Certain Doubts

Sad news from the Society of Christian Philosophers mail list: “Bill Alston, 87, died earlier today, September 13, 2009, at his home in Jamesville, NY.  He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just the week before last.”

Daniel Howard-Snyder has on-line both a biography of Prof. Alston and a bibliography of his writings.

Update: For those who haven’t seen them, there are some nice posts about Alston, by Tent Dougherty (9/13), Jeremy Pierce (9/14), and Tom Senor (9/17), and information about the memorial service that will be held for him on Nov. 2 in Syracuse from Linda Zagzebski (9/18) over at Prosblogion.

Update 5/13: I’m back from a trip to discover that Plato won the pre-modern contest, edging out Aristotle by just 2 votes.  However, the final round has begun to determine the most important philosopher of all time, and as of right now, Aristotle has a small but significant lead in that contest (results so far).  The poll ends in a couple of days (May 15).

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Like a good basketball game, it’s been close all the way, with lots of ties and lead changes.  But right now (10:30 Eastern, 5/8), one of the main “footnotes to Plato” (Aristotle) is beating Plato himself in the Leiter-sponsored poll concerning “The Most Important Philosophers of the Pre-Modern Era.”

Results.

Take the poll.

Next, of course, one supposes there will have to be a championship round of the most important philosophers of all time in which Kant, who came out on top of the poll about the “Most Important Philosopher of the Modern Era” (results), will square off against the Plato and Aristotle, no doubt hoping to avenge a controversial soccer loss that his German team suffered at the hands of the Greeks.

I’m being chased through enemy territory, and a warning light on my (eccentric) car indicates that either I am about to run out of fuel, or the radiator is about to boil over. I’m pretty sure it’s the fuel. Bother! If I hadn’t been going to run out of fuel, I would get away. Of course, I could be wrong about the fuel. But then, if I don’t run out of fuel, the radiator would boil over.
–Dorothy Edgington, “On Conditionals,” Mind 104 (1995): 235-329; p. 239)

I’m wondering which conditionals are in place in Edgington’s example — which seem accurate or likely accurate, and are the right way to put things. Which are the right things to say, or can be made the right things to say by inserting a “probably” or “likely” in the relevant place? Above, Edgington herself gives two:

A. If I hadn’t been going to run out of fuel, I would get away

B. If I don’t run out of fuel, the radiator would boil over

I’m not sure about these. Not saying they’re wrong. That’s just not the way I would put things. Is that just me? I am personally very unlikely to use anything like the “hadn’t been going to” of (A)’s antecedent, but if I were to start a conditional of that way, I’d be inclined to finish it off differently:

A2. If I hadn’t been going to run out of fuel, I would have gotten away [or would have been about to get away]

But that I’m very unsure of. Is (A) right (perhaps with a “probably” in there), or (A2), both, neither? And if we switch to antecedents with “were” in them, which if either of these is good (perhaps with a “probably” inserted):

A3. If I were not about to run out of fuel, I would get away

A4. If I were not about to run out of fuel, I would have been about to get away

And if I started a conditional off with (B)’s antecedent, I would finish it off differently, using “will” instead of “would”:

B2. If I don’t run out of fuel, the radiator will boil over

Is (B) right (perhaps with a “probably” inserted), or (B2), or both, or neither?
Any reactions to these?

