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.

My new paper: Ignorance and Presuppositions

I hope to submit it soon; any comments would be very welcome.

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.)

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?

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.

THE RULES OF THOUGHT: A RATIONALIST PROPOSAL

Part I: Propositions, Fregean Sense, and Rational Modality

Chapter One: Objective Rules of Thought

§1.1. Philosophical Anti-Exceptionalism

§1.2. Pure Rational Thinking

§1.3. Philosophical Traditionalism

§1.4. Experiential Rationalism

§1.5. The Intersubjective Validity and Objectivity of Rational Inquiry

Chapter Two: A Fregean Theory of Propositional Attitudes

§2.1. Propositions as Structures of Concepts

§2.2. Concepts

§2.3. “Use” and Representational Content

§2.4. The Language of Thought

§2.5. Conclusive Rational Relations

§2.6. Trouble From the Preface Paradox?

§2.7. Proof and Refutation

§2.8. Fregean Senses

§2.9. An Alternative Theory of Fregean Senses

§2.10. Distinguishing Senses of ‘Rational Commitment’

§2.11. Realizing Propositional Attitudes

§2.12. Rules and Rationality

§2.13. Conclusive Rationality and Defeasibility

Chapter Three: A Theory of Rational Modality

§3.1. Rational Entailment

§3.2. Rational Possibility and Other Family Notions

§3.3. Rational and Metaphysical Entailment

§3.4. Coherence and Rational Modality

§3.5. Rationally Possible Scenarios and Truth Conditions

§3.6. Rational Entailment and Revision

§3.7. R-Possibility, ‘Epistemic Possibility,’ and Neo-Russellianism

§3.8. The Rationality Version of Frege’s Puzzle

§3.9. R-Possibility and Frege’s Puzzle

§3.10. Kripke’s Puzzle about Belief and Frege’s Puzzle

§3.11. David Chalmers’s “Epistemic Possibilities”

§3.12. Against Two-Dimensionalism

Chapter Four: The Psychological Realization of Fregean Sense

§4.1. Ontology

§4.2. Quinean Revisability

§4.3. Harman on Bonjour

§4.4. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”

§4.5. The Psychological Reality of Rational Entailment

§4.6. Our Theory of Psychological Reality Contrasted: Peacocke

§4.7. Our Theory of Psychological Reality Contrasted: Davidson

§4.8. Our Theory of the Psychological Reality of Rational Entailment Recapitulated

§4.9. General Second-Order Inferential Competencies

§4.10. Theory-Building

§4.11. Indeterminate Rational Relations

§4.12. Kripke and Proper Names

§4.13. Indeterminate Singular Concepts

§4.14. Fregean Sense, Descriptivism, and Conceptual Role

§4.15. Non-intentional Rule-Following

Chapter Five: The Sociability of a Fregean Theory

§5.1. Social Anti-individualism

§5.2. Analyticity and Social Anti-Individualism

§5.3. The Publicity of Propositions and Concepts

§5.4. Social Fregeanism

§5.5. Deferential and Non-deferential Concept Possession

§5.6. Proper Names Again

§5.7. Timothy Williamson on Conceptual Truths

§5.8. Conceptual Refinement

§5.9. Socially Externalizing Rationality

§5.10. Propositional Attitude Ascriptions and Testimony

§5.11. A Naïve Neo-Russellian Theory of Propositional Attitude Ascriptions

Chapter Six: Fregean Sense First

§6.1. The Minimalist Explanation

§6.2. Inherent and Essential Rational Relations

§6.3. Reductive Strategies

§6.4. Reduction, Factorization, and Analysis

§6.5. Boghossian and Concept Possession

§6.6. Peacocke and Metasemantics

§6.7. Wright, Enoch & Schechter, and Pragmatism

§6.8. Field and Evaluativism

Part II: Rationality, Apriority, and Philosophy

Chapter Seven: A Theory of the A Priori

§7.1. Apriority and Propositional Justification

§7.2. An Alternative Approach: Albert Casullo

§7.3. A Priori Transitions in Thought

§7.4. Experience in a Warranting Role

§7.5. Experience and D-Justification

§7.6. Apriority and R-Necessity

§7.7. Apriority and Empirical Indefeasibility*

§7.8. Is Apriority Homogeneous?

