.

My paper discussed Tim Williamson's recent position on modal knowledge, rejecting some aspects, particularly the reduction of modal epistemology to counterfactual epistemology, but accepting others, particularly the idea of a third epistemic role for experience, neither merely enabling nor properly evidential. I then talked a bit about my own motivation (from concept grounding) for believing in a third role for experience and how it might resemble and/or come apart from Williamson's third role.

Philosophy Talk

Update: The show is now confirmed and scheduled for August 12th. The lineup of forthcoming programmes is available for perusal. I'm looking forward to 'Philosophy of Science' with Peter Godfrey-Smith and 'What Are Numbers?' with Gideon Rosen.

This should be fun: I'm provisionally scheduled to appear on the US radio program Philosophy Talk this August, hosted by Ken Taylor and John Perry.

Modal Knowledge Paper

My paper Concepts, Experience and Modal Knowledge has been conditionally accepted at Synthese, so I'm posting the current version with a view to soliciting comments from any helpful people who might be interested.

Photos

Now my camera problems are fixed I'm working on getting a backlog of photos up online. Available so far are photos from the Arché Basic Knowledge Workshop that I organized in November, and my trip to Leuven in February. More to follow soon ...

Backwards Explanation and The 'Real' Explanation

Update: The current draft of Backwards Explanation is now online. Comments welcome.

Some good news from my inbox this morning: Daniel and my joint paper, 'Backwards Explanation and The 'Real' Explanation' has been accepted for this year's Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference.

'Backwards' event explanation is explanation of an earlier event by a later event. The paper argues that prima facie cases of backwards event explanation are ubiquitous. Some examples:

(1) I am tidying my flat because my brother is coming to visit tomorrow.
(2) The scarlet pimpernels are closing because it is about to rain.
(3) The volcano is smoking because it is going to erupt soon.

We then look at various ways people might attempt to explain away these prima facie cases by arguing that in each case the 'real' explanation is something else. We argue that none is successful, and so any plausible account of explanation should either make room for backwards explanation or have a good story to tell about why it doesn't have to.

Epistemic Conservatism

Daniel and I have been talking a lot about conservatism lately (Daniel's been writing a book chapter on it), and we're considering writing a joint paper on the topic. Here's one of the things we've noticed that we'd like to write about.

A few importantly different kinds of epistemic conservatism seem to be floating around in the literature, not remarked upon nor clearly separated from one another, although it is far from obvious how they are related.

Some versions are about how to update your beliefs (e.g. Quineans, Bayesians), others about how to evaluate beliefs at a time. Let's call these 'update-evaluating conservatism' and 'state-evaluating conservatism' respectively. In the latter category, there are some versions which say that what matters is your belief state at an earlier time than the time which is being evaluated (e.g. Sklar), others which say that what matters is your belief state at that very time (e.g. Chisholm). Let's call these 'diachronic state-evaluating' and 'synchronic state-evaluating' conservatism respectively. Here are some examples from each category:

Update-evaluating (always diachronic):
The best updating strategy involves minimal change to your belief and credence structure.

Synchronic and state-evaluating:
The fact that you believe p at t1 gives a positive boost to the epistemic valuation of your belief in p at t1.

Diachronic and state-evaluating:
The fact that you believe p at t1 gives a positive boost to the epistemic valuation of your belief in p at t2.

Now, the interesting question: does believing one of these principles commit you to any or all of the others? In this paper by McGrath – one of the few I know of that talks about this stuff – it is assumed that the core of conservatism is an update-evaluating kind, but that this is equivalent in truth-value to a corresponding synchronic state-evaluating kind of conservatism.

But here's one reason to doubt things are that simple. Suppose I have a belief at t1 that is so epistemically bad that there is nothing to be said in its favour. Suppose I retain that belief at t2, with no new evidence, purely through inertia. One might wish to approve of the update qua update-evaluating conservative, but not wish to proffer any corresponding (diachronic or synchronic) state-evaluating approval of the belief at t2 – which, after all, is still held for really bad reasons.

Implicit Assumptions

I've just completed an implicit associations test run by a bunch of psychologists at Harvard, Virginia and Washington.

These tests work by assuming that you are faster to sort things into disjunctive categories when the disjuncts are things you (perhaps implicitly) associate with each other. So for instance, in one of their more disturbing tests, it turns out most people are much faster at sorting things into the categories 'African American or bad' vs 'European American or good' than into the categories 'African American or good' vs 'European American or bad', which is taken as evidence of positive associations with the one race and negative associations with the other.

The one I got had to do with TV and books. The test was fun (if a bit predictable), but the result that was given to me at the end seemed to me to be a misreporting of what they could reasonably claim to have discovered. I turned out to be a little bit faster at sorting into 'books or good' vs 'TV or bad' than into 'books or bad' vs 'TV or good', and they concluded that I have a 'slight preference' for books over TV. But 'preference' looks like a really bad word to use here. On a natural reading of what they're claiming, it means that I prefer to spend my time reading books than watching TV. Whereas the most their test has shown is that books have more positive connotations for me than TV. These two things obviously come apart – people could, for instance, enjoy TV much more whilst thinking of it as a guilty pleasure because watching TV is mind-rotting while reading books is worthy and highbrow.

This bothered me just enough to make me send an email ...

I think it would have bothered me a lot more if I'd been given a different test; if, for instance, I had turned out to have more positive associations with European Americans than African Americans and they'd described me as 'preferring' European Americans. This, at least on its natural reading, would imply far more than they could claim to have established.

Epistemic Norms and Natural Facts

I'm posting a new draft of my paper Epistemic Norms and Natural Facts, forthcoming in American Philosophical Quarterly. I am currently preparing a final version; any last-minute comments/corrections therefore very welcome. Speak now or forever ... publish embarassing refutations once the thing's in print.

Basically the paper presents, and points out some advantages of, a view which treats epistemic normativity in something like the way the Cornell realists treat ethical normativity.

Conditional Speech Acts

Indicative conditional questions seem to make good sense, and so do subjunctive conditional questions. For instance, (1) and (2) both look fine:

(1) If it has rained today, is the pavement wet?
(2) If it were to have rained today, would the pavement be wet?

But, although indicative conditional commands seem to make good sense, subjunctive conditional commands do not. For instance, (3) looks fine but (4) does not (and I'm not even sure how to formulate (4)):

(3) If it has rained today, go and tell the weather forecasters they got it wrong.
(4) If it were to have rained today, ???

Similarly for conditional requests:

(5) If it has rained today, please will you bring me an umbrella?
(6) If it were to have rained today, ???

And for conditional promises:

(7) If it has rained today, I promise it won't rain tomorrow.
(8) If it were to have rained today, ???

What's going on? And whatever it is, does it help us understand how ordinary indicative and counterfactual conditional statements are related?

Objective Language-Dependent Facts?

I'm currently preparing the final version of my book manuscipt and being puzzled anew by some passages in Stewart Shapiro's book Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology. In particular, I've never seen - and still am not seeing - how to reconcile these claims:

(1) [A] structure is ... determined ... by the relations among the places. ... [T]he correct use of the language determines what the relations are. (p. 137, emphases in the original)
(2) Through successful language use, we structure the objective subject matter. (p. 137)
(3) [T]he way the universe is divided into structures and objects - of all kinds - depends on our linguistic resources. (p. 161)

with this one:

(4) The natural-number structure has objective existence and facts about it are not of our making. (p. 137)

If anyone knows of a charitable interpretation, I would be very interested to hear it.