I join Jon in his request for suggestions of papers that came out in 2008 for the The Philosopher’s Annual. (I am also a nominator.) We realize we’ll get mostly suggestions for papers about epistemology here. That’s fine. I, for one, am really only interested in suggestions of papers in areas I know pretty well, anyway: I hope great papers in other areas are nominated, too, but it’s other nominators’ jobs to put those forward. My job, as I see it, is to put forward three papers that I’m very confident are worthy of serious consideration, and, for the most part, I can only be very confident about papers in areas I know. If anyone has suggestions, please put them in the comments to Jon’s post, so we can keep them together. (I’ll turn off the comments to this post.) And thanks to those who have already commented there.
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Back when I was interviewing for jobs (so this would have been during the last few days of the year 1989 in Atlanta), my writing sample was “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions” (which later appeared in PPR), and a quite famous* philosopher insisted to me during an interview that it was in fact extremely uncommon for people to say that they do or do not “know” things, and that I only thought otherwise because I spent all my time talking with other philosophers. I remember him exclaiming, “Why, I go whole weeks without using that word!” I tried to convince him otherwise (well, not about his own usage, which I couldn’t really speak to, but about his general point), citing all the various kinds of situations in which it is utterly natural to use “know(s)”. He wasn’t budging: “No, I almost never hear that.” I in fact spent a whole lot of time with non-philosophers, and I thought this guy was, well, full of shit, as my non-philosophical friends liked to say (almost as much as they liked to say “know(s)”!) (more…)

This was going to be a comment on the X-Phi post, but it became too long.

FRAGILITY
Suppose baseball bats come to be made of a special wood so that, as we’d be prone to say, how fragile they are varies greatly with how humid it is: when the humidity is very low, they become quite brittle, and break much more easily; while they become very resistant to breaking when the humidity is high. Managers would find themselves saying things like this to their teams: “Remember that your bats will be very fragile tonight. The humidity is very low.” Here the manager uses “fragile” to describe how easy it is to break the bats right now (or at least that evening), in the current conditions.

But there would also be a quite different, but also very natural, way to use “fragile.” The bat-maker at the factory might say this, after making an especially good batch of bats: “Today’s batch is excellent. They’re much less fragile than the bats we made yesterday.” The bat-maker doesn’t seem to be describing how easy it would be to break the bats right now, given the humidity of the air currently around them, but rather how easy it will be to break them under a variety of different humidity conditions. (We may suppose that today’s batch of bats is still at the factory, where the humidity happens to be extremey low, so that the bats would be very easy to break right now, while yesterday’s bats have already been shipped out to various high-humidity locations, so they are right now hard to break, though today’s bats would be harder to break than yesterday’s bats if the both sets were exposed to the same humidity conditions. Still, what the bat-maker says seems very natural.)

CONFIDENCE
I think a similar thing happens with our descriptions using the likes of “confident.” (more…)

I just wrote the book and chapter summaries for my upcoming The Case for Contextualism: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, Vol. 1. (OUP put it into my contract that I should write these: I believe they’re for on-line access via Oxford Scholarship Online.) I’ll past the summaries here, below the fold. They’re changeable drafts that I just wrote up, so comments are welcome, but I’m posting them here mainly as advance advertising for the book.
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Just a quick “professional issues” post to call attention, for those who might have missed it, to this perceptive blog post from about a week ago by Brian Leiter. In it, Leiter warns those who might be going on the philosophy job market (and those who advise such students should take notice, too) that the job market is likely to be very tight this coming year (and perhaps for longer than that), and gives some advice about how to handle that situation. I myself have given up trying to predict what the philosophy job market will be like from year to year, but, for the reasons Brian gives, the possibility that it will be extra rough this year seems strong enough that it’s a good thing to get people thinking about how to rationally respond.

Incidentally, I note that on the APA chart [pdf link] on candidates per job for the various years that Brian links to, my own going on the job market was extremely well-timed: My year, 89-90, was the most candidate-friendly year in a *long* stretch of years both preceding and following it. No wonder I found work!

So, here’s what I take to be the canonical presentation of Ginet’s famous barn example, from Goldman’s “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge,” (JP, 1976), pp. 772-3, with two slight modifications: 1) I’m not able to produce the various funny little marks on the words “papier-mache” and “facades” 2) I’m bolding one phrase that will be important to the discussion (Goldman italicizes two instances of the word “knows”; since this blog seems to italicize everything that’s in block quotes, I’ll indicate Goldman’s emphasis by also bolding those instances of “knows”):

Consider the following example. Henry is driving in the countryside with his son. For the boy’s edification Henry identifies various objects on the landscape as they come into view. “That’s a cow,” says Henry, “That’s a tractor,” “That’s a silo,” “That’s a barn,” etc. Henry has no doubt about the identity of these objects; in particular, he has no doubt that the last-mentioned object is a barn, which indeed it is. Each of the identified objects has features characteristic of its type. Moreover, each object is fully in view, Henry has excellent eyesight, and he has enough time to look at them reasonably carefully, since there is little traffic to distract him.

