There is Some Truth in That

I was very pleased to have my short discussion on evaluating the knowledge norm of practical reasoning appear in the inaugural issue of Thought. Unfortunately, I’ve just noticed that there are two errors near the end of the published version of the paper. One, which is entirely my fault, is that I misspelled Mikkel Gerken’s name. I’m very sorry, Mikkel!

The second error, which seems to have been introduced in copyediting, is more likely to interfere with comprehension. So I thought I should at least set the record straight here. The penultimate paragraph of my paper was meant to run thus:

The point cuts in both directions: pairs of intuitions like the ones featured above cannot be used to refute the knowledge norm of practical reasoning; neither can cases of that include both knowledge and appropriate action, or both ignorance and apt criticism of action, be used to speak directly in favor of the knowledge norm. The same point applies to attempts to evaluate knowledge norms from the other side: just as one can’t get very far from arguments of the form ‘S knows that p, but oughtn’t to Φ, neither can one get very far from arguments of the form ‘S doesn’t know that p, but it would be correct to Φ.’ Relatedly, pairs of cases that differ with respect to knowledge, but are alike with respect to appropriate action—as is plausible, for instance, with knowers and their Gettierized counterparts—do not bear at all directly on knowledge norms (contra  Gerkin (2011), pp. 535-36; Smithies (2011), p. 5). The knowledge norm identifies knowledge with reasons, but the facts about what reasons one has do not supervene on the facts about what actions are appropriate. (Perhaps there is supervenience in the other direction.)

The penultimate sentence of this paragraph unfortunately became rather mangled. (I regret that I whiffed my chance of catching it in proof corrections.) This is what was printed:

…Relatedly, pairs of cases that differ with respect to knowledge, but are alike with respect to appropriate action—as is plausible, for instance, with knowers and their Gettierized counterparts—do not bear at all directly on knowledge norms (contra Gerkin 2011, pp. 535–536; Smithies 2011, p. 5). The knowledge norm identifies knowledge with reasons, but the facts about what reasons one has to do does not supervene on the facts about what actions are appropriate. (Perhaps, there is supervenience in the other direction.)

The point I was trying to make was that everyone should agree that sometimes, pairs of subjects who have distinct reasons available to them ought nevertheless to perform the same actions—different reasons may point in the same direction. And given the knowledge norm, this is pretty plausible in the case of Gettier subjects and their knowledgable counterparts. Henry in fake barn country and twin-Henry in real barn country do not share all the same reasons: twin-Henry has the proposition that there is a barn in front of him, and Henry does not. Nevertheless, if they’re both allergic to barns, they are each reasonable in stepping away from the structure before him. Twin-Henry’s action is made reasonable by the reason that there is a barn before him (combined with his allergy and interests); Henry’s action is made reasonable by the reason that there is a building that looks just like a barn before him (combined with his allergy and interests).

Tags: knaw, knowledge, knowledge norms, practical reasoning

There’s a philosophy of mind reading group at UBC, reading Dretske’s (1981) Knowledge and the Flow of Information this spring. I’ve never made a proper study of Dretske’s work before, so I’m finding it extremely useful and interesting. In yesterday’s reading group, I had an idea that I’d like to explore a bit further; consider this blog post a rather preliminary rumination.

First, some background — both to clue in any readers who are interested in reading but don’t know the Dretske, and so that I can make sure I have his framework clear in my own head.

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Tags: fred dretske, information, knowledge, knowledge first

Sanford Goldberg has an interesting new argument against mentalist internalism about justification in Analysis. I’m working on committing myself to an internalist approach to justification at the moment; Goldberg’s new paper isn’t enough to force me to reconsider.

The master argument of the paper, which Goldberg lays out quite succinctly, is this, which I quote:

P1. The property of being doxastically justified just is that property which turns true unGettiered belief into knowledge.

P2. No property that is internal in the Justification Internalist’s sense is the property which turns true unGettiered belief into knowledge.

Therefore

C. No property that is internal in the Justification Internalist’s sense is the property of being doxastically justified.

I think internalists have two fairly natural lines of defence. First, one might reject the very notion of some property that turns true unGettiered belief into knowledge, at least if we read ‘turns into’ in some kind of truth-making sort of way. No doubt there is in some weak sense a property P such that one has knowledge if and only if one has true belief, has P, and is not in a Gettier situation, but I see no reason to suppose that it will be a property any more interesting or natural than the disjunction, knows or false or Gettiered. (I rather suspect “Gettiered” itself can be understood at best conjunctively.) And I don’t think there’s any interesting sense in which this disjunction turns unGettiered true belief into knowledge.

