Sophomoric Non-sequiturs

Directed Reading Update

2008-01-10T17:14:00.001-05:00

Well, I've gone and done it.

In my meeting with Brandom today, I mentioned the thoughts I've been having on justification and knowledge, and so now my directed reading is on knowledge attribution vs knowledge possession. Of course, neither Brandom nor I are current in epistemology literature, so this should be fun.

I had intended to do the reading on the exchange he and McDowell have been having since 1995 in PPR, but I opened my big mouth. Oh well.

So, for the next few months, it seems that lots of posts here will be about knowledge and justification. Sorry.

In other news, I'm trying to get a post together about my paper for Gupta and why he hated it. It should make for good reading. Perhaps I'll have that up in the next week. Brandom's Woodbridge Lectures are being given here tomorrow and Saturday, so that will take up most of this weekend.

Justification and Knowledge. Two Approaches.

2008-01-09T13:08:00.000-05:00

One of the papers I read for the grad conference was on the justification component of knowledge.

The central idea was that all beliefs were minimally justified. Because we don't believe things we don't take to be true or that we don't believe we have reasons for, this is enough to justify our beliefs. Common counter examples, like someone who believes something because they are hypnotized or are hallucinating were claimed to simply not be relevant to this because these examples are not about normal beliefs.

A couple ideas. First, the distinction between rational and justified beliefs is being overlooked. It's not enough that your belief be rational to be justified. In the infamous fake barn county example, you rationally believe there to be a barn in front of you, but you are not justified in believing there to be a barn.
Second, what is this use of minimally justified good for? If we're going to be deflationists about justification, what do we get? Suddenly every true belief counts as knowledge (as long as it's a "normal" belief). So, what matters now is determining which are the "normal" beliefs. This seems to have all the same problems as determining which are the "justified" beliefs.

The paper made me think of a paper I wrote for the Metaphysics and Epistemology core class my first year of grad school. I wrote the paper for Gupta trying to defend the idea that beliefs did not have to be justified to count as knowledge. The premise, if I remember correctly, was that restricting knowledge to only those beliefs which were true and justified was only a way to impugne the person holding the belief, not the belief itself. If you hold a belief that is true, I argued, you know something. You might still be irrational or unjustified in holding that belief, and so you might not be justified in claiming that knowledge, but that doesn't mean you don't know it.

What makes justification seem necessary for knowledge, I tried to argue, is that we conflate the problems of what counts as having knowledge with what conditions must be met to attribute knowledge. And what you need to attribute knowledge to others has nothing to do with their own justification and everything to do with yours. You need to be justified in believing that what they belive is true and that they believe it. Claims such as "So-and-so didn't really know that I killed Jones because they believed I killed Jones because a Psychic told them." really just is a claim that they shouldn't have counted as having knowledge by someone otherwise unsure of the truth of the claim because a psychic isn't good evidence that it's true. But if I killed Jones, I don't need so-and-so's evidence. I have my own. And if they believe I killed Jones, they know. If they're sure of their bad evidence (the psychic), they know.

Some people (I think Gupta did) counter that we shouldn't reward bad evidence-gatherers by conferring knowledge to them. But, again. The claim is not that you can always be taken to have knowledge when you aren't justified in your belief. The claim is that you can know something and not be justified in claiming to know it. The believer in psychics is such a case. Why? Because we don't accept psychics as evidence for truth. So, though they might know it, we don't have reason to believe they know it, because we don't have good evidence that it's true. But if I know it's true for other reasons - like the belief is about me - I know that they know. I can say to myself, or my accomplice who also knows "Sally knows - she's onto us!" And when my accomplice becomes concerned, I say "Well, she knows, but no one will believe her. Her knowledge isn't justified so she's not entitled to claim she knows. We need not worry." If I told someone else that Sally knew who killed the person, I would only be justified in making that claim if I also gave them reason to think that Sally's belief were true. I don't see why I'd have to make them think that Sally was justified in her belief.

Another reply might be that if my belief is only true by chance, I shouldn't count as knowing. But this only seems defensible if we think that coming to know something should always be repeatable. It might be that I have a true belief that there is a barn in front of me. But if I'm in fake barn county, most epistemologists want to deny that I know there's a barn in front of me. But why? Sure, this is the only barn in the county. It's a fluke that I'm in front of this one and not another. But if it's true and I believe it to be true, then why can't I know it? There might become reasons to question my justification in the claim. For example, if I know I'm in fake barn country, suddenly others can't take my testimony as evidence that my claim is true, and so will refuse to confer knowledge on me. But, if I walk up to the barn, open the door and jump in the hay, we'll have that evidence that my belief was true. We can then say "Well, she did know after all. But it could easily have been that she hadn't known." I see no problem with this.

So, keeping in mind the difference between restrictions on having knowledge and being counted as having knowledge, we can see that justification only counts for the later. You can know something as long as you have true beliefs.

Anyway, I'd have to look at the paper again. I'm sure it was terrible and I remember Gupta didn't like it, though I think he appreciated the gutsy topic.

Reviewing, It's a Tough Job, But Someone's Got to Do It.

2007-12-21T00:11:00.000-05:00

Ah, it's that time again.

Time to review submissions for the Pitt CMU grad conference. I have two this year, and upon scanning them, they look far less depressing than the ones I've read in the last two years.

