Certain Doubts

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.

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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Green is in the good case so he knows all sorts of stuff about how things are and ought to be.  Green knows that he ought to keep his promises when there’s no overriding reason not to, knows that he cannot keep his promises without visiting his friend Plum, knows that he cannot get to see Plum unless he gets his tickets for the train, and so knows that he ought to get his tickets for the train.  Mustard is in the bad case.  While Mustard is Green’s epistemic counterpart (i.e., the two are in precisely the same non-factive mental states and have been since the cradle), Mustard is deceived at nearly every turn by a deceiving demon.  It seems to Mustard that he has friends and that he’s made promises to them that can be kept only if tickets are purchased, but Mustard’s only companion is the demon.  His beliefs don’t constitute knowledge as they tend to be false.  Unless you like abusing a perfectly good word, you should probably say that the processes that produce his beliefs aren’t reliable.  Things seem precisely the same to them and they reason in just the same way. (more…)

Frege believed that the unrestricted comprehension axiom is true, and it is sad, since the axiom leads to paradox. If you are inclined toward coherentism, the rationality of Frege’s belief causes a problem, since it is logically inconsistent.

I’ve been working on the problem for coherentism of justified inconsistent beliefs, and this is one version of the problem. I’m tempted, though, to think it isn’t an epistemological problem, but rather a philosophy of language issue. Here’s why.
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It is officially Spring Break for us at SMU and while my students party on islands so exclusive their names are unknown to me, I’ll be heading to Oklahoma for the Epistemic Goodness Conference. I’m not jealous, by the way. Riggs and Pritchard have put together what promises to be a really exciting conference and I won’t have to worry about sunburn. I thought I’d do a quick post on something that I’ll be discussing next Saturday.

In old paper of Richard Feldman’s (’Subjective and Objective Justification in Ethics and Epistemology’), he stakes out a view concerning the relationship between the justification of belief and action that I’d like to discuss here. In criticizing some recent work on ‘actionable intelligence’ (e.g., Neta’s forthcoming proposal about when it’s permissible to treat something as a reason for action and a similar view defended by Fantl and McGrath in their forthcoming book), I’ve worked from the assumption that considerations that bear on the justification of action bear on the justification of beliefs about the justification of that action. If because of certain facts, someone cannot justifiably A, I’ve claimed that these very facts prevent someone from justifiably believing that they must A. (And, of course, whatever it is that ensures that your belief that you must A is justified will thereby provide an adequate justification for the intention to act in accordance with this judgment as well as the action itself.) Feldman thinks this isn’t right.
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Routledge is revising their online encyclopedia, and I’m doing the entry for epistemic justification. A draft of the entry can be found here, and any comments or suggestions are welcome.

There are three kinds of justification: (i) propositional justification, (ii) doxastic justification of mental events of judgment, and (iii) doxastic justification of enduring belief states. This distinction is relevant to the debates about the “closure” of justification under logical consequence.

In this post, I shall propose three different closure principles, corresponding to these three kinds of justification; each of these closure principles is most plausible when applied only to the corresponding kind of justification. I suggest that this gives us a way to respond to the alleged counterexamples to closure.

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Here’s a draft that might interest some folks here. The abstract:

Infinitists argue that their view outshines foundationalism because infinitism can, whereas foundationalism cannot, explain two of epistemic justification’s crucial features: it comes in degrees and it can be complete. I present four different ways that foundationalists could make sense of those two features of justification, thereby undermining the case for infinitism.

Orange Beach, Alabama
University of South Alabama
May 11-14, 2009
Conference Website

Keynote Speakers: William Lycan & Jonathan Kvanvig
Invited Speakers: Mylan Engel, Erik Olsson, Bruce Russell, and Matthias Steup

Interested in Participating? We welcome any philosophers interested in participating in this workshop. Please send Ted Poston an email by December 1st, 2008.

I’ve just completed a draft, available here, for the Companion volume edited by Duncan Pritchard and Sven Bernecker. I’m early on finishing the draft, and so have plenty of time to revise if any readers have suggestions for improvement.