In defence of this way of setting the issue up, Goldberg writes:

After all, ‘doxastic justification’ is a term of art, and so if we are to continue to use it, it must pick out something that is epistemically interesting. It picks out something epistemically interesting if P1 is true; but it is unclear whether it picks out something interesting if P1 is false. At a minimum, the burden of proof will be on those internalists who deny P1: if this is how they respond to the present argument, then we are owed an explanation of why we should care about the property of which the internalist is purporting to give us an account.

But there are other fairly natural reasons to care about justification available. For example, justification may be that property which permits knowledge, without being one that guarantees it.

The second way an internalist might resist Goldberg’s argument is to reject the considerations he brings to bear in favor of his P2. He imagines someone in an evil demon situation who is an intrinsic duplicate of someone with a justified belief. Take her perceptual belief that p. Her belief must be justified, by the internalist’s lights, but is not knowledge, since she is in an evil demon scenario. It is not knowledge, even if it happens to be true. This doesn’t support the argument unless we can also establish that this is not a Gettier case; at the moment it rather looks like one. (She has misleading evidence for p, and reasonably forms the belief that p on that basis; it turns out that p happens to be true.)

To close off this avenue, Goldberg asks us to suppose that it is probable that our subjects beliefs are true, due to the machinations of the demon.

Still, it is easy to tell yet another variant of the Evil Demon case on which this move – to explain away the ‘no knowledge’ verdict by appeal to Gettierizing luck – is not plausible in the least. Imagine the following scenario, involving the Not-so-Evil Demon: it is just like the ordinary Evil Demon scenario except the Not-so-Evil Demon has conspired to make 65% of your Doppelgänger’s beliefs true (the other 35% being false owing to systematic illusions sustained by Not-so-Evil). Imagine your Doppelgänger in this world. For any perceptual belief (s)he has, there is a 65% chance that the belief is true. If it’s true, this is not merely lucky.

But stipulating facts about luck is a dangerous game. There is of course some sense in which the not-so-evil demon victim isn’t merely lucky to believe truly, but is it the one relevant to Gettier cases? Probably not. Nothing in Gettier’s original cases precludes probability of true belief of this sort. Go back to Jones and the Ford and Brown in Barcelona; suppose Brown is in Barcelona 65% of the time, and Smith believes that Jones has a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona, as in the original case, solely on the basis of the misleading evidence about the Ford. This is still a paradigmatic Gettier situation, even though there may be some sense in which the belief is true not merely by luck. Given this parallel, I think the internalist has every reason to regard the subject of the not-so-evil demon as in a Gettier case. So there are good grounds for resisting Goldberg’s argument.

Tags: gettier cases, internalism, justification, sanford goldberg

Knowledge shows up in theories a lot lately. Or should I say that ‘knowledge’ shows up in statements of theories? One question I’m hoping to research a fair amount in the near future concerns the status of theoretical claims about knowledge. The knowledge first program, broadly construed, says that knowledge has some kind of priority or privileged status, which makes it a good candidate to explain other states. (My broad construction applies not just to the Williamson project, but to all of those recent projects that posit strong theoretical roles for knowledge, such as the knowledge-action links of Hawthorne and Stanley.) Here’s a question I’m interested in: how should we understand the knowledge first attitude? Here are two candidate interpretations:

1. Knowledge, the mental state, is metaphysically (relatively) fundamental; it is among the (more) basic building blocks of the world. Questions about knowledge are questions about the (relatively) natural epistemic joints.
2. KNOWLEDGE, the concept, is conceptually (relatively) fundamental; it is among the (more) basic ideas in our understanding of the world. Questions about knowledge are questions about our (relatively) fundamental conceptual framework.

(The hedges there indicate that knowledge ‘first’ should surely not be meant to imply absolute priority; one can subscribe, for instance, to the metaphysical interpretation of the knowledge first project and still believe that physical particles are the most fundamental bits of the universe; knowledge is prior to most of psychology and epistemology, perhaps, but not prior to physics.)

My suspicion, which I’m not yet in a position to make good on, is that a lot of authors are fairly indiscriminate about this distinction, and furthermore that it matters. But I’m not at all ready to argue for that claim; I need to re-read a lot of this literature with the question in mind. In this blog post, however, I’ll highlight a number of passages that suggest each of the readings. Inclusion on this list is not meant as an indication either that the author endorses one interpretation over the other, or that the author is in any way confused on the matter; this is just a list of passages that strike me as suggestive of one of the two views, so that eventually I can look back and have a whole list of material to scrutinize.

I’ll continue to update this blog post as I find passages that appear relevant. Suggestions, of course, are extremely welcome!