But I won't get my hopes up just yet.

And so, dear audience of one (two?) I ask: Do you think that graduate student submissions to conferences are generally poor? If so, why? I've probably read 6 papers in the past two years and then scanned these two. The six I have read were all either unreadable or uninteresting. About half are unable to properly format papers for blind review and so give away their identity in some way.

Anyway, these two papers this year are both on epistemology, which is interesting because... well, it's not my strongest suit. I generally get papers on philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and some early analytic history stuff. Stuff that I tell people I do when they ask at department functions where I have to have polite conversation of a generally superficial manner with people I don't know well. I'm looking forward to reading these epistemology papers, though. Especially because I'm working on this paper for Gupta.

So, I have to have these reviewed by the 10th. I resolve to post about my thoughts on the topics of the papers (not the papers themselves, of course) before or around that date. It'll give me something to spur me along.

Also, Gupta update: ~7000 words. expected date of completion ~ Dec 26th.

Upcoming Deadline

2007-12-11T20:33:00.000-05:00

I know that no one reads this (yet?) but, the deadline for submissions for papers to the Pitt-CMU Graduate Philosophy Conference is December 15th.

The keynote speaker is Bas Van Fraasen, and you can check out more details here.

Quick Thoughts on Gupta's Reply to Skepticism

2007-12-11T20:09:00.000-05:00

In order, then, to show that the skeptical attack on the commonsense view is ungrounded, Gupta attempts to show that the skeptical view is an inadmissible one.[1] A skeptical view, according to Gupta, has the fatal flaw of rigidity[2]. The example Gupta focuses on is solipsism. Irrespective of the series of experiences the solipsist suffers, the solipsist view never shifts according to Gupta. The solipsist cannot, as a result of experience, find themselves rationally compelled to hold a non-solipsistic view. On Gupta's view, because of this, the solipsist cannot use experience to bring her view into synch with the way that world is. The purpose of experience is to gradually shape our view to be more and more like the world, so it must be legitimate to restrict possible starting views to only those which can be shaped into closer and closer approximations of a true picture of the world. This seems to be the motivation for rejecting some views as admissible starting views for the revision process. Solipsism is not an admissible starting view, then on Gupta's account, because it is rigid in a way that prevents it from being revised by experience into a non-solipsistic view.

The problem, as I see it is, that there is an implicit claim here that a solipsistic picture of the world is not a true one. If it were true, or at least possibly true, then it is unclear that it would be a fault of solipsistic views that they cannot be revised by experience to non-solipsistic views. This might not be a concern to Gupta, but it certainly should be concerning. After all, if the skeptic doesn’t get to beg the question, surely the non-skeptic should not be able to do so either. In order to reply to the skeptic, we need something more than a dogmatic assertion that we are right, and if the skeptical view is accepted, no revision could get her to the truth (i.e. our commonsense view). We need to show that either there is a non-question-begging way to reject skeptical views as starting views, or good reason to think that we can move from skeptical views to our commonsense view. Unfortunately, I'm afraid Gupta has thusfar failed to give us a viable way to take the first option and the second seems like a losing fight, or at least has been for more than a thousand years since Sextus.

To be continued.

[1] Gupta, 154

[2] A view v is rigid iff, for all sequences of possible experiences E and all sequences of views V and all numbers n, if V is the revision sequence generated by E with v as the initial view, then v is fundamentally equivalent to Vn. Fn 57

Armchair Philosophy vs Experimental Philosophy

2007-12-10T15:52:00.000-05:00

Interestingly, the NYTimes published an article in Sunday's NYTimes Magazine by Kwame Anthony Appiah, a professor at Princeton. Research by Pittsburgh's (HPS) own Edouard Machery was included in the piece. It seems that the NYTimes has noticed that we Philosophers are a "quarrelsome group" and are (shock, horror) doing experiments to bolster our armchair speculations. Most of the article focuses on questions of intentionality and reference posed to subjects in thought experiments conducted by Philosophers.

My favorite line? "Philosophers have always been wonderfully confident in their ability to say what “it would be natural to say.” This confidence, experiments show, can sometimes lead us astray."

I think I'll still stick to the "it would be natural to say". I'm with Hume; the vulgar man might still be right., but he's still vulgar. Thankfully, Appiah seems to agree.

You can read the article, Idea Lab with a free NYTimes online subscription.

Wrong on Metaphysics, Wrong on Ethics, Wrong for America.

2007-12-08T16:06:00.000-05:00

This is about the funniest thing I've seen in months.

Thanks to Crooked Timber for bringing this to my attention.

Edited: now it's on Leiter, too. Philosophical wildfire, this is.

Oh God. Another Blog.

2007-12-07T14:11:00.000-05:00

When will I learn? I start blogs, I update them for awhile. I stop posting. Eventually I kill them.

Then I start another.
I might never learn.

But, here goes nothing, kids. I'm hoping to keep this blog focused on Philosophy only. By forcing myself to scribble down things here every few days, I am hoping to have some constant writing to keep myself focused. This means, if all goes according to plan, there will be no recipes, or pictures of cats, or rants about annoying drivers, or probably even about students on this blog.

Of course, this means that about two people will read it. But that's probably for the best.
If I find that I just MUST put pictures of my cats up on the internets (because you know how I am) I'll make another blog to fill that need.