Leuven Epistemology

The Epistemology Workshop has just ended (one talk early, as unfortunately Crispin Wright was not able to attend). Highlights included Finn Spicer laying into the Canberra Planning of Frank Jackson as applied to the project of analysing our concept of knowledge. Finn offered some challenges to the idea that the best theory of the relationship between our platitudinous intuitions about knowledge and the reference of our concept of knowledge is Jackson's.

This made me think more about the Canberra Plan, and in particular how it offers an answer to Field's question (from his recent paper on the a priori):

"Why should the fact, if it is one, that certain beliefs ... are integral to the meaning of a concept show that these principles are correct? ... Maybe the meaning we've attached to these terms is a bad one that is irremediably bound up with error."

The Canberra Planner's answer, I take it, is that the platitudes determine what if anything our concept refers to, but good old-fashioned empirical work has to be done to find out whether there is anything that is a good enough deserver to allow us to decide that the concept does refer. In other words, good old-fashioned empirical work is needed before we have a right to treat the concept as if it is not 'a bad one that is irremediably bound up with error' but rather one whose attendent platitudes get things right to a reasonable degree.

(Of course, this answer does not seem to rescue conceptual analysis as a means of securing a priori knowledge. Therefore it is not as good as a concept grounding account. But that goes without saying on this blog. :)

I leave you with another image from Leuven. Here I am with my new mate Cardinal Mercier (founder of the Higher Institute of Philosophy):

KU Leuven Reference Library

This impressive-looking library has a chequered history which I can't resist reporting. In WWI the library was burned down (c. 300,000 books lost, plus manuscripts collected from 1425 onwards), and it was rebuilt with financial help from American universities. Then it burned down again in WWII (c. 900,000 books and manuscripts lost), and was rebuilt again afterwards.* Then in the 1960s, language (and other) issues resulted in the university at Leuven becoming Flemish-speaking and a new Francophone university being built at Louvain-la-Neuve. The reference library collection was split in half.

The tower houses a lovely-sounding 63-bell carillon which I was lucky enough to hear playing when this photo was taken.

I'm less convinced about the dead insect on a stick. Apparently it symbolizes 'the relationship between art and science'. I think I don't get it.

* "So I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up."

Leuven

I'm currently visiting Leuven for a few days, where I'll be giving a paper at an epistemology workshop at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven's Philosophy Institute on Thursday. The programme should be fun: the other speakers are Marietje van der Schaar, Duncan Pritchard, Igor Douven, Finn Spicer, Rene Van Woudenberg and Crispin Wright, and every paper will have a commentator. More news here soon I expect ...

Curve-Fitting and Description-Dependence

I started thinking about this after Aidan Lyon's excellent talk on the curve-fitting problem yesterday.

Graham Priest in his 1976 article Gruesome Simplicity (this link is to JSTOR) discusses curve-fitting as a way of making inductive inferences. When we plot observed values of two related quantities x and y on a graph, we have several options for which curve to draw between them. The simplicity of the curve has to be traded off against fit with the existing data points, and it is a taxing problem to say how best this should be done. Yet we often do think we can choose an appropriate curve, and use it to make predictions concerning as-yet-unobserved values of x and y.

What Priest shows is that 'certain very natural transformations' on data sets result in different curves appearing to be 'best' and correspondingly conflicting predictions being delivered. Priest therefore claims to have shown that 'which prediction is best depends not on the situation but how you describe it. (Equivalent descriptions do not give the same answers.)' (p. 432). This sort of description-dependence sounds unsettling; we would like our predictions to be sensitive only to our data, and not affected by accidental features of the ways we happen to represent that data.

It seems to have been accepted in the subsequent literature that Priest's problem, if it cannot be avoided, establishes a worrying kind of description-dependence. But in my opinion the existence of such description-dependence is not established by Priest's argument. To get that conclusion, we would need an additional premise: that when we perform the transformations on the data that generate the new predictions, we are just redescribing the same situation, as opposed to considering a different situation.

What counts as a different situation? Well, for these purposes, we should consider any difference which is not merely a difference in our descriptions a difference in the situation described. (If this were not what Priest had in mind, i.e. if there were room for something else to differ besides the situation and our descriptions of it, it would not follow that a difference in prediction without a difference in the situation described must be due merely to a difference merely in our descriptions.)

There is reason to suppose that many 'transformations' of data – even very simple a priori ones – lead to description of a different situation. A priori inference, for example, enables me to conclude from This plane figure has three angles that This plane figure has three sides, but these are two different propositions involving different properties. The difference between these two propositions is (plausibly) not merely redescription; what's being described – which language-independent properties are being talked about – differs in each case.

Similarly, turning to one of Priest's own examples, when we transform data about velocity and momentum into data about velocity and kinetic energy, there is a difference in what is described and not merely a difference in description. Momentum and kinetic energy are related by the equation E = pv/2, but they are not therefore the same thing.

This might help make Priest's result a little less unsettling than Priest himself suggests. It is less philosophically disturbing to conclude that thinking about two different situations can lead us to make two different predictions than to conclude that describing the same situation two different ways can lead us to make two different predictions.

That's not to say it makes the result entirely comfortable; the difference in predictions is still somewhat disturbing, given that we know the transformation relationship between the two situations. It may well be interesting and difficult, to say what (if anything) we ought to predict in these circumstances. But it has not yet been established that the problem arises due to description-dependence.

Williamson On The Epistemology Of Modality

Chapter 5 of Tim Williamson's new book The Philosophy of Philosophy argues that modal knowledge is a species of counterfactual knowledge. Why should we believe this? The only reason offered is that there is a logical equivalence between modal claims and certain counterfactuals. In Williamson's words (p. 25):

"Given that the equivalences … are logically true, metaphysically modal thinking is logically equivalent to a special case of counterfactual thinking, and the epistemology of the former is tantamount to a special case of the epistemology of the latter."

But it does not follow from the bare fact that modal claims are logically equivalent to certain counterfactual claims that modal epistemology is tantamount to a special case of counterfactual epistemology. By analogy, it does not follow from the fact that that disjunctive propositions AvB are equivalent to negated conjunctive propositions ~(~A&~B) that the epistemology of disjunctive propositions is a special case of the epistemology of negated propositions. Nor does it follow from the fact that atomic propositions A are logically equivalent to conjunctive propositions A&A that the epistemology of atomic propositions is a special case of the epistemology of conjunctive propositions.

The equivalences cited by Williamson cannot by themselves establish that knowing certain counterfactuals is the way – or even our usual way – of knowing modal facts. At most, they might be taken to suggest that knowing the relevant counterfactuals is a way of knowing modal facts. I take it that epistemologists of modality are (rightly) more centrally interested in the question of how we do know about modality than in the question of how we might know about modality.

Moreover, without supplementation, flagging the mere existence of logical equivalences is not even to specify a way of coming to know about modality. We are left wondering what the supposed way of knowing is supposed to be like. Is it envisaged that we know the modal claims by first knowing the counterfactual claims and then deriving the modal claims which are equivalent to them? If so, it looks very unlikely that many of us are using this route to modal knowledge much of the time. Most people could not work through the relevant derivations if they tried, and even those who could certainly don't seem to be doing that kind of thing very often. On the other hand, if the envisaged route to modal knowledge does not go via derivation from the equivalent counterfactuals, what is it like? And what is the epistemological significance of the equivalence?

Photos Of Philosophers

There are some great photos among this new set by Steve Pyke, who also created the classic collection Philosophers. I love Hartry Field's little text, which totally avoids the sort of pretentiousness which must be a temptation when you're asked to write something like this:

"A nice thing about philosophy of the sort I do is that it can never be used to justify wars or oppress the disadvantaged or anything like that.
This follows from a more general principle."

Exactly.

(Hat tip: Jason Stanley. Personally I think Stanley's own self-portrait about half way down this page rivals Pyke's photo of him for capturing the soul of the subject.)