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Tags: knowledge, Knowledge and Its Limits, Knowledge and Practical Interests, knowledge first

I’ve been sitting in on, and enjoying, Carrie Jenkins’s grad seminar in epistemology. Today, one of our grad students, Kousaku Yui, brought up a pretty interesting suggestion in response to Jason Stanley’s stakes-relative approach to knowledge. I didn’t recognize the point as one that I’ve seen discussed before — if there is a literature on it, I’d be very interested to see it.

The worry is this. Jason thinks that when the stakes are high, it’s harder to know. But stakes aren’t just a feature of an individual at a time; stakes are high for certain propositions when the truth or falsehood of those propositions make a big difference. It’s possible to be such that the stakes for p are high, but the stakes for q are low. For example, it may be very important to Hannah and her wife Sarah whether the bank is open tomorrow, but not at all important to them whether it will rain tomorrow. In such a case, they would need to meet more exacting ‘standards’ in order to know about the bank than they would to know about the rain. That’s a little bit counterintuitive, but only in the way that pragmatic encroachment is generally a little bit counterintuitive.

But here’s what might be a deeper problem. Suppose someone is in a situation like the one just mentioned — the stakes for p are high, but the stakes for q are low — but where the subject knows that if q, then p. If so, then it’s easy to know q, but hard to know p; but it looks like anyone who knows q could easily infer p. Closure plus the possibility of a case with this structure looks like they entail that the stakes-sensitive view can’t be right.

Do we have to say such cases are possible? I don’t see anything that forces us to, but certain cases are very naturally described in that way. Suppose Hannah and Sarah have an important bill, as per the standard high-stakes bank case; it’s very important to them whether the bank will be open on Saturday. Suppose also that they have a friend Franklin who is a bank teller, and they have some small interest in whether he will be at the bank on Saturday. Here, however, the stakes are low — nothing much hangs on whether they’re correct about Franklin’s location on Saturday. Assume that they have a good enough position for arbitrary strong knowledge standards for the proposition that Franklin will be at the bank only if it is open. So we have:

• p: The bank is open Saturday
• q: Franklin is at the bank Saturday
• The stakes for p are high
• The stakes for q are low
• Everyone knows that if q, then p.

If Hannah and Sarah have a middling epistemic position with respect to q, then it looks like they’re in a position to know q, but not to know p. But this violates closure.

Might Jason say that in such a case, the high stakes for p force the stakes up for q as well? He might, but it seems like a pretty strange thing to say. Intuitively, it doesn’t matter to them much at all whether Franklin is at work on Saturday. Their bill situation has nothing to do with Franklin. Maybe we can wrap our heads around the idea that the bill makes it harder to know that the bank is open — but can it really make it harder to know where their friends are?

Tags: contextualism, Jason Stanley, knowledge, Knowledge and Practical Interests, pragmatic encroachment

I’m re-reading Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and Its Limits for a reading group at UBC. I’m struck by this passage, from the introduction to Chapter 9 on Evidence.

[W]e may speculate that standard accounts of justification have failed to deal convincingly with the traditional problem the regress of justifications—what justifies the justifiers?—because they have forbidden themselves to use the concept knowledge. E = K suggests a very modest kind of foundationalism, on which all one’s knowledge serves as the foundation for all one’s justified beliefs.

I’m not at all sure what to make of this. I’m very impressed by E = K, but I have a hard time seeing reason to accept either of these claims:

1. E=K is a kind of foundationalism
2. E=K provides a solution to the traditional problem of the regress

Here’s the story about foundationalism and the regress that I tell to my undergrads. I think it’s pretty standard; if its somehow idiosyncratic, I hope someone will tell me. Everybody thinks that the justification for some beliefs depends on other justified beliefs. How do those other beliefs get justified? Maybe by yet further justified beliefs. Foundationalism is the thesis that there are basically justified beliefs — beliefs that are justified in some other way than by being supported by other justified beliefs. If you’re not a foundationalist, then you think that all justified beliefs are justified by other justified beliefs; for any given justified belief, there must be a chain of justified beliefs in successive support relationships that never ends, either because it continues infinitely, or because it doubles back on itself. Insofar as these latter two options are implausible forms of regress, there is intuitive support for foundationalism.

So as I understand it, what it is to be a foundationalist is to think that there are basic beliefs — i.e., beliefs that are justified, not in virtue of being supported by other justified beliefs. I’m surprised to see Williamson suggest that his view is a foundationalist one; E = K appears to me to be neutral on the question of whether there are basic beliefs. The Knowledge First project is consistent with the traditional idea that knowledge entails justified belief; I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that, on Williamson’s view, knowledge is a (special, metaphysically privileged) kind of justified belief.

