Fallibilisms in Fantl/McGrath

We’re doing Fantl/McGrath in my grad seminar, and it is really great stuff–I’ve had a very high opinion of the book since it came out, but it is interesting to see how blown away the students have been by it. Very neat!

Anyway, the first chapter is about fallibilism, and I’ve been working on the distinction between fallibilism and infallibilism for a bit, finding it perplexing. And there is something really interesting here that I noted.

First some quick background. My interest arises because I’d like to see a characterization of fallibilism and its denial that are both exclusive and exhaustive, making every epistemic theory one or the other and not both. It used to seem simple to do so: one talked about entailing evidence and the failure of such, and that was that. But then along came the Cheap Infallibilisms: Disjunctivism in the theory of perception, the Williamsonian identification of evidence with knowledge, etc. (I’ll add an addendum that shows my own cheap version as well, one that doesn’t endorse E=K, but is built off a deduction theorem in epistemic logic. It’s very cool (perhaps, or in part because, trivial), I think, but you’ll have endure to the end to see it (or skip if you prefer)).

So usual construals of fallibilism fail the exclusive and exhaustive test, settling for a sufficient condition for fallibilism only. That’s fine if all you want to do is make sure you embrace the true view(!), but I want more. And I found something perplexing and interesting in F/M on this score, which I’ll report below the fold.

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Reminder: EPISTEME conference 8-10 June 2012

This is just to remind everyone of the 2012 Episteme conference that will be hosted by the Delft University of Technology and the 3TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology (www.ethicsandtechnology.eu).

The exciting theme of the conference is ‘Epistemological Problems of Privacy and Secrecy’, and the conference will take place June 8-June 10, 2012, in The Hague (the Netherlands). Confirmed speakers for this conference are:

  • John Hardwig
  • Alvin Goldman
  • Klemens Kappel
  • Peter Ludlow
  • Sanford Goldberg
  • Martijn Blaauw

The conference commentator-at-large is

  • Brian Leiter

 There is a call for papers (300 word abstracts) with a deadline of March 1st 2012. More information on the conference and the call for papers can be found on the conference homepage http://www.ethicsandtechnology.eu/subsite/epistemological_problems_of_privacy_and_secrecy/

If you have any queries, please email me at privacyandsecrecy2012@tudelft.nl

 
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Contextualism, Invariantism, and Linguistic Intuitions

My grad seminar this semester is on pragmatic encroachment–syllabus here, for those interested in what we are reading: Pragmatic Encroachment Seminar. Everything we are doing is stuff that gives me a reason to get up in the morning to do more epistemology, and I love getting to teach that kind of material!

This week we did chapters from Jason Stanley’s book Knowledge and Practical Interests, which is wonderful stuff! Got clear on the form of the view, from the programmatic proposal on page 89, where the idea is that the kind of invariantism Jason wants is one that claims four conditions necessary for knowledge and jointly sufficient (though I whine about the first condition, that knowledge of p requires that ~p is not a serious epistemic possibility, noting that any account which builds an account of epistemic possibility on top of the usual dual rule will find this condition introducing a hopeless circularity, as well as whining about the fact that there’s nothing here to address the Gettier problem).

And then we come to the arguments about costs and benefits of such a view, compared with contextualism, and indirectly with other views. The arguments concern a standard bank case, with Hannah the agent considering whether to go to the bank. Jason rightly notes the costs of his version of invariantism (noting that when the stakes shift higher between Thursday and Friday, his view might have to say that Hannah knew on Thursday that the bank is open on Saturdays, but didn’t know this on Friday). Jason tries to disarm this admittedly unintuitive result by showing that other views have other counterintuitive results. Especially, he wants to show that some standard versions of classical invariantism, which deny pragmatic encroachment, have unintuitive consequences.

The one I’ll remark on here is the one about what Jason reports reliabilists must say about fake barn country.

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Can we know what isn’t so?

It is widely agreed among epistemologists that the verb ‘knows’ is factive and that it is therefore impossible to know what isn’t so. Yet even this view has not gone unchallenged. Allan Hazlett has argued that there are strong reasons to reject the assumption that ‘knows’ is a factive verb.

Over at Experimental Philosophy, Wesley Buckwalter has a new post in which he reports a series of experiments that look in more detail at the kinds of cases Hazlett originally introduced. The results do show that people are sometimes willing to use the verb ‘knows’ with complement clauses that express false propositions, but they also point to a surprising new explanation of people’s tendency to speak in that way.