Given this information, would we say that Henry knows that the object is a barn? Most of us would have little hesitation in saying this, so long as we were not in a certain philosophical frame of mind. Contrast our inclination here with the inclination we would have if we were given some additional information. Suppose we are told that, unknown to Henry, the district he has just entered is full of papier-mache facsimiles of barns. These facsimiles look from the road exactly like barns, but are really just facades, without back walls or interiors, quite incapable of being used as barns. They are so cleverly constructed that travelers invariably mistake them for barns. Having just entered the district, Henry has not encountered any facsimiles; the object he sees is a genuine barn. But if the object on that site were a facsimile, Henry would mistake it for a barn. Given this new information, we would be strongly inclined to withdraw the claim that Henry knows the object is a barn.

It’s never been that clear to me that Henry doesn’t know that the object is a barn. Well, I don’t know about “never”: For a while, I at least thought it was clear to me that Henry didn’t know: Perhaps moved by the apparently authoritative judgments of others, like Goldman, after I encountered the example, I rather uncritically joined the consensus that Henry didn’t know, and was happy for a few years to, for instance, accept arguments based on the premise that Henry doesn’t know in the example. However, when Ruth Millikan first confronted me with skepticism about that judgment, I had to admit that it really was not all that clearly correct. (See pp. 329-30 of Millikan’s “Naturalist Reflections on Knowledge,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1984. I didn’t encounter Millikan’s skepticism until she confronted me with it in person a few later, early in 1990, at which time she referred me to her paper.) Key to Millikan’s doubt here is the fact that Henry has not encountered any of the fake barns. Though I was — and still am –personally inclined to judge that Henry doesn’t know in that case, I became — and remain — skeptical enough that I no longer took the judgment to be clearly enough correct for it to be useable as the premise of a good argument.

I recently e-sent a draft of a book I’ve been working on out to several philosophers. In it, I relate the skepticism explained above. Interestingly, several epistemologists have taken note of that, and have written back, saying that they too didn’t share this intuition, and that they’re glad to see they have company. Perhaps there are others who might join our skeptical cohort? (Or is it an anti-skeptical cohort? We’re skeptical of the commonly assumed “intuition,” but since the intuition we are skeptical of is itself a skeptical intuition (to the effect that Henry doesn’t know), we’re in a sense non-skeptical.)

Fortunately, the purpose for which I was using the example in my discussion with Millikan was served just as well by an easy modification of the example, so I modified it, and have since often used the modified version. (I believe the first times I used such a modification in published papers were in 1996: I used this modification of the barn case in my “Relevant Alternatives and the Content of Knowledge Attributions” (PPR, ‘96), and I used a similarly modified version of Dretske’s zebras example in my Encyclopedia of Philosophy (‘96 Supplement) on “Relevant Alternatives.”* I just don’t know if others have used such cases (it’s a fairly obvious move to make), but would be happy to learn.)

(*Update 11/25/09: I’ve just discovered that I used such a modified version of the case in my 1995 “Solving the Skeptical Problem” (p. 30).)

