Comments for There is Some Truth in That

Comment on The Rules of Thought by There is Some Truth in That » Blog Archive » Rationality and Fregean Content

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:39:22 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

Comment on Presupposition and ‘Knows’ Contextualism by There is Some Truth in That » Blog Archive » Ignorance and Presuppositions

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 21:18:37 +0000

[...] (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 [...]

Comment on The Rules of Thought by Tristan Haze

Tristan Haze — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 01:49:24 +0000

Thanks for posting this. I wish I’d seen it earlier!

Comment on Fitting the Evidence by Trent Dougherty

Trent Dougherty — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 02:25:28 +0000

Just saw this. I think the key to your puzzlement, Jonathan, is etiological. They never took it to be illuminating apart from a theory of evidence. They were just taken aback that people were fairly nonchalantly offering responsibilist cases which had pretty clear evidentialist answers, which struck them as much simpler. They are amazed that people found the thesis controversial. They’ve made pretty clear what they take their theory of evidence to be and the view that’s supposed to be illuminating is the wider view, though they acknowledge that one wants a theory of epistemic support as well–which they also offer, and then they also would like to put it to work, in a theory of knowledge, which at least Rich does. The Rochester way is to really labor over the small stuff, the foundations, etc. We used to spend whole seminars on the opening words of an essay. Often, Earl would contemplate the title for some time. I persist in being amazed that people are still offering the same kinds of responsibilist cases as counter-examples to evidentialism. If you’re really interested in the topic, I do have a suggestion… :-) http://bit.ly/qHMmQV

Comment on Fitting the Evidence by Clayton

Clayton — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 18:27:29 +0000

Hi Jonathan,
Agreed!
There are lots of platitudinous sounding claims about j and e that I find in their work and never do I find these claims terribly helpful. Still, I think they are probably false. For example, compare three claims: (a) you may believe what fits the evidence
(b) you must not believe without sufficient evidence
(c) you must not believe without sufficient reason
Of these three the last seems most obvious. I would argue that whether there is suff reason depends both on reasons to believe and reasons not to believe. If reasons-not do not supervene upon a subject’s evidence, we can accept c and b while rejecting a. Take the view on which you shouldn’t believe p if you cannot properly treat p as a reason for action or for belief. If p isn’t properly included in deliberation, there is not sufficient reason to believe but the belief might fit the evidence. I take it that c and f either have to reject c or reject the idea that there are any epistemic norms of the sort I’m imagining that govern belief ( norms the satisfaction of which depend upon more than just relations of fit). Once this is clear, I think it is fair to ask why we should prefer their apparent platitude a to c.