More On Incoherent Credences

Here's a thought which might help with the generalization point (see the end of my last post).

Suppose the case is as before except your credence in (p iff q) is 0.9 rather than 1. Then you aren't sure that your evidence concerning p is to be treated as evidence concerning q and vice versa, but you should think your evidence concerning p serves decently well as evidence concerning q and vice versa. Your credence in these two propositions therefore should not be able to get *too* far apart, else it will look like one of them (at least) is being influenced by something other than your evidence. Weakening your credence in (p iff q) correspondingly increases how far apart your credences in p and q can get before it starts to look like some untoward influence is at work.

Another point (thanks to Daniel for this): the reasoning I'm using here and in the original case involves an assumption that variation in credences without variation in evidence suggests that one's credences are sensitive to something other than evidence. One way of denying this would be to claim that evidence (sometimes) makes a range of different credences in p admissible but does not single out one in particular as correct.

It is not surprising that those who hold this permissive type of view find it harder than others to account for the strangeness of having two different credences in (what you know to be) materially equivalent propositions. They'll presumably even find it harder to account for the strangeness of having two difference credences in (what you know to be) one and the same proposition. Maybe permissive people should doubt whether there is anything epistemically wrong with incoherent credences. That wouldn't, I think, undermine my explanation of what sort of account people who think there is something wrong with it should give of that wrongness.

What's Wrong With 'Incoherent' Credences?

Define 'incoherent' credences as ones that don't satisfy the probability axioms. There are familar 'Dutch Book' arguments about what's wrong with having incoherent credences. At a reading group meeting today lead by Al Hajek, I became even more convinced than previously that they leave a lot to be desired (at least as they stand). I thought I'd have a shot at something else.

Ideally, it would be nice to formulate a norm of credence which incoherent credences - or rather, credences which you *know* to be incoherent (there needn't be anything irrational about credences which are *in fact* incoherent if you've no reason to think they are) - are in tension with. I thought of this:

NC: You should try to make your credence in p sensitive only to your evidence concerning p.

Now, suppose you notice that you have different credences in p and q and you have credence 1 in (p iff q). Your certainty that (p iff q) will (at least in lots of standard situations) enable you to (properly) treat all your evidence concerning p as evidence concerning q and vice versa. So that you have the same evidence for and against each of them. This means, since your credences in p and q are different, that at least one of those credences must be sensitive to something other than your evidence concerning the relevant proposition. You can see that you have violated a norm of credence.

This seems to me to be a decent explanation of what is wrong with incoherent credences in this sort of case. Is this kind of explanation sufficiently generalizable? I don't know yet. For one thing, I'm not sure how to get this sort of explanation going in situations where you don't have credence 1 in something. But then, I'm also not sure whether you can get clear cases of irrationality in situations where you don't have credence 1 in something. (In the above case, if your credence in (p iff q) wasn't 1, it would be less clear that it was an epistemic mistake to have different credences in p and q.)

Constitutive Independence

In my paper Realism and Independence I distinguished between modal independence and essential independence.

Modal independence of p from q:
There is a possible world where (p and not q)

Essential independence of p from q:
It's no part of what it is for p to be the case that q be the case

I argued that essential independence from the mental (not modal independence from the mental) is characteristic of mind-independence realism.

But there are other notions of independence in the vicinity as well. For one thing, 'what it is' talk might be interpreted the way I had in mind, as essence talk, or it might be interpreted as more like constitution talk. A third putative notion of independence is

Constitutive independence of p from q:
p's being the case is not constituted by q's being the case.

One reason I don't like the idea of using constitutive independence to characterize realism is that it seems to restrict the range of positions that can be classified as realist. One thing I like about essential independence as defined is that it is supposed to be metaphysically neutral on issues like whether facts or states of affairs exist. (It only talks about 'things being the case', which is intended as lightweight talk that could, but need not, be cashed out in terms of the obtaining of facts or states of affairs.)

By contrast, talk of constitutive independence seems on the face of it not to make sense unless we acknowledge the existence facts or something similar. If we have such things in our ontology, we can perhaps make sense of a constitution relation holding between them, analogous to that which holds between objects (or between objects and stuff).

Are there other ways to make sense of constitutive independence?

Visitations

Apparently 'Jacques Derrida (deceased)' is among the 'Regular Visiting Faculty' at Stony Brook (scroll right down). Does he haunt them, or what?

What a terrifying thought.

Wittgenstein's Tenure Case

I've been following the interesting discussion between Jason Stanley and Aidan McGlynn on the "Wittgenstein Fallacy". I think both sides of this debate get it half right. There *is* something wrong with the current climate, because there *is* a chance that Wittgenstein would have got tenure under it.

Chalmers on Ontological Realism

Today I have been mostly reading Dave Chalmers on Ontological Anti-Realism. (NB: Dave's paper is a draft, not a finished product. Still, since it's in the public domain, I thought it might be helpful to make a comment here since I think the point is important.)

A couple of quibbles then the biggie.

Quibble 1: I think it's inviting trouble to describe anything as 'the' basic question of metaontology, ethics, or metaethics (p. 1). Other basic questions of metaethics, for instance, besides Dave's ('Are there objective answers to the basic questions of ethics?') will plausibly include: 'What is the best methodology for ethics?' and/or 'How - if at all - do we know ethical truths?'. And many people might think that the basic questions of ethics, besides 'What is right?', include 'What is good?', 'What ought I to do?' and/or 'What is the force of ethical reasons for action?'.

Quibble 2: Those who hold that 'commonsense' and 'correct' ontology coincide in cognitive significance aren't thereby forced to be deflationary about correct ontology (p. 9). They might instead be inflationary about commonsense ontology, holding that it has the cognitive significance of - and is sensitive to the commitments of - correct ontology. (Or at least, I don't see why this option is off the table.)

The big one: Dave's 'ontological realism' (section 5) consists in attributing the following properties to all ontological existence assertions:
1. objectivity, which amounts to lack of sensitivity (regarding content or truth-value) to context (speaker's or evaluator's),
and 2: determinacy (having truth-value true or false).
His 'anti-realism' is defined as the denial of realism in this sense.

My worry about this is that 'objectivity' as Dave defines it is orthogonal to the question of mind-independence, which I suspect is what most of those who take themselves to be ontological realists because they think ontological claims are 'objective' will be thinking of. By Dave's lights, one can count as a realist about ontology despite thinking that There are Fs is true iff (and in virtue of the truth of) Someone believes at some time that there are Fs. But I think this position is pretty clearly anti-realist in at least one good (and commonplace) sense.

Moreover, I'm not sure that I know of a good (and/or commonplace) usage of 'realism' which goes along with determinacy of truth-value and lack of sensivity to context. No-one would say we are in danger of counting as anti-realists about physical space, say, just because we believe spatial language is full of indexicals and therefore not all spatial assertions are 'objective' in Dave's sense.

Update: I have cross-posted this to TAR where it has received some discussion from Chalmers.

Epistemic 'Ought' Does Not Imply 'Can'

Happy New Year everyone!

Yesterday Michael Smith visited ANU and gave a fun paper called 'Two Kinds of Consequentialism'. Afterwards the pub conversation turned to whether epistemic 'ought' implies 'can'. My hunch is that many different things may be expressed by epistemic uses of 'ought' in different contexts, and (more familiarly) the same kind of thing goes for 'can'. And it might be that for each epistemic 'ought' there's a corresponding 'can' which it implies. Nonetheless, I suspect that all or most (or at least most of the common) uses of the epistemic 'ought' express things which don't imply the things usually expressed by 'can'.

