Certain Doubts

A quick reminder about the 2010 Episteme Conference in Edinburgh, which is being hosted by Edinburgh’s epistemology research group. The conference topic is ‘Cognitive Ecology: The Role of the Concept of Knowledge in our Social Cognitive Ecology’, and if you haven’t the foggiest idea what we have in mind by this take a look at the conference webpage where there is a detailed description of the conference topic.

Speakers include Martin Kusch, Lorraine Code, Sandy Goldberg, Hilary Kornblith and Ram Neta. There are also a bunch of very interesting invited discussants.

Finally, there are some open sessions too, which means there is also a call for papers, deadline January 1st 2010. For more details about this, see the conference webpage.

The Edinburgh Epistemology research group will be hosting the 2010 Episteme conference, on the topic: ‘Cognitive Ecology: The Role of the Concept of Knowledge in our Social Cognitive Ecology’. So far, confirmed speakers include Sandy Goldberg (Northwestern), Hilary Kornblith (UMass), Martin Kusch (Cambridge/Vienna) and Ram Neta (UNC, Chapel Hill), with more speakers to be confirmed soon. A rough conference webpage is available here.

There is also a call for papers, with more details posted on the conference webpage.

Episteme’s annual conference will be taking place in Evanston, IL, 6/27 – 6/28, on the campus of Northwestern University.  The topic is the Epistemological Significance of Disagreement.  For details regarding the speakers, the program, or local accommodations see here.  Information is also available at Episteme’s own web site, here.

This conference is sponsored by the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities (Northwestern University), the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, and Rutgers University.   The organizers are Alvin Goldman (Rutgers), David Christensen (Brown), and Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern).

All are welcome to attend.

Here’s an interesting experiment.  Figure out how susceptible you think the word of an intellectual superior should be in defeating whatever evidence you have for believing what the superior denies.  Then figure out how susceptible you think the word of an intellectual inferior should be in defeating whatever evidence you have for believing what the inferior denies.  Plot each on a scale from 0 to 1 (where zero reflects never revising in the face of contrary testimony, and 1 reflects always acquiescing).  Should the results sum to 1?

Ralph and Keith are tough acts to follow, but here goes …

In her paper “Norms of Assertion” (Nous 41:4, 2007), Jennifer Lackey argues against the knowledge account of assertion (KA). She says that some “selfless assertions” are counterexamples to KA.

This post presents an interpretation of Lackey’s argument and offers a couple responses.
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We are all familiar with the distinctions between knowledge de dicto and knowledge de se and de re. Recent work in ethics by Darwall and some of the recent work by Stump claims that there is a distinctive kind of second-person perspective, leading to the idea that in addition to the above kinds of knowledge, there should be knowledge de te.

But what could that be? I just heard a talk by Eleonore in which she gave 3 necessary conditions for second-person experience: the thing experience must be a person, and be conscious, and the experience must be direct and immediate. None of these seem quite right to me, however. I can have a second-person experience of you through a TV monitor, I can have a second-person experience with my dog, and perhaps animists can have second-person experiences with trees. I’m least confident of the last point, but the first two seem unassailable. And then, as with de re awareness, the illusions: brief encounters with mannequins-taken-to-be-persons, just as there is experience of things that go bump in the night. On the illusion score, it isn’t clear whether the de re and de te categories should track the phenomenology or the external reality; I’m inclined to think that a good account in other respects gets to say whatever it wants here.

To get in the mood to address the issue, recall the nature of autism in children. They avoid eye-to-eye contact, don’t read emotional states in others except in a quite indirect way (they don’t see sadness in others, but they can be taught to characterize people who look that way as sad), and the mirror neurons in the head don’t fire at all as they do in ordinary people when they have this purportedly distinctive second-person experience of another person. (The neurons are called “mirror neurons” because they fire when you are sad and also when you see sadness in another, when you are surprised and when you experience another as surprised, etc.).

So, what can we make of de te awareness, knowledge, experience, etc.? If Darwall and Stump are onto something here, and they seem to be, I’d like a theory…

Leslie Marsh tells me that Issue 4.3 of Episteme – a themed issue on Testimony — will be freely available for download for 14 days only (July 7 – July 21). Those interested should see here.

The volume, edited (and with an introductory essay) by Jennifer Lackey, contains original articles by Peter Lipton, Linda Zagzebski, Melissa Koenig and Paul Harris, Patrick Rysiew, Paul Faulkner, Al Casullo, John Greco, Marc Moffit, Arnon Keren, and Jonathan Adler.

See here for details:

http://epistemejournal.wordpress.com/contents/volume-4/issue-3/

Cheers,

Sandy

I am always looking for ways to connect epistemology to other subfields of philosophy (esp. within the “M” side of M&E). Here’s one I’ve been thinking of for some time.

If testimonial belief is to be knowledge, it must satisfy the anti-luck condition on knowledge. There are, it seems, (at least) three sources for luck to enter into the picture in a typical testimonial exchange: the testimony itself, though true, might be only luckily so (as when based on a guess); the recipient might be lucky in having accepted what in fact is solid testimony (as when one just happens upon the one truth-teller in a room full of expert liars); or the recipient might be lucky in having recovered the attested proposition (as when one didn’t really catch what was said, but guessed correctly). Of these the first two have been explored at length in the literature on the epistemology of testimony; the third not so.

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A quick case for “No”: in philosophy we aim to think for ourselves, and as such we do not — and we should not — rely on the authority of another philosopher in coming to a conclusion.

I am very tempted by this quick case. But I have a certain uneasiness about it. People in other disciplines regularly defer to their within-disipline colleagues, on matters where they regard their within-discipline colleagues as having relevant expertise. In so doing they recognize the importance of shared knowledge (or at least well-justified belief) regarding the common world they and their colleagues inhabit. I worry that if we deny that there is expertise within philosophy — that is, if we deny the sort of thing that would justify one philosopher in reaching a philosophical conclusion on the basis of accepting what one of her philosopher-colleagues told her — this reflects an attitude that rejects the very idea that one philosopher could have (and be seen by others to have) more philosophical knowledge than another. Such an attitude might be based on the view that there is no knowledge to be had in our discipline in the first place (a depressing thought); or else on the view that within philosophy no one can lay claim to the sort of knowledge/justified belief required by expertise (but what is it about our discipline and its subject-matter that precludes this?).

And yet: the practice of accepting a philosophical claim merely because philosopher X (known to be sharp) said so strikes me as deeply unphilosophical. (Possible exception: results in logic and the more formal parts of philosophy.)

Anyway, this is a worry I’ve been having since giving a paper on a related topic at the first Midwest Epistemology Workshop.