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Seventh Biennial RochesterGraduate Epistemology Conference

Announcing!

The Seventh Biennial Rochester Graduate Epistemology Conference
October 19-20, 2012

Keynote Speaker: Michael Huemer
(University of Colorado, Boulder)

Commentator: Richard Feldman
(University of Rochester)

Special Guest Speaker: Trent Dougherty
(Baylor University)

The philosophy department at the University of Rochester welcomes submissions in the field of analytic epistemology, broadly construed. We also welcome hybrid epistemology papers which are also (partially) in the fields of ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, or metaphysics.

Guidelines: Papers should be no more than 3,000 words (approx. 12 pages), excluding notes and references. Submissions should also include a second sheet with an abstract (200 words or fewer). Papers should be suitable for blind review: include detachable cover page with the paper’s title, author’s name, mailing address, email, phone number, school affiliation, and word count; please omit any self-identifying marks within the body of the paper.

Papers should be emailed as an attachment to conference organizer Matt Frise at ur.7th.epistemology.conference@gmail.com in ‘.doc’ or ‘.pdf’ format.

Deadline for submission: July 31st, 2012

Accommodations: Lodging (with UR philosophy grads), transportation in Rochester, and most meals will be provided.

Conference Web Page: https://sites.google.com/site/urgradepistemologyconference/

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CFP: Edinburgh Graduate Epistemology Conference

The Edinburgh Epistemology Research Group is hosting its second annual graduate epistemology conference in June. More details, including a call for papers, can be found on the conference homepage. Note that the deadline for the CFP is *March 9th*.

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A Formal Epistemology Reader

A Formal Epistemology Reader

Edited by
Horacio Arló-Costa, Johan van Benthem, Vincent F. Hendricks
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012
ISBN 9781107608726 (paperback)
ISBN 9781107001794 (hardback)
Assistant Editors: Henrik Boensvang & Rasmus K. Rendsvig

Release date / Fall 2012

‘Formal epistemology’ is a term coined in the late 1990s for a new constellation of interests in philosophy,the roots of which are found in earlier works of epistemologists, philosophers of science, and logicians. It addresses a growing agenda of problems concerning knowledge, belief, certainty, rationality, deliberation, decision, strategy, action and agent interaction – and it does so using methods from logic, probability, computability, decision, and game theory. This volume presents 42 classic texts in formal epistemology, and strengthens the ties between research into this area of philosophy and its neighbouring intellectual disciplines. The editors provide introductions to five basic subsections: Bayesian Epistemology, Belief Change, Decision Theory, Interactive Epistemology and Logics of Knowledge and Belief. The volume also includes a thorough index and suggestions for further reading, and thus offers a complete teaching and research package for students as well as research scholars of formal epistemology, philosophy, logic,computer science, theoretical economics and cognitive psychology.

Read more about the collection, and view table of contents here: http://www.vince-inc.com/vincent/?p=1030

[Cross posted at Choice and Inference]

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Northwestern Epistemology Brownbags for AY 2012-13

Northwestern’s Epistemology Brownbag series will be in its fourth year in Academic Year 2012-13.  For those epistemologists whose plans take you to Chicago on a Wednesday during the academic year, consider coming to present an epistemology paper of yours at our brownbag series.  If you are interested, please contact Northwestern epistemologist and graduate student Amy Floweree [AmyFlowerree2011@u.northwestern.edu] to let her know of your interest and your Chicago plans.

On behalf of the Philosophy Department at Northwestern, I want to offer my most sincere thanks to Matthew Mullins, who has been at the center of the Northwestern Epistemology Brownbag series from the very start.  Matthew will be handing over the administration of the series to Amy in AY 2012-13.  His tireless outreach efforts have enabled us to have many excellent epistemologists, from all over the world, present papers at our workshops in the past three years (see the schedules of the first year and the second year).  For this the Northwestern philosophical community and the Chicago-area epistemology community owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

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NEH Institute in Experimental Philosophy, Summer 2012

Shaun Nichols and Ron Mallon are again running an NEH Summer Institute in Experimental Philosophy this July in Tucson. Details are here: http://epi.arizona.edu/. Applications are due March 1st.

Institutes are designed for teachers of American undergraduate students. Because of recent changes to the program, now up to three spaces may be awarded to graduate students in the humanities.

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Interview with Jason Baehr

Concerning his new book defending a responsibilist virtue epistemology, at Philosophy News.

The interview lasts about an hour, and provides a nice overview of the book. The interview is available here.

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