There's a recipe for creating counterexamples to 'ought' implies 'can' in the epistemic case which helps convince me of this. Take your favourite case of someone holding an irrational belief that she epistemically ought not to hold. (E.g. Carrie's believing at 5.40pm that aliens are invading the Earth despite there being absolutely no evidence to that effect.) Then make it so that the subject's holding that belief is beyond her control in your favourite sense. (E.g. Specify that Daniel has attached a brain-manipulating device to Carrie's head so that when he presses his remote control button at 5.40pm she will start believing that aliens are invading the Earth, despite having absolutely no evidence to that effect.) These will be cases where the subject epistemically ought to refrain from believing the proposition in question yet it's not the case that she can refrain from believing it.
It seems to be possible to follow this recipe for various different kinds of epistemic 'ought' (corresponding to various notions of epistemic irrationality) and various kinds of everyday 'can's (corresponding to various notions of control). It doesn't work for the weak 'can' of bare metaphysical possibility, of course, but 'ought'-implies-'can' isn't very interesting unless the 'can' is at least a bit stronger than that.

Any Polish Speakers Out There?

Polish magazine Charaktery reports on my Philosophy of Flirting paper in Polish.

Although I don't speak a word of Polish, thanks to online translation site Poltran, I can reveal that what it says is:

Carrie Jenkins, On department of australian philosophy of national university in canberra doktorantka, there is author of publication titled „ philosophy flirt ”, soon it has appear in london which (who) „ ” The Philosophers Magazine. Idea of writing of article has emerged for (after) it, as it has met on way of other student of philosophy Jenkins, daniel name Nolan and it has fallen in love in it.

If anyone out there speaks Polish and can offer a more, erm, natural-sounding translation, and more generally tell us what kind of magazine this is, please write in!

In other news, the Brisbane studio where we recorded our ABC interview yesterday is today closing down!

ABC Radio National Debate

Daniel and I are confirmed to appear on ABC radio's 'Life Matters' programme on Thursday (21st December). Our interview will be aired shortly after 9.00am in Australia, and will also be available for download from the 'Life Matters' website for a couple of weeks.

Update: You can now hear the interview here. (Our piece starts about 12 minutes into the programme. At the moment you can only listen online but for the truly dedicated it will be available for download soon!)

Two Links

Ralph Wedgwood has a fun case - an 'Epistemic Newcomb Problem' - over at Certain Doubts.

Also well worth checking out: the online manuscript of Tim Williamson's new book 'The Philosophy of Philosophy'. (Hat tip: Dave Chalmers.)

Commitment and Degrees of Belief

I've recently got interested in degrees of belief. (Hang around Canberra long enough and it's bound to happen.) I've been particularly enjoying a paper by Lina Eriksson and Al Hajek called 'What Are Degrees of Belief' (forthcoming in a Studia Logica special issue on formal epistemology, edited by Branden Fitelson, to appear 2007). I won't go into the details of their paper here since it is not publicly available yet. But here's something a bit different that I started thinking about after reading their paper and chatting to Al about it.

(Caveat: I don't know much about the literature on this topic, so I'm making no claims to originality.)

It would be nice to have a unified way of explicating the notions of belief and degree of belief. My hunch is that the notion of commitment - which clearly has both on/off and gradable aspects - can help. Belief could be explicated as commitment in the on/off sense, degrees of belief as degrees of commitment in the gradable sense.

The tricky bit is going to be specifying the right notion of commitment. Here are some of the things it's not:
- the kind of commitment you take on by making a promise
- the kind of commitment you have to a proposition p in virtue of believing something which entails p (thanks to Al for this one)
- the kind of commitment you can have to a cause or a person.

Here are some things that might help pin down the right notion:
- it's a propositional attitude
- we aim to have this kind of commitment in the on/off way to a proposition p only if p is true.

Incidentally, some readers of this blog may be interested to know (if they don't already) that Studia Logica is currently calling for papers on vagueness. (I just spotted this while finding the link for the above reference.)

Life Matters

Daniel and I might be appearing on ABC National Radio on 21st December on a programme called 'Life Matters'. Discussing what, I hear you ask? The semantics of conditionals? The a priori and the Canberra Plan? Methodology and epistemology?

Amazingly, it's none of these they're interested in; it's the philosophy of flirting. Watch this space for confirmation ...

Book News

Some good news: my book Grounding Concepts will be appearing with Oxford University Press. The central aim of the book is to develop the idea of concept grounding as the basis of a new kind of epistemology for arithmetic (see my paper Knowledge of Arithmetic for a sketch). It also tries to show how some of my ideas about realism and knowledge are supposed to fit into a coherent whole together with the concept grounding story.

Now I just have to get down to writing up the final version. Any volunteers to read and criticize draft chapters would be welcome ...

(PS: Sorry about the delay with the BK workshop photos. I'm having some technical difficulties with my camera.)

AAP(NZ)

Pictures from the Basic Knowledge workshop will be appearing here soon ... I am currently away at the New Zealand AAP.

Ed Mares gave the opening presidential address on Sunday, arguing that validity was to be identified with information-preservation and not with truth-preservation. Since information-preservation was so defined as to yield the rules of a relevant logic, this allowed Ed to maintain that the connectives have meanings given by their classical truth-conditions without thereby committing himself to classical logic.
Amongst other interesting stuff, Ed argued (by way of arguing that we do not need Looney Tune, or 'that's all', facts) that whether a model is complete or partial is not a matter of whether the model contains a 'that's all' fact but a matter of our attitude to that model (i.e. whether we regard it as complete or partial). I think it would be preferable, to avoid raising realist eyebrows, to say simply that it is a fact about the model rather than a fact within the model, and leave us out of it.

New (Final?) Draft of My Boghossian Paper ...

... is now online.

More Photos

I've just posted some more photos from the grad conference.

Priest On The Logic Of Relativism

Today at the Arché grad conference Graham Priest entertained us with a fun talk on the logic of relativism.

Amoung other things, Graham considered the following problem that (some) relativists seem to face. Suppose you are the kind of relativist who thinks that as a relativist you should not make absolute claims (A), but only claims about what holds according to some perspective (SA - where S stands for 'syat', a Sanskrit term of art which apparently is used by Jains to mean something like 'from some perspective'). This gives rise to a regress: one should not assert SA absolutely but only the qualified SSA; not SSA but SSSA; and so on. It turns out nothing is assertible.

Graham proposed a system in which A and SA (and hence SSA, SSSA etc.) are all logically equivalent, and suggested that this would solve the problem, since whenever one asserts A one is thereby asserting (something equivalent to) SA, SSA and so on.

But I wondered how this proposed solution would work. The thought motivating the problem was not that the relativist should say SA as well as A, but that the relativist should say SA instead of A: that she was wrong to assert the unqualified A. If A and SA, SSA etc. turn out to be equivalent, the wrongness of asserting the unqualified A has not (for all that's been said so far) been removed. So for all that's been said so far, none of SA, SSA etc. are assertible because they are all equivalent to the unacceptable unqualified A.

Grad Conference Photos

Here are some of my photos from the Arché grad conference. More will follow ...

Tip

Look out for more coverage of next weekend's Basic Knowledge workshop over at Plurality of Words. "Extensive blogging" of the event is "promised"! (Can't get out of it now, Andreas!)

Stanley on Shared Content

Neglecting Hegel on the a priori yet again, Jason Stanley gave an exciting talk about contextual sensitivity and shared content yesterday.

The (alleged) problem of shared content for those who believe in rampant contextual sensitivity is that is that to the extent that the proposition expressed varies with context, it is harder to explain why people find it so easy to communicate (i.e. grasp what propositions others are expressing) .

Richard Heck has suggested that grasping the exact proposition expressed is not important - you just have to grasp one that is similar enough.

