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.

In general, when context serves to assign Y to X, via some salient relation R, it will sound fine to say ‘X has Y’. That’s because by uttering ‘X has Y’ in the context, we end up expressing the proposition that X stands in relation R to Y, that is, R(x,y). Depending on what relation is salient, this works fine where ‘X’ names a person and ‘Y’ a proposition. But it doesn’t seem to work when the salient relation is the reason relation. This spells trouble for the abstractionist’s response. [Ed. note: As comes out in an exchange with Brad C. below, I don't think this paragraph is essential to my point here. This is good, because it's not clear that the "in general" point is true.]

We can contrive contexts where it sounds okay to say ‘I have the proposition <Sarah published a book>’. Suppose you and I are playing a strange game. The game is to see who can think about their assigned proposition for the longest time. You get assigned <Barack published a book>, and I get assigned <Sarah published a book>. A third party asks, “Who’s supposed to be thinking about Sarah?” I respond, “I am. I have the proposition <Sarah published a book>.” This sounds fine.

Given that we can generate this effect in the context of our strange game, if the abstractionist proposal under consideration were correct, then we should expect it to sound okay to say ‘I have the proposition <Sarah published a book>’ when it’s salient that this proposition is my reason for believing something. But that doesn’t happen. Consider: I say, “Sarah published something.” Everyone asks what my reason is for thinking this. I respond, “Sarah published a book.” Everyone believes me. It still sounds ridiculous for me to say, “So I have the proposition <Sarah published a book>.” It would likewise sound ridiculous for others to say of me, “He has the proposition <Sarah published a book>.” I don’t even understand what that’s supposed to mean. (It would be fine, though, for others to say, “He has the belief that Sarah published a book.”)

Consider a different case. Barack and Joe both believe that Sarah published something. We ask them what their reasons are for thinking this. Barack says, “Sarah published a book.” Joe says, “Sarah published a journal article.” We all believe that they’re being sincere. Now someone asks, “So, which of these two gentleman has the proposition <Sarah published a book>?” The question is unintelligible. But why should it be unintelligible, if the abstractionist proposal currently under consideration were true? If it were true, we should understand the question to be ‘which of these gentleman stands in the reason relation to <Sarah published a book>?’. But we don’t. (It would be intelligible, though, for someone to ask, “Which of these two gentleman believes that Sarah published a book?”)

[Update: Here it might be worth repeating something I said in the comment thread below, since it helps further clarify the trouble I'm trying to articulate for abstractionism. "My point about the abstractionist proposal is this. Even when the reason relation is salient — we’ve just been asked what our reason is for believing Sarah published something, and we respond by saying ‘She published a book’ or whatever — it still sounds awful to say ‘I have the proposition [Sarah published a book]‘. I can think of other contexts where it makes sense to say ‘I have the proposition [Q]‘ — I understand what relation it’s picking out. (This is the point of my “strange game” example.) But it makes no sense in the context of the reason relation. Why would that be, I wonder, if the reason relation relates us to the proposition in question, and that’s very salient in the context? Why would ‘have’ have such a hard time picking out the reason relation? Why can’t we hear it that way?]

[Later update: Tomorrow's headline: Philosopher changes his mind.]

]]> http://el-prod.baylor.edu/certain_doubts/?feed=rss2&p=1574 17 http://el-prod.baylor.edu/certain_doubts/?p=1557 http://el-prod.baylor.edu/certain_doubts/?p=1557#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:48:30 +0000 Jon Kvanvig http://el-prod.baylor.edu/certain_doubts/?p=1557 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?

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 conference is organized loosely around Jennifer Lackey’s book, LEARNING FROM WORDS, and the epistemology of testimony.

The participants are:

Robert Audi, Notre Dame (2009-10 Brady Distinguished Visiting Professor, Northwestern)

Elizabeth Fricker, Oxford

Peter Graham, University of California at Riverside

Jon Kvanvig, Baylor University

(In addition, Ted Poston of the University of Southern Alabama will be giving the epistemology brownbag that day, which will be folded in to the conference.)

All talks will take place in the Wildcat Room of the Norris Center on Northwestern’s Evanston campus.  The schedule is planned as follows:

Session 1: 9:00 a.m – 10:15 a.m.

Session 2: 10:30 a.m. – 11:45 p.m.

