Certain Doubts

Some people think that reasons are propositions. When you form a belief or perform an action, they say, your belief is based on a proposition, not another belief, an experience, a desire, or anything else mental. The basis of belief and action is one or more propositions. Call this view “abstractionism” about reasons (where ‘reasons’ picks out the basis of belief or action).

Here’s an argument against abstractionism:

1. You can have reasons.
2. You can’t have propositions
3. So reasons aren’t propositions.

The argument is valid. 1 is obvious. But taking a cue from Mark Schroeder’s work, someone might object to 2, on the following grounds.

‘X has Y’ means ‘X stands in salient relation R to Y’ (or vice versa). For example, ‘I have a father’ means that someone stands in the father relation to me, not that I possess a father. And while we can’t possess propositions, we can of course stand in relations to propositions. So we can understand ‘I have a reason’ to mean that a proposition stands in the reason relation to me. Perhaps 2 seems true because we’re thinking of ‘have’ to mean ‘possess’. But really, it should be understood as naming the reason relation, in which case, 2 is false.

I don’t think this works, partly because I don’t think ‘have’ can be understood in the relevant way.

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From Brian at TAR, news that Jonathan Schaffer and Susanna Schellenberg are going to Rutgers, along with the previously announced addition of Branden Fitelson. The trio helps Rutgers in a number of ways, but I note here the central impact of the trio in epistemology. Maybe now the pre-eminent epistemology department in the world?

Available here, and comments always appreciated, since changes are still possible.

Mostly boilerplate stuff, though some new stuff on the truth connection in the last section, connecting with the impossibility results from Bovens/Hartmann as well as a brief preview of my own response to the problem of justified inconsistent beliefs.

The Philosophy Department at Northwestern will hold a one-day Epistemology conference on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus on Wednesday, February 17, 2010.  The conference is free and open to the public. We especially welcome philosophers who will be in town for the Central APA meeting (Feb 17-20, 2010, Palmer House, Chicago).

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I couldn’t decide whether to post this here, at PEA Soup, or both.  So, I posted it at PEA Soup and thought I’d post a link here instead of double posting.  Some regular commentators comment both places, but many do not.  I’ve written up a post that concerns matters epistemic, matters practical, and their interface and I’d love to know what the epistemologists have to say about this.  So, if you’d do me the favor of heading over to PEA Soup, I’d love some feedback.

The issue has to do with the relation between the normative standing of a normative judgment and the actions that judgment rationalizes.  The view that it’s permissible to act on p when it’s permissible to believe p (or something in the neighborhood) seems to be gaining some traction, but those who defend this view end up saying things they shouldn’t say.  Whereas I think this sort of principle is useful in showing that there cannot be false, justified beliefs (here), this tends not to be the view shared by others.  Maybe they don’t have my intuitions about the moral significance of outcomes the agent could not have predicted.  I’m trying out something different.  So, feedback would be great (here).  Go talk to the ethicists.  It will be like that time on Lost.

Ralph’s interesting post and penetrating discussion raised to my mind the central question of the relationship between access internalism and various principles about the connection between first-order and higher-order justification. The simplest are, where ‘p’ is a proposition and ‘J’ is the justification operator which can be read “it is justified that” (with the understanding that it is the same person with the same total epistemic condition between antecedent and consequent), these:
1. Jp entails JJp
2. JJp entails Jp.

Here I have no special interest in 2, and don’t think anyone, even access internalists, ought to endorse it. Perhaps a defeasible connection should be endorsed (if JJP and no external defeaters with respect to JP, then JP), but the unqualified principle strikes me as obviously false (for the same reasons that infallibilism in general is false). But principle 1 is more plausible to me (when the kind of justification is the kind figuring in an account of the nature of knowledge, i.e., when ungettiered and combined with true belief yields knowledge), and the relationship between it and access internalism is the topic here. In short, access internalists, I wish to maintain, move quickly to operationalizing principle 1, in a way that leads to problems for their view that do not threaten principle 1 itself. More below the fold… (more…)

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…)