Jason proposed instead that one should respond by saying that it is not so hard as you might think to grasp the exact same proposition that one's interlocutor expresses. Adpoting a Russellian view of propositions enabled him to argue (if I got him right) that my grasping the exact proposition you express requires only a kind of de re understanding. It only requires that I know, de re of the things you were talking about and properties you ascribed, that you said that those things have those properties. Since the Russellian proposition expresed is just a construct out of those things and properties, not a Fregean sense, mode of presentation doesn't matter: it doesn't matter what descriptions of these objects and properties I have available, nor whether I can distinguish them from close relatives, as long as I end up with the appropriate piece of de re knowledge about them.

One question this raised in my mind is whether this move really addresses the spirit (as opposed to the letter) of the shared content problem. If we go Russellian about propositions, then arguably grasping the proposition expressed is not all that's important for communication. Modes of presentation ought to matter too.

Addendum: Thanks to Jason for correcting my spelling of 'Russellian'. I should have mentioned that the term 'problem of shared content' is due to Herman Cappelen.

Arche Trip

I'm back at Arché for a couple of weeks, where I'll be attending the Arché graduate conference and organizing the Basic Knowledge Workshop. I will be posting some event reports here as I go along.

Tonight I'm off to see Jason Stanley open the grad conference. The title is TBA, so it remains to be seen whether he will address the important yet neglected topic of Hegel on the a priori, as requested by Paula and me.

Nolan Flirts With Fame

The Aussie press has now picked up Daniel's response to my paper The Philosophy of Flirting - see the fourth item down on this page of The Australian.

The reporter offers some sage advice inspired by the work of Nolan: "If you want to flirt, send text messages, not testicles."

PGR and Other News

The long-awaited Philosophical Gourmet Report is now up. I note with interest that the ANU is ranked 15th in the world, along with my alma mater Cambridge. Nottingham comes in at joint 51st in the world.

In other news, I'm very pleased to have been offered Associate Fellowship of two research centres in the last week: the Centre for Metaphysics and Mind in Leeds and my old haunt Arché in St Andrews. Both are places where there's lots of good philosophy going on, so this is really exciting (and it raises my number of institutional affiliations to four for the rest of this academic year)!

Davies Paper

A draft of another of the papers for the Arché Basic Knowledge Workshop is online: 'Two Purposes of Arguing and Two Epistemic Projects' by Martin Davies.

Boghossian on Epistemic Analyticity

I'm posting the nearly-final draft of my paper on Boghossian on Epistemic Analyticity. Comments welcome. The paper upholds the objection that knowledge of meaning through implicit definition cannot be a source of a priori knowledge, since in order to use implicit definitions, one must already know the propositions knowledge of which we are trying to account for. This claim itself is not new, but I aim to do four new things: firstly, drawing on some recent work by my former colleague Philip Ebert, I put a new structure on the objection, showing how it works on either of two possible readings of one of Boghossian's premises. Secondly, I argue that Boghossian's recent attempts to answer this sort of objection are unsuccessful. Thirdly, I offer some new side-objections to Boghossian. Finally, I resist Ebert's reasons for thinking what's wrong with Boghossian's argument is that it fails to transmit warrant (and also explain how the objection I defend is different).

Update: The link now points to a new draft, changes to which have been based in part on the discussion in the comments on this post.

Merely Verbal Disputes

I'm planning to join the metaphilosophical fray over what counts as a merely verbal dispute. My first thought is that what counts as a merely verbal dispute is likely to depend to a fair extent on what the parties to the dispute are interested in. One obvious way it looks like this can happen is that various prima facie substantive-sounding disputes can turn out to be merely terminological if the parties are self-consciously interested in settling a point of terminology. But this isn't the only way.

For instance, consider disputants A (an externalist) and B (an internalist), who argue as follows:
A: "We both know that there is an external world."
B: "No-one knows that there is an external world."

Suppose A and B agree that they each stand in relation E to the proposition There exists an external world, where E is the relation that A, being an externalist, takes to be sufficient for knowledge. And they also agree that nobody stands in relation I to that proposition, where I is the relation that B, being an internalist, takes to be necessary for knowledge.
Now suppose that when they realize they agree in these ways, they find that this enables them to resolve all the points they were interested in. Then we might be tempted to say that their original dispute was merely a verbal dispute about 'knows'. But in fact things aren't quite that simple - we want to allow that two people could resolve a substantive dispute about knowledge by thinking about the E and I facts, even where the original dispute was a substantive dispute about the knowledge facts (as opposed to the E and I facts) and not merely a verbal dispute about 'knows'. For instance, it could be that thinking about the E and I facts helps one of them to notice the facts about the knowledge relevant for resolving their dispute. Instead, I think that being resolvable in this way is a symptom of a merely verbal dispute. It is a symptom because it (fallibly) indicates that they never really diagreed about anything they were interested in, which I think is crucial for whether their dispute was merely verbal. (That's not supposed to be a criterion by itself either, but it's closer.)

But if noticing these points of agreement does not resolve their dispute (and the same goes for any other agreements of a similar kind that they may have), then it's tempting to say their dispute is not merely verbal but concerns a substantive point about knowledge. And that's going to be because this is evidence that what they're interested in is the facts about knowledge, and not just the E and I facts (or whatever).

In fact, however, there's something appealing about the thought that their dispute might still be merely verbal even if they are interested in knowledge for its own sake. For if there are no knowledge facts as distinct from the facts about E and I, then there is nothing substantive for their dispute to be about. So their dispute - if it is to have any point at all - must boil down to a disgreement about whether 'knowledge' tracks (and/or should track) E or I. If this is right, the interests of the disputants don't always settle whether the dispute is merely verbal. Still, they surely have an impact in many cases.

Pritchard's Basic Knowledge Workshop Paper

A draft of Duncan's paper for the Arche Basic Knowledge Workshop, 'Knowledge and Value', is now available. I'm looking forward to getting a chance to read it this weekend ...

A Priori Paper

I'm posting a draft of my new paper on the a priori. Comments very welcome, as always.

(Actually p) iff p

Here's an interesting schema from the point of view of thinking about the relationship between conceptual truth and necessary truth:

A: (Acutally p) iff p

For true but contingent propositions p, this is possibly false: worlds where not-p are still worlds where actually p. Do people reckon it's conceivable that A is false for such p?

Even if it *is* conceivably false, you might think it's the sort of thing you can tell is true just by thinking about the concepts it involves. This might lead you to suspect there are two grades of conceptual truth:

1. Things you can tell are true just by thinking about the concepts involved,
2. Things such that it is not conceivable that they are false.

The second grade looks strictly stronger. (Although I'd be interested to hear if people think they have counterexamples to this claim.)

(Thanks to Daniel for making me think about this!)

More Fame

Since my last post I have been interviewed on ABC Radio! (Although before anyone gets too excited, I should mention that it was ABC Radio Hobart). I'm about to be interviewed again by RTR fm in Perth. It seems the Aussies are interested in flirting.

What I want to know is why nobody takes this kind of interest in my *fascintating* papers on the a priori. :)

Fame At Last?

I had my first philosophy-related media interview last week, with a journalist from The Australian. (This is an Australian national newspaper - in fact, as I was surprised to learn, the only Australian national newspaper.) Thanks to my post on TAR, the guy had taken an interest in my work on flirting. If anything is printed, it will be in the Higher Education supplement, which appears on Wednesdays. There may even be a compromising photo ... :)

Addendum: Here is the article.

Flirting Again

My paper on the philosophy of flirting will be coming out in The Philosophers' Magazine, so this is to say thanks to all the people who sent me comments after I posted a draft here. Unfortunately TPM won't let me include any acknowledgements in the actual article, but be assured that I am grateful for all the comments it received! Here is the probably-final version.