Session 3: [The Brownbag]  12:45 – 2:00 p.m.

Session 4: 2:30 p.m. – 3:45 p.m.

Session 5: 4:15 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.

(The Norris Center has a food court two floors below where we will be meeting, so people can get food and either eat downstairs, or bring it back to the room on time for the brownbag.)

For further information, contact Sandy Goldberg at s-goldberg@northwestern.edu.

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.

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…

An access internalist rendering of principle 1 says: if you are justified in believing p, then if you reflect on the question of whether you are justified in believing p, it will be really obvious to you that you are. This rendering has all of the faults of conditional analyses of anything, being threatened by Shope’s conditional fallacy. For example, some people, when they reflect, can’t get past their own inability to come to a conclusion on the basis of reflection. Others mistrust their reflective capacities, and so doubt what seems to be the right conclusion. And others still reflect in such a way that additional evidence is created by reflection that didn’t exist prior to the reflection. In all these ways, an access internalist construal of principle 1 has difficulties to solve.

Note, however, that principle 1 doesn’t require access internalism. In fact, access internalism is merely what you get when you are attracted to principle 1 and try to operationalize the principle. You imagine being justified in believing a claim. And you want to know what is true at the metalevel. So, instead of asking whether the information involved in the total perspective of the individual in question involves information sufficient to justify the claim that Jp, one resorts to operationalizing: imagine reflecting in such a way that total epistemic condition is preserved, and see what results one can defend. But such a move to reflection is precisely the distinction between being justified and being able to justify a given claim, and is a typical operational move to replace a concept with its operational consequences. My thought here is that evaluating access internalism should be one research project, and evaluating principle 1 a different one. I endorse the idea that undermining principle 1 will also undermine access internalism, but not vice-versa.

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 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.

(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).

My refutation of (1) is based on the following “margins for error” principle for justified belief:

(2) If you’re justified to degree d in believing p, then in all relevantly close cases, you’re justified in believing p to at least degree d – ε (where ε is some small difference in degree of justification).

(2) can be motivated by considering the same sorts of cases that Williamson considers in supporting his “margins for error” principle for knowledge (Knowledge and Its Limits, Chap. 5).

E.g., the degree of justification that you have for believing the proposition ‘That man is less than 6 feet tall’ varies smoothly over a spectrum of cases: the shorter the man looks to you, the more justification you have for believing the proposition. Among the cases where you at least have more justification for ‘He is less than 6 feet tall’ than for its negation ‘He is not less than 6 feet tall’, the closer you are to the tipping-point where you cease to have more justification for the proposition than for its negation, the less justification you have for that proposition.

Now let us use the phrase ‘a very high degree of justification for believing q’ to mean: a degree of justification for q that is at least 1 – ε (where 1 is total certainty, and ε as before is some small difference in degree of justification).

Then (1) and (2) entail:

(3) If you’re justified in believing p, then in all relevantly close cases, you have a very high degree of justification for believing that you’re justified in believing p.

The second premise in my refutation of (1) is:

(4) If you have a very high degree of justification for the higher-order proposition that you’re justified in believing p, then your justification for that higher-order proposition must itself rest on (or incorporate) your justification for p – and so you must indeed be justified in believing p.

In effect, (4) is a ‘J_highJp → Jp’ principle: if you’re highly justified in believing that you’re justified in believing p, then you are justified in believing p.

(4) should seem appealing to any philosopher who is attracted to anything like (1). After all, how could you have such a high degree of justification for the (higher-order) proposition that you’re justified in believing p, unless your justification for that higher-order proposition somehow rested on or incorporated your justification for the lower-order proposition p?

Taken together (3) and (4) entail:

(5) If you’re justified in believing p, then in all relevantly close cases, you’re justified in believing p.

But if we iterate (5) sufficiently many times, we can infer from the obviously true premise that there are cases in which you are justified in believing ‘That man is less than 6 feet tall’ (when you are looking at someone who is clearly less than 5 feet tall) to the obviously false conclusion that you’re still justified in believing ‘That man is less than 6 feet tall’ when looking at someone who is clearly more than 7 feet tall!

The obvious conclusion to draw is that the ‘JJ’ principle is false and must be rejected – indeed, it must be rejected for fundamentally the same reasons as the better-known ‘KK’ principle.

More information, including the CFP, can be found here.