§7.9. Is Our Theory of the A priori Vacuous?

§7.10. The Nature of Experience

Chapter Eight: A Priori Philosophy: Responses to Objections

§8.1. A Posteriori Knowledge of A Priori Faculties

§8.2. Limiting the Challenge: Non-Basic Methods?

§8.3. Knowledge and Knowledge of Knowledge

§8.4. A Priori Reliability of A Priori Methods

§8.5. Philosophy and Knowledge of Philosophical Abilities

§8.6. Thought Experiments and the Quotidian

§8.7. Perceptual Faculties in Imagination

§8.8. Peeking as Self-Experimentation?

§8.9. Misleading “A Priori” Feelings

Chapter Nine: The Content of Thought-Experiment Judgments

§9.1. Formalizing Thought-Experiment Arguments: Necessity?

§9.2. Timothy Williamson’s Counterfactual Formulation

§9.3. Against the Counterfactual Formulation

§9.4. Attempted Patches

§9.5. Thought-Experiments as Fictions

§9.6. Fictions Fixing Content

§9.7. Disanalogies between Thought-Experiments and Fictions?

§9.8. Reasoning and Thought-Experiments

§9.9. Other Argumentative Roles for Thought-Experiments

§9.10. Non-Argumentative Roles for Thought-Experiments

Chapter Ten: The Epistemology of Thought-Experiment Judgments

§10.1. Content and Inferential Competencies

§10.2. Reliability and Knowledge about Imaginary Scenarios

§10.3. Two Points

§10.4. Knowledge of Necessity

§10.5. Categorization and Apriority

§10.6. On Conceptual Analysis

Chapter Eleven: Rational Imagination and Modal Epistemology

§11.1. Imagination as Supposition

§11.2. Imagination and Possibility

§11.3. Coherent Imagination

§11.4. Rational Imagination

§11.5. Defeasible Inference in Imagination

§11.6. R-Modality and Metaphysical Modality

§11.7. The Coherent Impossible

§11.8. From Rational to Metaphysical Possibility

§11.9. Moral Theorems

§11.10. Mathematical Truths

§11.11. A Priori Knowledge of Rational Modality

§11.12. Overstipulation

Appendix A: The Misidentification Response

Appendix B: Natural Kinds

Part III: Intuitions and Philosophy

Chapter Twelve: The Nature of Intuitions

§12.1. Eliminativism

§12.2. Reductionism

§12.3. The Robust Picture of Intuitions

§12.4. Williamson on Phenomenology

§12.5. Earlenbaugh and Molyneux

§12.6. Reductionism Without Insignificance

Chapter Thirteen: Against Strong Experiential Rationalism

§13.1. Strong Experiential Rationalism

§13.2. Intuitions and Evidence

§13.3. Evidence Concerning the Psychological

§13.4. Blind Irrationality

§13.5. What You Can’t See, Can’t Rationally Constrain You?

§13.6. The Intersubjective Validity of Rational Norms

§13.7. The Objectivity of Rational Norms

§13.8. Reliabilist Strong Experiential Rationalism

§13.9. Against Phenomenal Conservatism

§13.10. Against General Foundationalism

§13.11. Against Subjective Foundationalism

§13.12. Intuitions and Evidence Revisited

§13.13. Intuitions and Purely Rational Inquiry

Chapter Fourteen: Intuition as a Source of Evidence?

§14.1. A Simple Argument

§14.2. Blind Irrationality Reconsidered

§14.3. Epistemology and Psychology

§14.4. Apriority and the New Evil Demon Problem

§14.5. Perceptual Justification and the Problem of the Speckled Hen

§14.6. Failure of Justified belief

§14.7. Intuiting and Perceiving Compared

§14.8. Intuiting and Perceiving Contrasted

§14.9. The Benacerraf-Field Challenge

Chapter Fifteen: Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Methodology

§15.1. Positive Experimental Philosophy

§15.2. Negative Experimental Philosophy

§15.3. The Use of Intuitions in Philosophy

§15.4. The Critique Generalized?

§15.5. Epistemology and Methodology

§15.6. Traditional Methodology and Experimental Philosophy

§15.7. Philosophy and the Quotidian