What Is A Necessary Condition?

Necessary conditionhood is a notion I employ all over the place, and I've only just noticed that I'm not really sure what it amounts to.

Suppose P is a necessary condition for Q. Here are some of the things I've probably taken that to mean on various occasions:

1. Q materially implies P
2. Q strictly implies P
3. ~P materially implies ~Q
4. ~P strictly implies ~Q
5. If Q then P
6. If ~P then ~Q
7. Necessarily, if Q then P
8. Necessarily, if ~P then ~Q
9. If Q were the case then P would be the case
10. If ~P were the case then ~Q would be the case

On other occasions I've taken necessary conditionhood to involve some more substantial kind of dependence, so that if P is a necessary condition for Q, then Q's obtaining depends causally, explanatorily, or in some other interesting way, on P's obtaining. So for instance another thing I've taken it to mean is:

11. If ~P were the case then ~Q would be the case *because* of ~P

All this goes for sufficient conditions too, mutatis mutandis.

Some questions this raises: is one of these understandings right and the others wrong? Or do we in fact have a wide range of notions of necessary conditionhood? If the latter, is that a good state of affairs? Should we take more care to spell out what we mean each time we use the phrase 'necessary condition'?

Opacity and Anti-Realism

Something I probably should have thought about before, but in fact only noticed in conversation with Daniel Stoljar on Friday, is that (by my lights) '... is an anti-realist about ...' can create opaque contexts, on at least some uses. I reckon that one way to to be an anti-realist about ethics is to say that the ethical facts are identical with certain facts about what we approve and disapprove of. But anti-realists about ethics needn't (even by their own lights - i.e. even given that their identity claim is right) be anti-realists about approval.

In Australia

Greetings from the ANU! Pending recovery from jetlag, I've been enjoying meeting the philosophers and other local wildlife, and listening to an interesting talk by Hilary Greaves on how in the multiverse we should rationally update our beliefs.

Epistemic Norms Paper

Things will be quieter here for a while during the run-up to my move to Canberra at the end of August.

In the meantime, here is the current rough draft of my paper on Epistemic Normativity. Comments very welcome, although I can't promise to reply quickly at the moment :(

Worlds and Women

I'm currently enjoying a paper from 1993 by Tony Roy called Worlds and Modality (the link is through JSTOR). I like his attempt to ground modal facts in actual-world structural facts about properties (see esp. section 2). Or at least, I think it sits very nicely with the kind of epistemology of modality that I'm working on defending.

In other news, Brit has an interesting post on women in Philosophy. (I'd be even more interested to know the statistics for women Lemmings ...)

Positions On The A Priori

I'm currently working on a paper on a priori knowledge, and I thought it might be helpful to start out with an overview of available positions, characterized in terms of the answers their defenders would give to a set of questions. I'd be really interested to hear whether people think anything important is missing from my overview, whether the description is helpful, etc..

Before I start, it's useful to have an umbrella term for all forms of the view that some appeal to conceptual truth or something in that area is what does (most of) the interesting epistemological work in helping us understand (at least some of ) our a priori knowledge. I'll refer to all such views as versions of the conceptual approach.

First, then, there is the question of whether or not a priori knowledge is a distinctive epistemological phenomenon at all. Those who deny this include Mill and Quine, both of whom argue, in their different ways, that what appear to be cases of a priori knowledge are in fact cases of ordinary empirical knowledge.

If it is agreed that a priori knowledge is a distinctive phenomenon, there is the question of whether or not to adopt any version of the conceptual approach. If the answer is no, then we can ask whether or not any form of factualism is correct for claims of a priori knowledge or justification: that is, whether there are facts corresponding to acceptable claims of this kind, or whether the acceptability of such claims has some other basis. Field defends a form of non-factualism, at least for basic a priori knowledge, arguing that claims of justification for basic a priori principles are merely expressions of pro-attitude towards these principles. Factualist positions available to non-defenders of the conceptual approach include innatism, certain forms of conventionalism which are not wedded to the conceptual approach, and some forms of rationalism (for instance, some of the thoughts of Gödel could be developed in this way: we could posit a priori knowledge of set theory, for instance, via a rational faculty which is 'something like a perception' of its objects, without our account appealing to conceptual truth).

For those who favour the conceptual approach, we now ask whether or not mind-independence realism is true for any of the a priori knowable subject matters that are covered by the account. Those who answer 'no' here I take to include Ayer, Carnap, Kant, defenders of implicit definition views such as Wright and Hale, and perhaps Boghossian.

Those who do want to be realists then have to decide whether to be rationalists: that is, whether to accept that some propositions can be known solely through the exercise of faculties other than the senses. (I take empiricism to be the denial of rationalism). Those who answer 'yes' to this question I take to include BonJour, Peacocke and Bealer.

There is one node left on my imagined diagram: that is the node which I want to occupy. This node represents the view that a priori knowledge is a distinctive epistemological phenomenon to be explained via some sort of conceptual approach, that we should be realists about at least some of the subject matters to be covered by the account, and that rationalism is not true.

(The fun part is fitting all those things together …)

Blogging News

Thoughts Arguments and Rants is to evolve into a group blog, and in future I'll be posting there a bit as well as here.

Jobs and Studentships

Nottingham has a three-year postdoctoral fellowship and a three-year PhD studentship available in its AHRC-funded Metaphysics in Science project.

Also, advance notice for those interested that Arché will have two five-year postdoctoral positions and two three-year PhD studentships available in its AHRC-funded Basic Knowledge project, probably to start in September 2007. (NB: I am no longer working in Arché myself; any enquiries about these positions should go to arche@st-andrews.ac.uk.)

Quine and Vague Existence: New Draft

I've posted a new draft of my paper on Vague Existence and Ontological Commitment. I got loads of feedback on this, but I've tried to keep it short and sweet ... still, if anyone thinks there's something crucial missing I'd be interested to hear!

Update: a few typos and other sillinesses now corrected!

Knowability

Another new blog for lemmings (especially modal epistemic logicians) that'll be worth following: Knowability, run by Joe Salerno.

Checking out Joe's webpage, I notice that a draft of the introduction to his collection of New Essays on the Knowability Paradox is now available, and looks to be a great overview of the current state of the debate on this topic (as well as providing some history). There is also a draft of a helpful bibliography for the volume.

They Grow Up So Fast These Days

Today is LWBM's first birthday! Thanks to everyone who's been reading and commenting and helping to make it so much fun.

New Blog for Lemmings

Berit Brogaard has just started up a new blog, Lemmings.

No Escape for Epistemicism

Some more on the argument of my previous post ...

After my paper, Daniel Elstein encouraged me to think about how epistemicists would respond to the argument. At the time, I was inclined to think they could block it, but now I'm not convinced.

Epistemicists think that (what appear to be) borderline cases for (predicate or property) F exist only due to our necessary ignorance as to where the sharp cut-off for F-ness lies. A defender of the claim that it's vague whether there are any Fs, by these lights, is committed to its being unknowable whether there are any Fs (since according to her, we can't tell where the cut-off is within a certain range, and the actual situation is somewhere within that range). But that, surely, means she lacks commitment to Fs (since in particular, she is committed to its being unknowable for her whether there are any Fs). And hence, via the Quinean criterion, we can conclude that there are no Fs in the range of her quantifiers, so the argument is up and running.

Quine and Vague Existence Again

The Joint Session was fun, although it was a shame that lots of the accommodation was so far from the conference venue - strolling in across the common was nice in the morning sunshine but at 2am it was less appealing to walk back.