So, Suppose Henry has encountered many of the convincing fakes — say, 19 of them — and has been convinced by these convincing fakes: he has confidently, but mistakenly, taken all of the fake barns he’s encountered to be barns. Now he’s encountering the only real barn in the district. He again confidently takes the object to be a barn, but from Henry’s point of view, there’s nothing special about this case: He’s no more confident about this identification than he was about all the others. But this time, he’s right –he’s 1-for-20 in his recent barn judgments. Does he know that the object is a barn? Here, I’m fairly confident that Henry doesn’t know. If you’re still not sure, we can try other modifications. For instance, we can suppose that Henry goes on to encounter 20 more fakes, and gets completely fooled 20 more times. Now he’s 1-for-40, and his one “hit” among many “misses” is right in the middle of a sea of errors. If you’re still not solidly intuiting that 1-for-40 Henry doesn’t know, there are still further changes we could try, but you’re probably beyond the reach of my help.

(You can similarly modify Dretske’s zebra case so that the subject actually has encountered, and has been fooled by, several cleverly painted mules that the zoo is using in the midst of a zebra shortage in a successful attempt to fool the zoo-going public, but is now encountering the only real zebra in the zoo.)

Why is the case typically presented with the feature that Henry hasn’t encountered any of the fakes? It seems that Goldman’s main use of the example — to motivate the relevant alternatives account of knowledge — would be well-served by the modified example, where intuitions against knowledge are stronger. For when we compare the modified example with a normal case, in which all the barn-looking objects in the area (including the ones Henry has encountered) have actually been barns, we find that Henry cannot rule out the convincing-fake alternative in either scenario, but that his inability to rule that alternative out seems to block his knowledge only in the case in which there are fakes. So the actual presence of the fakes, together perhaps with Henry’s having encountered & been fooled by them, seems to make the alternative that what he is now seeing is a fake relevant.

But one of the points that Goldman goes on to make is that Henry’s evidence is the same whether or not the other object that look like barns in the area really are barns, and I speculate that he didn’t want to jeopardize that claim. (Much depends here on how exactly one construes the notion of evidence, but even if the fakes look exactly like real barns from the road, there are ways of construing evidence such that one is getting different evidence, depending on the nature of what one is actually seeing.) So, since he thought the intuition that Henry doesn’t know was solid enough even if the case is presented with Henry not having encountered any of the fakes, Goldman decided to tell the story that way. (Again, that’s just speculation.)

But if it really isn’t that intuitively solid that Henry doesn’t know in the unmodified story, we have good reason to modify the case. And the modified case has served my purposes well. (Because the fake barns have looked exactly like real barns, Henry still seems as justified in his judgment that he’s seeing a barn as he would have been if there had been no fakes, so, even with the modification, this example still seems, for instance, to be a case of justified, true belief that fails to be knowledge.)

Is it absolutely certain that Henry doesn’t know, even in the modified 1-for-20 (or 1-for-40) case? Of course not. But about the modified case, the judgment that Henry doesn’t know seems fairly solid to me, so far as premises of philosophical arguments go. But I wonder what others think

Some readers may be interested in this critique of recent work in experimental philosophy: Simon Cullen, “Survey-Driven Romanticism: What’s Wrong with Experimental Philosophy”: pdf link. A lot of the work that is discussed involves epistemology. There was also an interesting discussion of the paper, that Cullen took part in, about three months ago at the Experimental Philosophy blog here.

I now see that Brian Weatherson linked to these over at Thoughts, Arguments, and Rants a while ago, but I missed it, and thought others who might be interested may have missed it, too. Thanks to Jennifer Nagel, who sent Cullen’s paper to me. (I then did a little googling, and found Brian’s earlier link to it.) Jennifer sent me the paper because, in e-mail correspondance, I had told her about one of my chief complaints about the experimental philosophers work in epistemology: What’s up with them asking their survey takers whether subjects “really know, or only believe” the proposition in question? The function of that “really” is unclear, and muddies the waters, I think. Why wouldn’t the options just be “knows” and “doesn’t know”? That would seem a lot cleaner, and would avoid a lot of needless worries in interpreting the results, it seems to me. That’s one of the issues Cullen discusses. (It turns out, according to Cullen’s own studies, that the results are quite substantially different when the cleaner question is asked: see pp. 19-20.) But that’s just my own pet peeve. There are a lot of issues discussed, and I haven’t studied it at all carefully.