So if one’s knowledge is among one’s justified beliefs, then read literally, the claim that “[all of] one’s knowledge serves as the basis of all one’s justified beliefs” is tantamount to the claim that the chains of justification of the sort foundationalists talk about are in fact circular: some of my justified beliefs—the knowledgable ones, at least—are supported by chains that include themselves. But this is anathema to foundationalism, as the label for that view makes vivid.

Maybe I’m reading uncharitably literally; the thesis is that the knowledge is basic, and it supports the mere justified beliefs. All the knowledge is at the bottom of the pyramid and nowhere else. This now looks like foundationalism, but it carries the commitment that all knowledge is basic: all knowledgable beliefs are justified, not in virtue of being supported by other justified beliefs. This is a stronger claim than any I’d thought Williamson was committed to; I’m not sure it’s particularly plausible. There is such a thing as inferential knowledge; in such cases, it seems very intuitive that justification depends on justification of the beliefs from which it’s inferred. If you’re a knowledge first program, you shouldn’t think that’s the main thing or the fundamental thing or the most interesting thing going on — knowledge first people should be more excited about the fact that the knowledge of the conclusion flows from the knowledge of the premise — but I see no reason to deny that there’s also justificatory dependence at a less fundamental level. But foundationalism is (I thought) precisely about justificatory independence.

So what’s going on? Does Williamson intend a weaker sense of ‘foundationalism’? Or am I wrong about what the traditional sense would require, given his comments? Or is Williamson really committed to the thesis that if S knows that p, then S’s justification for p does not depend on S’s justification for any other proposition?

Tags: evidence, knowledge, Knowledge and Its Limits, timothy williamson

I haven’t been updating my blog since moving to UBC last fall, partly because I’ve been busy preparing new courses and grant applications and settling into a new city. (My two biggest professional bits of news over the last while, for anyone interested who hasn’t already heard elsewhere, are that The Rules of Thought, my book with Ben Jarvis, is now under contract with OUP, and I’ll be beginning an Assistant Professorship at UBC this summer.)

I’m now starting to shift back into research mode, however, and blog activity may come back up accordingly.

One of the philosophy books that has been on my ‘to-read’ list for a long time is Jessica Brown’s Anti-Individualism and Knowledge; I’ve been interested in the relationship between mental content and epistemology for a while now. Of course if I’d been cleverer about it, I’d've read the book while I worked at St Andrews and spoke to Jessica regularly, but: better late than never.

Among the interesting things Jessica is up to in her book is an argument that Fregeanism about content is inconsistent with — or at least, fits poorly with — anti-individualism. This is the negation of one of the chapters of The Rules of Thought, so I wanted to attend especially to the argument. (Thanks to Sandy Goldberg for bringing this connection to my attention recently.)

One of Jessica’s arguments boils down to this. (I’m looking at pp. 200-201.)

1. Fregean sense depends for its motivation on the transparency of sameness of mental content.
2. Anti-individualism is inconsistent with the transparency of sameness of mental content.
3. Therefore, if anti-individualism is true, then Fregean sense is unmotivated.

In defense of (1), Jessica suggests that, were it possible for a subject to be wrong about whether two token concepts express the same content, the failure to make logically valid inferences would be consistent with full rationality. Celeste is in a Frege case.

Celeste fails to make the simple valid inference … since she does not realize that the relevant thought constituents have the same content and thus that the inference is valid. Further, she can come to the correct view only by using empirical information. On this view, her failure to make the simple valid inference does not impugn her rationality, for even a rational subject would fail to make a valid inference that she does not realize is valid.

Jessica suggests that Fregeanism is motivated by the possibility of rationally holding what would be according to non-Fregean views contradictory sets of beliefs, or rationally declining to infer according to what such views would say are logically valid inferences. I agree — a central motivation for Fregeanism is to explain why there’s nothing irrational about believing Hesperus to be F and believing Phosphorus not to be F. But why does this rely on the assumption of the transparency of sameness of content? Jessica says in the passage above that there is an alternate explanation available, if transparency is denied: one doesn’t make what is in fact a logically valid inference because one doesn’t realize that it is valid, and this is consistent with full rationality.

Jessica’s argument seems to rely on this claim:

(Reflection) If a subject doesn’t realize that an inference is valid, then she faces no rational pressure to make it.

But Reflection strikes me as a pretty dubious principle in generality. Suppose somebody is pretty dense, and fails to realize that modus tollens is a valid inference form, and so fails to realize that various instances of it are valid. She sits there and thinks if it has an even number, then it’s red and it’s not red, and finds herself with no inclination to infer it has no even number. Surely her ignorance doesn’t excuse her rational failure. So Reflection is false in generality; so arguments that rely on Reflection are unsound. It looks to me like Jessica is relying on Reflection, so I think her argument is unsound.