Like last year, I thought the open sessions were in need of some degree of refereeing. Still, I very much enjoyed giving my paper in one of them, on ontological commitment and vague existence. The purpose of this paper (which is a much improved version of this post) is to present the following argument and then wonder what should be done about it:

1 (Quinean premise): One is committed to Fs iff there are Fs among the range of the quantifiers appearing in one's best theory.
2 (Assumption): We think it's a vague matter whether there are any Fs (and that's all we have to say on the question of whether Fs exist or not).
3 (From 2): We are not committed to there being any Fs.
4 (Contraposing on the right-to-left direction of 1, then MPP using 3): There are no Fs among the range of the quantifiers appearing in our best theory.
5 (Premise): Our quantifiers are precisely those which appear in our best theory.
6 (From 4 and 5): There are no Fs among the range of our quantifiers.
7 (From 6): We can truly assert 'There are no Fs'.
8 (From 7, disquoting): It is not a vague matter whether there are any Fs: it is settled that there are no Fs.
9 (From 2 and 8): We are mistaken.
10 (Discharging 2, using 9): If we think it's a vague matter whether there are any Fs (and that's all we have to say on the question of whether Fs exist or not), then we are mistaken.

Some members of the audience suggested that rejecting contraposition was the best thing to do, a response I've not come across before. (Although as Daniel pointed out to me later, we really only need modus tollens. But maybe the people who'd want to reject contraposition would want to reject MTT too, for similar reasons?)

Joint Session 2006

Some of my photos from this year's Joint Sesh are now online. When my feet touch the ground I'll hopefully get a couple of comments on some of the papers up here too.

Revenge of the Paranormal

I have just put a new paper online (based on stuff that I posted here a while ago). It's a short response to JC Beall's recent paper 'True, False and Paranormal'. Beall says that his five-valued semantics enables us to desribe a language which allows exhaustuve semantic characterization of its own sentences without generating liar-like contradictions. I say it doesn't!

Conference-Hopping

I'm just back from a fun conference on Moral Contextualism in Aberdeen. Some of my photos of the conference are now online. (I can assure readers that there is a perfectly rational explanation of those ones with the cutlery.)

Highlights from the conference included Berit Brogaard's attempts to convince us that the truth-value of one and the same proposition can vary with the speaker. (Her presentation is available online.) She appealed to Recanati's views on direct speech reports (whereby the quoted sentence is not merely mentioned but used) to argue that such reports, although they create shifed contexts, do not change the parameters of the circumstance of evaluation.

While I agreed that the view seems to have advantages over Macfarlane-style relativism, one thing that made me suspicious about it was that one surely wants to deliver the same result for unquoted sentences as for quoted sentences. The following pair, for instance, sounds very odd:
1. At t, John said 'Murder is wrong' and he was mistaken.
2. The sentence John uttered at t was true.
But it wasn't clear how the account could deliver this uniformity; since it appeals to special features of quoted speech to deliver the desired result in case 1, it wasn't clear how to get it for cases like 2.

John Hawthorne suggested in his talk that 'ought' claims might be subject to contextual variation in semantic value for the same reasons as are the 'can' claims which they (supposedly) imply. This, I thought, might sit quite well with the view (suggested in Lewis) that there is contextual variation in the semantic value of modal utterances due to contextual restriction of the quantifiers over worlds which they involve.

I was particularly interested, therefore, to hear Ralph Wedgwood developing a version of Angelika Kratzer's possible-world semantics for 'ought' claims in the next-but-one session. Kratzer's basic idea here (subject to many bells and whistles, of course) is that context supplies a set of propositions which are held fixed across all relevant worlds, and an ordering on those worlds. 'It ought to be that p' is then true iff p is true in all the worlds ranked as unsurpassed.

Tomorrow I'm off to Southampton for the Joint Session, so more paper reports should follow soon.

Williamson on Conceptual Truth

Tim Williamson has a paper on Conceptual Truth in the new Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume. His target is the view that appealing to something like conceptual truth or analyticity can help us explain how a priori knowledge works.

But strangely, he focuses almost exclusively on one particular - and particularly weak - version of this type of view. Almost the entire discussion is concerned with the view that anyone who understands a conceptual truth knows it. I don’t know of any contemporary philosopher of the a priori who defends this claim, and indeed it is not attributed to anyone by Williamson. Although in footnote 5 Williamson claims that Boghossian holds ‘something like’ it, I doubt whether Boghossian would accept this reading of his work. Peacocke is also mentioned, but as I understand him Peacocke is not committed to anything in this vicinity either. The same footnote also says that ‘the focus of this paper is not on some few thinkers in particular; it aims to make explicit and criticize a conception on which many contemporary philosophers still rely, often tacitly, at various points in their work.’ But the paper would be more exciting if its took into account some of the potentially interesting versions of the conceptual approach currently being proposed by serious philosophers of the a priori. There is too much of the straw man about the view Williamson actually discusses. Even some examples of places where he thinks this view is being assumed by philosophers who are not specifically interested in the a priori would have helped to motivate the paper.

The only attempt to engage with slightly more sensible versions of the conceptual approach is fleeting: on pp. 26-7 he considers the view that understanding merely puts one in a position to know or justifies the relevant belief. He argues that some people who understand the relevant propositions aren’t even in a position to know them, because certain of their other commitments get in the way of their believing them. This may or may not be the best way of describing these cases, but even if it is, it isn’t particularly devastating: a nearby position which Williamson doesn’t consider is the view that whoever understands certain propositions and believes them on the basis of that understanding knows them. Not that I would defend anything like this view myself - my point is just that Williamson's arguments do nothing to touch it. (Moreover, the debate on, for instance, how Boghossian’s view fares with regard to the distinction between possessing knowledge and having a warrant available to one is already at a more advanced stage than Williamson’s discussion takes account of - see Philip Ebert’s 2005 paper on this point).

Also, the argument in this section relies heavily on assumptions I think are false, e.g. that ‘justification rather than knowledge is the central epistemological question only for internalist theories’ (p. 27). Justification, like knowledge, can be construed in an externalist or an internalist fashion, and an externalist about both notions could well take justification to be the, or at least a, central epistemological notion.

A good point is mentioned on p. 4, namely that conceptual approaches tend to assume the epistemological problem of a priori truth is somehow ‘automatically’ solved for conceptual truths, but they ‘do not say how it is solved’. This point, however, is anticipated (and developed in more sophisticated ways) in various places, including e.g. Field 2005 and BonJour 1998.

Williamson's discussion, which focuses on finding counterexamples to the view under consideration, does not take the most illuminating tack in attempting to show what's wrong with it. What's more illuminating is the fact that even if it were true that everyone who understood a certain proposition knew it, we still wouldn't have given any account of how they knew it.

Against 'Against 'Against Vague Existence''!

Robbie Williams has a response to my post Against 'Against Vague Existence' over on his blog Theories 'n Things.

I've recently written up a short note based on the idea in my original post, which I've put online here. I hope it goes some way to addressing Robbie's concerns (which centre on the thought, shared by Sider, that I need to say something about what kind of thing a precisification is on the envisaged account).

Extended Simples and Quantized Space

David Braddon-Mitchell and Kristie Miller have a fun new paper arguing that we can both believe in spatially extended mereological simples and agree that every extended object o has a part at each sub-region of the region which o occupies. The trick which is supposed to enable us to marry these two theses is to claim that space has smallest regions which have no sub-regions. (This is a position I've heard defended in conversation by others as well, so I'm coming round to the view that it ought to be taken seriously.)

