Certain Doubts

May 23-25, 2010; conference website here. From the website:

The first St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality (SLACRR, pronounced (slăk΄ r)) will take place May 23-25, 2010 at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The conference is designed to provide a forum for new work on practical and theoretical reason, broadly construed. Please submit an abstract of 500-1000 words by December 31, 2009 to SLACRR@gmail.com. (In writing your abstract, please bear in mind that full papers should be suitable for a 30 minute presentation.) We are also interested in finding commentators for papers, so please let us know if you would have an interest in commenting.

This is to announce the first annual Northwestern-Notre Dame Graduate Epistemology Conference, which is to take place on the campus of Northwestern University, in Evanston, IL, on April 16th, 2010.   The keynote speaker will be Hilary Kornblith of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

More information, including the CFP, can be found here.

Announcement and call for submissions:

The European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA) is pleased to announce the launch of its new journal:

EUROPEAN JOURNAL FOR PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (EJPS)

Editor-in-Chief: Carl Hoefer (Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain) Deputy Editor: Mauro Dorato (University of Rome III, Italy) Associate Editors: Franz Huber (Konstanz, Germany), Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh, USA), Michela Massimi (London, UK), Samir Okasha (Bristol,
UK) and Jesús Zamora (UNED, Spain).
The Editorial Team will be assisted in its work by an Editorial Board of highly reputed philosophers of science from around the world.

EJPS is the official journal of EPSA and will appear three times a year, beginning in January 2011. EJPS intends to publish first-rate research in all areas of philosophy of science, and now welcomes submissions via the on-line portal: http://www.editorialmanager.com/epsa

The Journal’s website (still partly under construction) is here, and the website for the European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA) is here.

Call for Papers: On April 15th and 16th of 2010, the Synthese Conference will take place at Columbia University. The 2010 edition of the Synthese Conference will focus on the theme of epistemology and economics. (more…)

As part of our Northwestern Epistemology brownbag series, Juan Comesana (Arizona) was in Evanston yesterday giving a talk, and in it he raised an issue I have been wondering about as well: the nature and existence of philosophical expertise.  (I speak for myself, though much of what follows is in the spirit of Juan’s excellent discussion.)

It is uncontroversial (I think!) that philosophers as a group, and most philosophers as individuals, make a good deal of false philosophical claims.  This suggests that if there is such a thing as philosophical expertise, it is not to be understood interms of our epistemic competence w.r.t. the philosophical claims we make.  (I tried my hand at arguing for something in this vicinity in “Reliabilism in Philosophy,” Phil Studies 142: 105-117, available in pre-published form here.)

What, then, might the nature of philosophical expertise be?  I have some ideas here but, prompted by Juan to think again about this issue, I’d be interested to hear what others think.

The knowledge account of assertion (KA) says you may assert Q only if you know Q. KA’s defenders (e.g. Unger and Williamson) have frequently pointed to data on challenging assertions to support their view. For instance, when I assert Q, it’s appropriate ask ‘How do you know that?’ or ‘Do you really know that?’. KA nicely explains the relevance of these questions.

One objection to this is that it’s also appropriate to challenge an assertion by asking ‘Are you certain of that?’, even though knowledge doesn’t require certainty. KA cannot explain this. (It can if knowledge requires certainty, but this is a non-standard view.)

I have a KA-friendly story to tell about why the “certainty” challenge appears appropriate (which I won’t explain here). In addition to that, I also think KA’s proponents can and should expand the terrain of linguistic data, to take into account not just appropriate challenges to assertion, but appropriate prompts as well.

For instance, these two prompts are practically interchangeable: ‘What time does the meeting start?’, and ‘Do you know what time the meeting starts?’. We respond exactly the same way to either of these prompts, namely, either by saying what time the meeting starts, or by saying ‘I don’t know’. But these prompts aren’t interchangeable: ‘What time does the meeting start?’, and ‘Are you certain about what time the meeting starts?’. The latter is too demanding, and even somewhat alienating. Save for special circumstances, we don’t prompt assertion this way.

So whereas knowledge is closely connected to assertion both upstream and downstream, certainty is, at best, connected downstream only.

More on this and related matters here.

In case you missed it, take a look at the website for this institute here, directed by Crispin Wright and focusing on core areas, including epistemology both of the formal and more traditional varieties. Lots of interesting things happening there, and I hear from Luca Moretti that they’ll be announcing posts at different levels soon, from postdocs to professorial research fellowships.