That said, there is admittedly an intuitive difference between my dense character and Jessica’s ignorant one — Jessica’s character’s failure to infer in accordance with valid inferences would be corrected by suitable empirical information; mine presumably wouldn’t. Could this motivate a weakening of Reflection to render Jessica’s verdict while avoiding the problematic one? Maybe, but it looks to me like it’d end up pretty ad hoc. (One upshot of Timothy Williamson’s work on apriority is that it’s very difficult precisely to state the kinds of connections to empirical investigation that underwrite certain intuitions.)

The Fregean can say this: failure to infer according to logically valid inferences is a rational failure, whether or not the subject recognizes the inference as a logically valid one. This, combined with the intuitive verdicts (no rational failure) about Frege puzzle cases, implies Fregeanism, but does not require any thesis about the transparency of content. This seems to be to be the natural thing to say.

Edit: Aidan McGlynn tells me that John Campbell and Mark Sainsbury are on the record against (1) in Campbell’s ‘Is Sense Transparent?’ and Sainsbury’s is ‘Fregean Sense’ in his collection Departing From Frege. I’ll be interested to read them.

Tags: anti-indivdualism, content, fregeanism, Jessica Brown

I’ve never been at all sure what to make of ‘evidentialism’ in epistemology. Following is a fairly naive response to Conee and Feldman; I suspect there’s some discussion of these or closely related issues; I’d be happy to be pointed to them.

Conee and Feldman think that the doxastic attitude I’m justified in having toward any given proposition is the one that fits my evidence. However, it’s just not at all clear what that’s supposed to mean. They offer examples, by way of illustration:

Here are three examples that illustrate the application of this notion of justification. First, when a physiologically normal person under ordinary circumstances looks at a plush green lawn that is directly in front of him in broad daylight, believing that there is something green before him is the attitude toward this proposition that fits his evidence. That is why the belief is epistemically justified. Second, suspension of judgment is the fitting attitude for each of us toward the proposition that an even number of ducks exists, since our evidence makes it equally likely that the number is odd. Neither belief nor disbelief is epistemically justified when our evidence is equally balanced. And third, when it comes to the proposition that sugar is sour, our gustatory experience makes disbelief the fitting attitude. Such experiential evidence epistemically justifies disbelief.

My problem here isn’t that anything strikes me as false — it’s just that I don’t see that justification has been illuminated by the connection to ‘fitting the evidence’. I don’t feel like I have a better antecedent grip on what the evidence is, and how to tell what fits it, than I do on what is justified. Conee and Feldman go on to observe that various views about justification are inconsistent with evidentialism, because, e.g., they have the implication that only a responsibly formed belief is justified, but some beliefs that are not responsibly formed fit the evidence. One needn’t think this, though; perhaps what fits the evidence is what one would do if responsible. Or, certain reliabilist views will have the implication that Bonjour’s clairvoyant character has justified beliefs; this too can be rendered consistent with the letter of evidentialism by allowing that external facts about reliability play a role in what evidence one has (or, less plausibly, which attitude fits a given body of evidence). A commitment to evidentialism per se doesn’t seem to tell you much.

A theory of justification, it seems, ought to be illuminating, in the sense that it should explain justification in terms of states and relations that are antecedently well-understood. (As indicated last post, however, I don’t think this constraint implies that the stuff on the right-hand-side need always be non-epistemic.)

Tags: connee and feldman, epistemology, evidentialism, internalism, justification

I’m starting work on a new project on epistemic justification. I’m trying to begin by laying out various perceived or actual desiderata for theories of epistemic justification. Here’s one, laid out in Alvin Goldman’s classic paper, “What is Justified Belief?”: a theory of justification should give necessary and sufficient conditions in non-epistemic terms. We could call this a “naturalistic reduction” constraint. Goldman writes:

The term ‘justified’, I presume, is an evaluative term, a term of appraisal. Any correct definition or synonym of it would also feature evaluative terms. I assume that such definitions or synonyms might be given, but I am not interested in them. I want a set of substantive conditions that specify when a belief is justified. Compare the moral term ‘right’. This might be defined in other ethical terms or phrases, a task appropriate to metaethics. The task of normative ethics, by contrast, is to state substantive conditions for the rightness of actions. Normative ethics tries to specify non-ethical conditions that determine when an action is right. A familiar example is act-utilitarianism, which says an action is right if and only if it produces, or would produce, at least as much net happiness as any alternative open to the agent. These necessary and sufficient conditions clearly involve no ethical notions. Analogously, I want a theory of justified belief to specify in non-epistemic terms when a belief is justified. This is not the only kind of theory of justifiedness one might seek, but it is one important kind of theory and the kind sought here.