For many of us, quantized space seems a very strange idea on the face of it, but Braddon-Mitchell and Miller argue that it must be taken seriously because of certain results in physics. They claim that 'physicists tell us that we cannot divide up space into any finer-grained regions than those constituted by Planck squares [i.e. areas of 10 to the power -66 centimetres squared]' and that physics 'tells us that talk of space breaks down altogether once we talk about regions smaller than the Planck square'. 'Hence', they conclude, 'we know that talking about something occupying a sub-region of a Planck square makes no sense: there is no such sub-region' (p. 224).

When they give a few details of what the physics actually shows, it turns out to be that 'there is nothing that could be taking place within these squares'. Braddon-Mitchell and Miller take it (and this is where I get puzzled) that this 'is to say that in principle, there cannot be anything that occupies the sub-regions of such a square' (p. 224, their emphasis).

For all I know, physicsists may well be claiming this sort of import for that sort of result, but I can't see how the transition could be that straightforward. What I can't understand is how any claim about what can or cannot take place with a Planck square - which is of course the sort of thing physicists can helpfully tell us about - could settle the question of whether such a square has sub-regions. Specifically, I wonder what sort of results are supposed to distinguish between the hypotheses:
1. that Planck squares have no sub-regions
and
2. that any Planck square (and therefore any sub-region of a Planck square) must, as a matter of nomic necessity, be uniformly filled.

The claim that nothing can be 'taking place' within a Planck square seems at best to get us as far as 2. What justifies the further step to 1? What sort of result from physics as it is currently practiced could possibly justify this further step?

(I ask these questions in self-confessed ignorance of the physics, but with a dose of scepticism as to whether we can get this much metaphysics out of it, whatever it is!)

Job News

I've just accepted a job offer from the University of Nottingham. I start there on 1st September, although I will be in Australia until September 2007.

My favourite colleague is also moving to Nottingham. We are sorry to leave behind lots of great colleagues in St Andrews, but are very excited about joining the Nottingham crowd!

Philosophy of Flirting

Just for fun, I've written up a few thoughts on the philosophy of flirting. I'm trying to make progress towards a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for when an act of flirtation has taken place. Let me know what you think!

TAR at new address

For those who read Brian Weatherson's blog as well as this one (I imagine an improper subset of those who read this blog), Thoughts Arguments and Rants is now at http://tar.weatherson.org/ after the original address was hijacked.

They'll All Be Concept-Grounding Theorists Soon ...

More evidence that a priori knowledge is hitting the big time again - and that people are starting to ask just the right sorts of questions about it (that is, the questions that motivate my view ... :)

Infallibility and Modal Epistemology

The Arche Modality Conference has just finished, and has been excellent fun. I've put some photos on my website. In the end, my comments on Scott Sturgeon's talk mainly focussed on the claim that the infallibility of idealized conceivability methods is the wrong focal point for his worry. He's worried that if we are realists, we shouldn't think that metaphysics and epistemology will fit together the way the infallibilist requires - there should be room to make a mistake. For idealized conceivability (as he thinks of it) involves only mental idealization (allowing unlimited time, capacities etc.). How can we have a guarantee of getting a true belief, if we have only idealized these mental processes, and said nothing about their relationship to the world?

But I argued that we still have a worry of the same kind for fallibilist conceivability views. My point here was just an analogue of what we tell students who think Hume’s worries about induction show that we aren’t guaranteed to get true beliefs by inductive methods, but still think these beliefs are likely to be true. What I claimed is that, for the same reasons Sturgeon thinks we should be worried about the infallibility of conceivability, namely because epistemology and realist metaphysics don’t fit together like that, we should also be worried about the claim that it’s likely that conceivability will deliver true beliefs. Epistemology and realist metaphysics don’t fit together like that either – you don’t get good ways of finding out about the independent world when you idealize along only mental dimensions. Good ways of finding out about the independent world require input, which is a world-involving relationship, and not purely mental.

So infallibility is not necessary to generate the problem. In fact, I claimed, it’s not sufficient either. Sturgeon’s worry will go away if we can somehow add a mind-world input element into our account of ideal conceivability. This sort of ideal conceivability can unproblematically be infallible, for the same reasons Sturgeon thinks idealized vision (which is, among other things, always veridical) can unproblematically be infallible.

The deep problem in the vicinity of Sturgeon's worry is a very old one: how can a priori reflection be a source of knowledge of facts which are construed realistically? But of course, there are many answers to this and debates about them which would have to be engaged with before we could claim to have pressed the point in a new way.

Responding to Kripke

Right, I'm back ... minus one appendix. And straight back into the thick of it, with the Arche academic audit starting today. We've had talks by Mark Sainsbury, Paul McCallion, Philip Ebert and Marcus Rossberg (jointly) and Frank Jackson, with topics ranging from famous fictional characters such as Sherlock Holmes to infamous real ones such as Julius Caesar and Timothy Williamson.

In my spare time :) I'm meant to be preparing some comments on Scott Sturgeon's talk at the upcoming Modality Conference, which is based on this paper. He is arguing against the following combination of views:

1. Kripke is right that ideal conceivability does not imply possibility.
2. But we should make minimal adjustments to deal with 1 - i.e. we should hold that ideal conceivability implies possibility except in the particular kinds of case Kripke brings to our attention.

One thing I'm not sure of is whether this combination of views is defended in print by anyone. (Scott doesn't mention anyone in the version of the paper I've seen.) But more interestingly, I wonder whether many people really (perhaps tacitly) think this is the appropriate thing to do.

Out of action

LWBM will probably be off air for a little while; due to illness I will be off work until at least the end of May.

Going to Australia

I'm very pleased to be spending the next (British) academic year on secondment at the ANU. I'll be working on an ARC project, Epistemic Warrant, lead by Daniel Stoljar, Martin Davies and Crispin Wright. The project will focus on transmission of warrant, basic knowledge and entitlement.

Dogmatism and The Content of Experience

If I understand correctly (and I'm indebted to Sebastian Schmoranzer's recent Arche presentation for clarifying the following exegetical points) it is a tenet of Pryor's dogmatism (as represented in this paper) that certain of my experiences give me a reason to believe I have hands, and this regardless of any antecedent warrant I may have for thinking that I am not hallucinating, not a brain in a vat, etc.. Why? Because my experience represents it as being the case that I have hands.

However, my experience's 'representing it as being the case that I have hands' cannot amount to its being as it would be if I had hands, lest we be able to construct a parallel argument to the effect that experience gives me a reason to believe I am a brain in a vat being fed perfectly hand-like sensations.

The standard response to this seems to be that although my experience is as it would be if I were that kind of brain in a vat, my experience does not represent it as being the case that I am that kind of brain in a vat in the way it represents it as being the case that I have hands. That is, the content of my experience is that I have hands, not that I am a brain in a vat having hand-like experiences.

This seems to raise a puzzle: how do we spell out the notion of content required? If it is purely something about (my relationship to) the external world that makes the difference between having an experience with content 'I have hands' and having an experience with content 'I am a brain in a vat having hand-like experiences', then the 'standard response' just described appears to collapse the dogmatist line into a familiar kind of disjunctivist response to scepticism.

On the other hand, suppose we try to use inferential role (assuming that to be something internally accessible) to distinguish the two contents. Then the important thing about the inferential role of the content of the experience I'm actually having is presumably going to include things like the fact that I can correctly infer from the content of this experience to the conclusion that I am not a handless brain in a vat, which is something I cannot infer from the content of an experience which represents it as being the case that I am a brain in a vat having hand-like experiences.

However, it seems to be blantantly begging the question against the sceptic to assume without further comment that I am presently having an experience the content of which enables me to correctly infer that I am not a handless brain in a vat. This is exactly what the sceptic doubts my experience is like.

So what other stories about the difference in content are available for the dogmatist to tell here?