Philosophy Publications and Drafts in Progress Online (see published papers only)
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I have completed a draft of a new short discussion piece on Michael Blome-Tillmann’s (2009) Mind paper, “Knowledge and Presuppositions”. It is essentially a development of this blog post from a year and a half ago. (I’d forgotten about it, to be honest — I rediscovered it as I finished drafting.)
My new paper: Ignorance and Presuppositions
I hope to submit it soon; any comments would be very welcome.
discuss » Keywords: contextualism, david lewis, elusive knowledge, knowledge, Michael Blome-Tillmann, presuppositionI’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.)
In Defense of a Kripkean Dogma, with Ishani Maitra and Brain Weatherson, penultimate draft: 22 February, 2010, forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
In “Against Arguments from Reference”, Ron Mallon, Edouard Machery, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich (hereafter, MMNS) argue that recent experiments concerning reference undermine various philosophical arguments that presuppose the correctness of the causal-historical theory of reference. We will argue three things in reply. First, the experiments in question—concerning Kripke’s Gödel/Schmidt example—don’t really speak to the dispute between descriptivism and the causal-historical theory; though the two theories are empirically testable, we need to look at quite different data than MMNS do to decide between them. Second, the Gödel/Schmidt example plays a different, and much smaller, role in Kripke’s argument for the causal-historical theory than MMNS assume. Finally, and relatedly, even if Kripke is wrong about the Gödel/Schmidt example—indeed, even if the causal-historical theory is not the correct theory of names for some human languages—that does not, contrary to MMNS’s claim, undermine uses of the causal-historical theory in philosophical research projects.
Experimental Philosophy and Apriority, Draft of 15 April, 2010
One of the more visible recent developments in philosophical methodology is the experimental philosophy movement. On its surface, the experimentalist challenge looks like a dramatic threat to the apriority of philosophy; ‘experimentalist’ is nearly antonymic with ‘aprioristic’. This appearance, I suggest, is misleading; the experimentalist critique is entirely unrelated to questions about the apriority of philosophical investigation. There are many reasons to resist the skeptical conclusions of negative experimental philosophers; but even if they are granted—even if the experimentalists are right to claim that we must do much more careful laboratory work in order legitimately to be confident in our philosophical judgments—the apriority of philosophy is unimpugned. The kinds of scientific investigation that experimental philosophers argue to be necessary involve merely enabling sensory experiences. Although they are not enabling in the sense of permitting concept acquisition, they are enabling in another epistemically significant way that is also consistent with the apriority of philosophy.
Is Imagination A Priori? Draft of 21 July, 2009. Will be subsumed into a longer piece.
Sometimes, we come to new knowledge via imaginative processes; plausibly, sometimes, such imagination plays an indispensably warranting role. Is such a role for imagination inconsistent with the apriority of our new knowledge? Stephen Yablo has argued that a certain kind of imaginative engagement, ‘peeking’, is relevantly like reliance on perceptual experience, and thus precludes apriority. I argue that Yablo’s case against the apriority of peeking is not compelling.
Rational Imagination and Modal Knowledge, with Benjamin Jarvis. Forthcoming in Nous.
How do we know what’s (metaphysically) possible and impossible? Kripke-Putnam considerations suggest that possibility is not merely a matter of (coherent) conceivability/imaginability. For example, we can coherently imagine that Hesperus and Phosphorus are distinct objects even though they are not possibly distinct. Despite this apparent problem, we suggest, nevertheless, that imagination plays an important role in an adequate modal epistemology. When we discover what is possible or what is impossible, we generally exploit important connections between what is possible and what we can coherently imagine.
Quantifiers, Knowledge, and Counterfactuals, forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
Many of the motivations in favor of contextualism about knowledge apply also to a contextualist approach to counterfactuals. I motivate and articulate such an approach, in terms of the context-sensitive ‘all cases’, in the spirit of David Lewis’s contextualist view about knowledge. The resulting view explains intuitive data, resolves a puzzle parallel to the skeptical paradox, and renders safety and sensitivity, construed as counterfactuals, necessary conditions on knowledge.
