Certain Doubts

On September 6-8, 2012, Purdue University will host an interdisciplinary conference entitled “Challenges to Religious and Moral Belief: Disagreement and Evolution”.

The conference will focus on three main challenges to religious and moral beliefs:

1. Widespread interpersonal disagreement among intellectual peers on religious and on moral topics provides reason to doubt these beliefs;
2. Belief-source disagreement on moral issues between commonsense moral intuitions and religious belief sources raises doubts about both methods of belief formation;
3. Evolutionary accounts of the origins of our religious and moral beliefs create doubts about these beliefs by undermining our confidence in the reliability of their sources.

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I gain evidence that this used car salesman is unreliable.  He tells me he’s the most honest person I’ll ever know.  It would be ridiculous, on that basis, to think “Well, gee, I guess he’s reliable after all.”  We need independent confirmation that his testimony is reliable.  Here are two more controversial examples.  I gain evidence that my moral intuitions are unreliable.  Can my moral intuitions defeat that evidence?   It seems not: to defeat that undercutting evidence, you would need to appeal to something independent of the intuitions undercut.  You’re smart, but we disagree about P, which gives me some reason to think that my relevant arguments and intuitions aren’t reliable.  Can I rely on those intuitions and arguments to defeat the evidence of my unreliability?  It seems not: again, we seem to think we need something independent of those arguments and intuitions.

Our intuitions suggest that, to defeat undercutting evidence, we need to appeal to something independent of what’s undercut.  I think those intuitions are wrong.  Suppose I receive testimony from a reliable source that all my belief-forming methods are unreliable.  Given our “independence intuitions”, this undercutting evidence is impervious to defeat.  Since it undercuts everything, there is nothing to which I can appeal.  Yet the mere generality of the defeater should not make it invincible.

When we realize that the intuitions are wrong, we have some explaining to do.  If undercut evidence can defeat the undercutting evidence, then what’s the problem with trusting the testimony of the car salesman?  And what’s the problem with relying on the wall’s appearing red to give me evidence of my reliability in the context where the wall is lit by red lights?  If our “independence intuitions” don’t explain what’s going on in these cases, why can’t we appeal to the undercut evidence to defeat the undercutting evidence?

Feel free to comment on the above quick and dirty argument without consulting the material below the fold.  For those who want to see the argument against our independence intuitions laid out more carefully, see below. Continue reading →

The new issue of International Journal for the Study of Skepticism is now out. Thanks to everyone who has helped us establish this new journal. I’m pleased to announce that since it’s doing so well, we will shortly be moving to four issues a year rather than the current two.

The Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking invites submissions the 2012 AILACT Essay Prize. Value: $300 U.S. The prize-winning paper will be published in Informal Logic, contingent upon meeting the conditions specified in the prize’s notice, available at http://ailact.mcmaster.ca/. Papers related to the teaching or theory of informal logic or critical thinking, and papers on argumentation theory, will be considered for the prize. Authors need not be members of AILACT. Previously unpublished papers, and papers published or accepted for publication between January 1, 2009 and October 31, 2012, are eligible. Maximum length: 6,000 words. Please send the paper ready for blind-reviewing. The deadline for receipt of submissions now is October 31, 2012. For further questions, contact Susana Nuccetelli at sinuccetelli@stcloudstate.edu.

Perceptual dogmatism is the view that a perceptual seeming that P prima facie justifies P.  Classical Bayesianism (CB), as I am using the term, is the idea that justification is accurately modelled by classical probability theory, which includes Bayes’ Theorem.  A popular way of objecting to dogmatism goes something like this: dogmatism is incompatible with CB, so dogmatism is false.  I’ll assume that you have some familiarity with this sort of objection, which can be found in White’s “Problems for Dogmatism”, Schiffer’s “Skepticism and the Vagaries of Justified Belief” (pgs 175-6), and Wright’s “The Perils of Dogmatism” (pg 42).

Suppose we grant the premise that dogmatism is incompatible with CB.  Why in the world should we conclude that the CB wins?  Why shouldn’t we reject CB instead?  The latter view does have a number of virtues, but it is not as though dogmatism has nothing going for it.  And CB has a number of well-known problems.  So I repeat: if dogmatism and CB are incompatible, why should the Classical Bayesian win?

Here is a way of approaching the question: if the incompatibility between CB and dogmatism depends on the most controversial features of Classical Bayesianism, then dogmatism should win.  For example, I find it implausible that a rational human being should assign a credence to every proposition or a credence of 1 to every necessary truth.  I take it that these implausible claims are entailed by CB.  To whatever extent the incompatibility arises because of CB’s commitment to either of those two claims, dogmatism should win and we should rework CB.  If, however, the incompatibility relies only on the least controversial features of CB, then CB should win.  Perhaps an example of something uncontroversial would be: if S assigns a credence to both P and P or Q, S is irrational for assigning P or Q a lower credence than P. Continue reading →

Fans of pragmatic encroachment need a way to resist the arguments of Weatherson and Nagel and Bach, arguments that show that in many of the motivating cases, an explanation in terms of pragmatic encroachment into belief itself can replace pragmatic encroachment into knowledge or justification. One way to push this response to the motivating cases is to defend a functionalist account of belief, and this is Weatherson’s tack. He endorses this account:

A and B are actions, and q is a proposition. The symbol stands for preference, so the account says that you believe a claim just in case the ordering of your conditional preferences isn’t affected by adding that claim to the condition. Later in the article, Brian notes that this formulation needs to require that p and q are consistent, but I think that restriction doesn’t go far enough. If p and q are probabilistically or evidentially in tension, the account is subject to counterexample.

Consider this case. Given that it seems to me that I’m not married, I prefer leaving my wedding ring in the drawer to wearing it. But given that it seems to me that not I’m married but actually married, my preferences reverse. But I do in fact believe that I’m married.

The fix strikes me as simple, however: Just restrict q to propositions independent of p. Would love to hear, though, if that can’t work. (For Weatherson aficianados, I should note that the quantifiers above are restricted, but that the restrictions in question don’t rule out counterexamples of this sort. I’ll leave it to the reader to verify that I’m right about this.)

[UPDATE: I fixed the original garbled example, sorry for any confusion! And a bit more below the fold.]
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