I am not sure I feel the motivation for this constraint. I can certainly see why we might not be satisfied by a theory of justification that is circular (justification is justification) or otherwise uninformative (justified belief is belief that is epistemically good), but barring all epistemic notions from the right-hand-side seems like a pretty strong constraint. But perhaps I’ve misunderstood Goldman’s motivation here? Is the naturalistic reduction constraint motivated by something other than informativeness?

Tags: alvin goldman, justification, naturalism, reliabilism

Benjamin Jarvis and I have been working for some time now on a book manuscript on mental content, rationality, and the epistemology of philosophy. I posted a TOC of our first draft last summer. Since then, we’ve received some helpful comments from reviewers, and have revised extensively; we now have a full new draft, which we feel ready to share with the public. If you’re interested, you can download the large (2.3 MB, 331 page) pdf here. Comments and suggestions are extremely welcome.

I’m including a table of contents of the new draft in this post, to better give an idea of what we’re up to.

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Tags: apriority, epistemology, intuition, modal epistemology, rationalism, rationality, the rules of thought, thought experiments

Suppose that Katie is sitting out in the sun. Here are two propositions:

(1) It is sunny.

(2) Jonathan is wearing glasses or Jonathan is not wearing glasses.

It’s pretty plausible to develop the case in such a way that each of (1) and (2) would be rational for Katie to believe, and irrational for her to disbelieve. Why is it rational for Katie to believe (1), and irrational for her to disbelieve it? Because of various experiences she is having, like the way the sky looks, and the way her skin feels. (Obviously.) Why is it rational for her to believe (2), and irrational for her to disbelieve it? Now that’s a more interesting question. (Under some circumstances, Katie might be rational in accepting (2) in part because of her perceptual experience — for instance, if she can see that I am wearing glasses. We stipulate that she doesn’t know, or have any reason to believe, that I am or am not.) One answer that seems to be reasonably widely held is that, in just the same way that the rationality of (1) is explained by Katie’s perceptual experience, the rationality of (2) is explained by her intuitive experience. I think that this is a very bad answer, and in this post, I’ll press an analogy that I hope will make you think this answer very bad too.

If the rationality of (2) depends on Katie’s intuitions, then, if she lacked the relevant intuitions, she would no longer suffer rational pressure to accept (2). But that’s crazy. Imagine Katie’s stupid counterpart, Dummy, who does not have any intuitions about (2). It’s rational for Dummy to accept (2), and irrational for her to reject it, just like it is for Katie. The difference between Katie and Dummy is, Katie’s intuitions help her to see what she has reason to accept. Dummy is blind to her rational obligations. Dummy doesn’t escape rational obligations just by lacking intuitions. We can take it a step further, and imagine yet another counterpart, Crazy, who has the intuition that (2) is false, or even necessarily false. Would it be rational for Crazy to deny (2)? Definitely not. The rational thing for Crazy to do would be to reject her crazy intuition and accept (2). So the fact that (2) is rational for Katie does not depend on her intuitions.

This point is very obvious in the moral domain.

Dick has promised his shy friend to speak on his behalf to the woman he loves, but breaks the promise, deciding instead to woo the woman in question for himself. Our confident judgment that Dick acts immorally does not depend in any way on our assessment of his moral sensibilities. Dick may be a moral imbecile, who lacks sensitivity, even at the intuitive level, to his moral requirements. His failure to intuit in accordance with his duties to his friend constitute a moral shortcoming, and they do not by any means exempt him from said duties. Dick may even have had the intuition that betraying his friend was the correct action; still, that don’t make it right!

Nobody thinks that Dick escapes his moral obligations by failing to have the relevant intuitions, or even by having contrary ones. So nobody should think that of Katie, either.

Tags: intuition, morality, rationality

According to David Lewis’s classic paper, “Scorekeeping in a Language Game,” conversations, like sporting matches, have scores, which characterize the current situation, and rules, which interact with scores to determine what is permissible. The score of a baseball game includes the number of runs scored, an indication of which team is batting, the number of outs, balls, strikes, etc. (Lewis characterizes baseball scores as ordered septuples; in fact, they’re more complicated. Lewis’s baseball scores leave out, e.g., the batting order, which pitchers have already appeared in the game, and perhaps most egregiously, who is on which bases.) An example of a baseball rule, in Lewis’s sense, is that if a the score includes three balls, if the pitcher throws a ball, the score is updated by resetting the count, putting the batter on first base, updating other runners and the run total as necessary, as making the next member of the lineup the batter. This is a rule that tells you what happens to the score when a particular event occurs; there are also rules that tell you what is permissible, given the score. You may not come up to bat if you’re in the lineup and it is not your turn.