Explaining Away Intuitions, (2010) in Studia Philosophica Estonica, special issue on intuitions. Refer to published version, available here.
What is it to ‘explain away’ an intuition? Philosophers often attempt to explain intuitions away, but it is often unclear what the success conditions for their project consist in. I attempt to articulate these conditions, using several philosophical case studies as guides. I will conclude that explaining away intuitions is a more difficult task than has sometimes been appreciated; I also suggest, however, that the importance of explaining away intuitions has often been exaggerated.
Quantifiers and Epistemic Contextualism, Version of 25 May, 2010. Forthcoming in Philosophical Studies.
I defend a neo-Lewisean form of contextualism about knowledge attributions. Understanding the context-sensitivity of knowledge attributions in terms of the context-sensitivity of universal generalizations provides an appealing approach to knowledge. Among the virtues of this approach are solutions to the skeptical paradox and the Gettier problem. I respond to influential objections to Lewis’s account.
Knowing the Intuition and Knowing the Counterfactual, (2009) Philosophical Studies, 145(3), September 2009: 435-443. Please refer to published version here. For a Philosophical Studies book symposium on Timothy Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy. See also Williamson’s response here.
I criticize Timothy Williamson’s characterization of thought experiments on which the central judgments are judgments of contingent counterfactuals. The fragility of these counterfactuals makes them too easily false, and too difficult to know.
Dreaming, with Ernest Sosa. Forthcoming in The Oxford Companion to Consciousness.
Thought-Experiment Intuitions and Truth in Fiction, with Benjamin Jarvis. (2009) Philosophical Studies 142 (2), January 2009: 221-246. Please refer to published version, available online here.
What sorts of things are the intuitions generated via thought experiment? Timothy Williamson has responded to naturalistic skeptics by arguing that thought-experiment intuitions are judgments of ordinary counterfactuals. On this view, the intuition is naturalistically innocuous, but it has a contingent content and could be known at best a posteriori. We suggest an alternative to Williamson’s account, according to which we apprehend thought-experiment intuitions through our grasp on truth in fiction. On our view, intuitions like the Gettier intuition are necessarily true and knowable a priori. Our view, like Williamson’s, avoids naturalistic skepticism.
Scepticism and the Imagination Model of Dreaming. (2008) The Philosophical Quarterly, 58 (232), July 2008: 519–527 doi:10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.546.x Penultimate draft; please refer to published version, available online here.
Ernest Sosa has argued that the solution to dream skepticism lies in an understanding of dreams as imaginative experiences – when we dream, on this suggestion, we do not believe the contents of our dreams, but rather imagine them. Sosa rebuts skepticism thus: dreams don’t cause false beliefs, so my beliefs cannot be false, having been caused by dreams.
I argue that, even assuming that Sosa is correct about the nature of dreaming, belief in wakefulness on these grounds is epistemically irresponsible. The proper upshot of the imagination model, I suggest, is to recharacterize the way we think about dream skepticism: the skeptical threat is not, after all, that we have false beliefs. So even though dreams don’t involve false beliefs, they still pose a skeptical threat, which I elaborate.Intuitions and Begging the Question. Under Review. Version of 4 July, 2009.
What are philosophical intuitions? There is a tension between two intuitive criteria. On the one hand, many of our ordinary beliefs do not seem intuitively to be intuitions; this suggests a relatively restrictionist approach to intuitions. (A few attempts to restrict: intuitions must be noninferential, or have modal force, or abstract contents.) On the other hand, it is counterintuitive to deny a great many of our beliefs—including some that are inferential, transparently contingent, and about concrete things. This suggests a liberal conception of intuitions. I defend the liberal view from the objection that it faces intuitive counterexamples; central to the defense is a treatment of the pragmatics of ‘intuition’ language: we cite intuitions, instead of directly expressing our beliefs via assertion, when we are attempting to avoid begging questions against certain sorts of philosophical interlocutors.
Sosa on Virtues, Perception, and Intuition. Version of 19 January, 2009.
I critically evaluate Ernest Sosa’s (2007) contrast between intuitive justification and perceptual justification. I defend a competence-based approach to intuitive justification that is continuous with epistemic justification generally.