Certain Doubts

This blog post offers a refutation of the following “JJ” principle:

(1) If you are justified in believing p, then you have the highest possible degree of justification for believing that you’re justified in believing p (in other words, you can be certain that you’re justified in believing p).

The refutation will be based on broadly Williamson-inspired considerations about “margins for error”. Nonetheless, the argument is also designed to be completely compatible with internalism about justification (or at least with the “mentalist” form of internalism).

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Vincent Hendricks, Professor of Formal Philosophy at The University of Copenhagen, is now  Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Congratulations, Vincent!

I’ve updated LaTeX for Philosophers. Among the new items:

• LineByLine.sty – Designed to run inside the equation environment, LineByLine provides a quick and uniform format for line by line derivations. This is beta and, while not perfect, it works better than alternatives I’ve tried. I am keen to hear about bug reports, things-you-wish-it-would-do reports, or I’ve-got-a-better-idea reports. I’ve also included some instructions to help you fiddle with some of the parameters.
• A full, compilable template for philosophy.sty, plus sample pdfs.
• Some new tricks, including how to get natbib to work within beamer (HT: Jonah Schupbach).

Choice and Inference, maintained by Jonah Schupbach and Jake Chandler, is a new blog covering topics in uncertain and ampliative inference, coherence, paradoxes of belief and / or action, belief revision, disagreement and consensus, causal discovery, epistemology of religion, etc., as well as the formal methods used in the field, including game theory and decision theory, formal learning theory, probability theory and statistics, networks and graphs, and formal logic.

Jonah has an interesting post there about a connection between Bayesian and formal epistemology.

The error concerns the relationship between modal axioms and frame properties. The current SEP entry provides a table

that indicates axioms, their names, and the corresponding conditions on the accessibility relation R,

but the entailment only holds in one direction, from a specified frame property to that line’s modal schema. The implication does not hold in the other direction, for it is false that a specified modal schema must have that line’s frame property. To illustrate, consider the schema (M), which the author uses as an example. According to his table, the models in which (M) is valid are all based on reflexive frames. But here is a model that isn’t reflexive. (more…)

The Review of Symbolic Logic has just published on line a special issue devoted to recent developments in formal epistemology. The issue contains the following papers and an introduction to the special issue:

Horacio Arló-Costa: FORMAL EPISTEMOLOGY, CONTEXT AND CONTENT: INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE ON RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN FORMAL EPISTEMOLOGY
Niel Tennant: BELIEF-REVISION, THE RAMSEY TEST, MONOTONICITY, AND THE SO-CALLED IMPOSSIBILITY RESULTS
Jeff Helzner:EXPECTED CONTENT
Haim Gaifman: CONTEXTUAL LOGIC WITH MODALITIES FOR TIME AND SPACE
Rohit Parikh: SENTENCES, BELIEF AND LOGICAL OMNISCIENCE, OR WHAT DOES DEDUCTION TELL US?
Sergei Artemov: THE LOGIC OF JUSTIFICATION
Giacomo Sillari: QUANTIFIED LOGIC OF AWARENESS AND IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE WORLDS
Joseph Halpern: INTRANSITIVITY AND VAGUENESS

The articles deal with a variety of topics from the logic of context and content, to the problem of logical omniscience, to belief revision, to the logic of justification, to formal models of vagueness. I assume that the printed version will be available soon.

Bengt Hansson (Lund) has sent a message announcing Postdoc scholarships from 6-24 months funded by the Swedish Research Council. Open to all nationalities; deadline February 26, 2009.

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Topics include:
Categories and Structures, by Steve Awodey (June 8-12);
Decisions and Games, by Teddy Seidenfeld (June 15-19);
Logic and Formal Verification, by Jeremy Avigad (June 22-26).

Tuition and housing is free for a class of 20 or so undergraduate or first-year graduate students. The application deadline is March 15, 2009. See details here. (Thanks to Jeff Helzner, at Philosophy, Science and Method, for the tip.)

Note, too, that FEW 2009 is also at Carnegie Mellon this year, from June 18-21.

========================================================================

FORMAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF RELIGION

June 10-12 2009 @ KU Leuven (Leuven, Belgium)

Co-organized by the Formal Epistemology Project, KU Leuven
and the Center for Philosophy and Religion, University of Glasgow

Conference website: http://formalphilosophy.org/fmer

========================================================================

The organizers of the conference invite contributions bringing
formal methodology — decision theory, statistics, epistemic logic,
game theory, etc. — to bear on issues in the epistemology of religion.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

– Pascalian arguments

– Cosmic and organic design arguments

– Arguments from miracles

– Problems of evil

– Religious pluralism and disagreement

Authors are invited to submit a 400-600 word abstract for a paper of
30-40 minutes reading time. The abstracts are to be submitted by e-mail,
as an attachment in a common format (preferably pdf, doc or rtf).

The submission deadline is Monday 16th of February 2009, with decisions
expected to be reached by Monday 30th of March 2009.

The language of the conference is English.

In addition to contributed papers, the program will also include the
following invited speakers:

– Paul Bartha (British Columbia)

– Branden Fitelson (Berkeley)

– Alan Hajek (ANU)

– Tim & Lydia McGrew (Western Michigan)

– Graham Oppy (Monash)

– Richard Swinburne (Oxford)

– Michael Tooley (Boulder)

Further details regarding the event will be posted in due course on the
conference website.

Please send abstracts and requests for further information to

jacob.chandler@hiw.kuleuven.be.

and cc. to

v.harrison@philosophy.arts.gla.ac.uk

We are in the process of organizing our sixth annual formal epistemology
workshop (the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth workshops were all
great successes). The purpose of these workshops is to bring together
individuals, both faculty and graduate students, using mathematical
methods in epistemology in small focused meetings. Topics treated will
include but are not limited to:

* Ampliative inference (including inductive logic);
* Game theory and decision theory;
* Formal learning theory;
* Formal theories of coherence:
* Foundations of probability and statistics;
* Formal approaches to paradoxes of belief and/or action;
* Belief revision;
* Causal discovery.

Besides papers with respondents, each workshop will typically include
short introductory tutorials (two or three topically related
presentations) on formal methods. These tutorials will be oriented
particularly to graduate students.

The sixth workshop is scheduled for June 18 – June 21, 2009 and will be
held at Carnegie Mellon University. We are now accepting submissions for
FEW 2009. Please send submissions by email to Branden Fitelson.
Submissions are due — in the form of full papers — by Sunday, March 15,
2009; notifications of acceptance either as definite presenters or as
alternates will be sent out by Thursday, April 30, 2008. Some of the
papers presented at FEW 2009 will appear in a special issue of the
Journal of Philosophical Logic.

Those interested in participating, either by presenting papers,
responding, or providing tutorials, or in helping with organization,
should contact one of the local organizers listed below. We can
contribute $500 in travel funds for every graduate student who presents
or comments on a paper. We are also able to contribute $250 in travel
costs for a number (to be determined) of graduate students who attend
the workshop without presenting or commenting on a paper. Priority will
be given to graduate students who have not attended previous workshops,
and to women and minorities. Graduate students who wish to be considered
for travel funding should contact Kevin Kelly or Richard Scheines (the
local organizers this year) by May 1, 2009.

Kevin Kelly
Richard Scheines
CMU

Branden Fitelson
UC-Berkeley

Sahotra Sarkar
UT-Austin

—-

NOTE: The FEW website is now located at:

http://fitelson.org/few/

We hope to see you all in Pittsburgh in June!