In a language games, scores will include contextual parameters like who is speaking, what is presupposed, what is salient, etc. There are rules that tell you what is permissible, given the score, and there are rules that govern the updating of scores. These sometimes interact, as when the score is accommodated to permit a conversational move. For example, there’s a rule that say I’m only allowed to use the definite article “the cat” when there is a uniquely salient cat. But if there’s not one that was already salient — if the score didn’t already indicate a uniquely salient cat — my utterance can cause an updating of the score, to make it permissible. If I say “I’d better go home because the cat is hungry,” the score is updated to make my cat at home the uniquely salient one.

This feature of conversational games, Lewis says, marks a difference between conversations and sporting events.

There is one big difference between baseball score and conversational score. Suppose the batter walks to first base after only three balls. His behavior would be correct play if there were four balls rather than three. That’s just too bad – his behavior does not at all make it the case that there were four balls and his behavior is correct. Baseball has no rule of accommodation to the effect that if a fourth ball is required to make correct the play that occurs, then that very fact suffices to change the score so that straightway there are four balls.

I’m not sure Lewis is right about this. Of course he’s right that you don’t get a walk just by trotting along to first base, but I’m not sure that’s because there’s no accommodation in play. What, plausibly, would happen in a Major League game where a batter tossed his bat aside and jogged to first base after ball three? The umpire would call him back. That’s a baseball move too; that’s what the umpire is supposed to do, and it’s surely what he would do. And there’s plausibly a baseball rule that says that when the umpire says you’re still at bat and have three balls, the score is updated to make that the case. If the umpire stood idly by and let the batter take first base, I think that might well make it the case that he got a walk. That’s part of why bad calls suck so much; they make themselves true. After this play, there were only two outs in the inning, even though, had the umpire performed correctly, there would have been three. (To deny this would be to say that there were four outs in that inning — or that Melky Cabrera’s subsequent apparent plate appearance was illusory, and that his turn was skipped in the lineup.)

This happened pretty dramatically in an infamous college football game between Colorado and Missouri. The football score, in Lewis’s sense, will include what down it is. And failure to convert on fourth down means you lose possession. But in this game, the officials miscounted the downs, and nobody noticed until afterward, when Colorado scored a touchdown on ‘fifth down’, which had been described by the officials as fourth down. The officials got it wrong, obviously. But, I think, they didn’t get it wrong in the sense of saying something false; they got it wrong by making the wrong thing the case. It really was fourth down, and there really was a touchdown.

So I think, contra Lewis, that football scores and baseball scores can accommodate, in more or less the same way that conversational scores can. (There’s no doubt it’s easier to do in the case of conversational scores.)

Tags: baseball, david lewis, football, scorekeeping

I spent the last week at the APA Pacific in San Diego. I have several topics inspired there that I’m hoping to write up quick blog posts about, including some philosophical and nonphilosophical ones. In general, I think I’m going to start using this blog for a bit more extraphilosophy content. I’ll start that not-right-now, though, because first I want to write up a reaction Brian Talbot’s talk, An Argument for Old-Fashioned Intuition Pumping (pdf link).

Brian was defending the traditional philosophical project of investigation into extra-mentalist subject matters, and arguing that the best way to do this involves heavy reliance on intuitions. His main focus was on the appropriate conditions for measuring such intuitions, but my main point of departure comes earlier, in the suggestion that traditional armchair philosophy must or should rely on intuitions in any interesting sense. Brian makes a stark contrast between intuitions and what he calls ‘reasoned-to judgments’. Anything reasoned to is, Brian says, no intuition. I disagree, but let’s allow the stipulation. The question is whether we have any special reason to care about intuitions in Brian’s sense. Brian says we do: his argument is roughly this: a reasoned-to judgment that p is not itself evidence for p; rather, it reflects the evidence upon which the reasoning is based. So we should, when investigating the evidence for p, look to the evidence on which any reasoning is based; in the relevant cases, this must be intuition.

From this methodological stance, Brian makes some fairly sweeping claims about philosophical methodology and experimental philosophy, emphasizing the need to study intuitions directly, isolating them from any influence by reasoning. This, to my mind, is a rather bizarre idea. Good reasoning, in my view, is at the center of good philosophy. So I’m pretty suspicious of any approach to methodology that wants to marginalize reasoning.

In the Q&A, I raised something like this point. I pointed out that, at least so far as Brian had said, it was open for the defender of traditional philosophical methods to deny that intuitions play the important starting-point role that Brian articulated; perhaps reasoning is ultimately where the action is. Brian’s response was effectively that reasoning must have starting points, and those starting points are intuitions. But reasoning, in general, need not have starting points; sometimes, good reasoning can proceed from the null set of premises. Another audience member raised the apt example of a reductio.

Brian’s response to this was effectively to allow that there might be some philosophical knowledge achievable in this way, but that the strategy would extend only to tautologies. Insofar, then, as philosophers are interested in establishing more than just tautologies, one will need intuitions as starting points. Someone following my strategy, Brian said, will not count as engaging in the traditional project he intends of substantive investigation into extramentalist subject matters.

Now I don’t know what exactly Brian means by ‘tautology’, but it seems to me that there are two ways one can go, either of which looks fine. If tautologies are limited to, e.g., obvious logical truths, then there is no reason to accept that good reasoning, without intuitions, can yield only tautologies. For good reasoning need not be limited to logical reasoning. I think that one can reason, for instance, from ‘S knows that p’ to ‘p’; this kind of reasoning can underwrite the knowledge, from no premises, that knowledge is factive. And I don’t see why this couldn’t extend to all of that philosophy which is plausibly a priori. If, on the other hand, Talbot wants to call claims like these tautologies, then it’ll just turn out that philosophers sometimes discover interesting tautologies.

Tags: experimental philosophy, intuition, Philosophy, rationalism

Suppose somebody has a false intuition about an a priori matter. Is she justified in believing its content? Many plausible answers, of course, will begin with “it depends…”. On what does it depend?

Ernie Sosa thinks that among the things upon which it depends is whether the false intuition derives from “some avoidably defective way”; such errors constitute “faults, individual flaws, or defects.” (I think Sosa means these two quoted bits to be approximately equivalent, or at any rate, to apply together in the relevant cases.) Sosa thinks this is what is going on when somebody follows her strong inclination to affirm the consequent, inferring from q and (if p, q) to p. By contrast, “the false intuitions involved in deep paradoxes are not so clearly faults, individual flaws, or defects. For example, it may be that they derive from our basic make-up, shared among humans generally, a make-up that serves us well in an environment such as ours on the surface of our planet.”

So Sosa’s line is that false intuitions do not justify when they derive from faults, flaws, and defects, but do justify when they derive from our basic make-up and are generally shared among humans. I’m suspicious that this distinction will hold up to scrutiny. I think there may be an equivocation on the relevant kinds of ‘faults,’ ‘flaws,’ and ‘defects’ going on. In one sense, of course, one is flawed by virtue of being incorrect; beliefs are supposed to be true, so if one goes wrong, that constitutes some sort of defect. This, of course, cannot be what Sosa has in mind. Instead, he seems to be imagining flaws as deviations from some sort of imperfect but generally effective strategy for getting around in the world. This is, perhaps, the more ordinary sense of a defect. My computer, even when it is working properly, will occasionally crash; a tendency to crash constitutes a defect only when it is not working properly. And maybe there is a good reason why humans ought to have tendencies to accept, for instance, naive set theory.

The problem for this line is that there is also plausibly sound reason for humans to have tendencies to commit more obvious errors, like affirming the consequent. Given the environments we face, having a tendency to affirm the consequent will help us to recognize patterns and confirm hypotheses; inductive reasoning generally looks a bit like affirming the consequent. Similarly with other standard errors; they derive from heuristics that are generally helpful.

So we face a dilemma for upholding Sosa’s distinction. Do we say that these errors — these false judgments arising from generally good heuristics — constitute defects or not? If not, then they are relevantly like Sosa thinks the intuitive premises involved in deep paradoxes are. If so, what makes them so, and why should they not apply also to the cases of the paradoxes?

Consider three people. First, the possible über-rational being who looks at me the way the fallacious gambler now looks to me. She describes us both as defective; as failing to live up to the standards of rationality. She can see that I am not tempted by one particular error (the gambler’s fallacy) — but also that I regularly commit another (fallacy X), and have some attraction to a third (naive set theory). Second, myself: I think of the fallacious gambler as defective, but of myself and my peers, I think our attraction to naive set theory as nondefective; my more ignorant peers who have not studied philosophy, I even consider justified. (We will suppose I have Ernie’s views.) Third, the gambler himself, who accepts his characteristic fallacy and naive set theory alike, and sees no defect in any of us. He considers himself justified in both cases.

All parties agree that the gambler is wrong; he proceeds in a defective way inconsistent with intuitive justification. But Ernie thinks I’m importantly different from him. Ernie thinks that I am not defective, but merely have some tendencies to affirm falsehoods that derive from my general human nature. Our rational superior, presumably, thinks of me as defective in just the same way as the gambler, but to a lesser degree. Does Ernie give any reason we should think her wrong about this?

Tags: ernest sosa, intuition, rationality