Certain Doubts

The 2005 edition of REC is scheduled for May 6-7. Our contributors are well-represented at this conference as well: speakers include Keith DeRose and Richard Fumerton; round table panelists include Jennifer Lackey; and discussants-at-large include Juan Comesana, Michael Huemer, and Matt McGrath. Nor should I forget to mention the immense effort of organizing the conference taken on again by Peter Klein. For more information on the conference, click here.

Upcoming, 8/20 to 8/22. Our contributors participating in the conference include paper-presenters Jim Pryor and Ernie Sosa, commentators Earl Conee and Al Casullo, and participants Juan Comesana, Rich Feldman, and Jennifer Lackey. For more information, click here.

My earlier post on the relationship between ethical internalism and the analogue in epistemology was intended partially to raise the issue of noncognitivism in epistemology. It is a bit surprising to find that view so popular in ethics, but quite rare in epistemology. There is at least one exception, of course: Hartry Field’s endorsement of Gibbard’s view (I guess that’s two…).

Probably the explanation for reticence here is because of our scientistic heritage. It is one thing to go noncognitivist about the right and the good, but how could we do this about our illustrious empirical method itself? (I won’t pursue this here, but put this way, the reticence is strikingly bizarre: we sit down and consider what we really have to preserve in our theorizing, what matters most in our conception of things, and we rank what’s right and wrong lower on the scale of importance than what’s scientifically confirmed and disconfirmed.)

Here minimalism about truth rides to the rescue, or as I prefer to characterize it, here comes the giant sucking sound of minimalism about truth. Such a view allows us to say cognitivist-sounding things in ethics while still embracing noncognitivism. Noncognitivists can say, it is claimed, that it is a fact that child abuse is wrong and that the truth of the matter is that totalitarianism is a bad thing. Perhaps our minimalist will go disquotational here: the truth of the matter and the facts of the case are just disquoted sentences. And then what remains after disquotation gets the usual nonfactive treatment of noncognitivism.

Neat package, and if acceptable, would block any scientistic aversion to going noncognitivist in epistemology.

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There’s a certain understanding as to what contextualists think or say about disputes between skeptics and their opponents that seems to be very widely assumed. And here it pops up again, in Mark Richard’s (very well worth reading) recent article, “Contextualism and Relativism” (Philosophical Studies 119 (2004): 215-242):

Suppose a confrontation between a skeptic with high standards, and Moore, who has low standards. The skeptic says

(1) You don’t know that you have hands.

Contextualism tells us that the content (and thus the extension) of ‘knows’ in the skeptic’s context is determined by the standards that his context provides. Since he, unlike Moore, has high standards, Moore and the claim that he has hands just don’t make the cut. The skeptic’s utterance of (1) is true: that is, Moore doesn’t know that he has hands.

Of course, when Moore utters

(2) I know that I have hands

the standards in his context are the relevant standards, and so, given his low standards, he speaks truly. So Moore knows that he has hands after all. But how can that be? Didn’t the skeptic just establish that Moore doesn’t know that he has hands? Well, says the contextualist, what the skeptic said was true. But since ‘know’ is contextually sensitive, (2) doesn’t say the same thing, when Moore uses it, as does

(3) You know that you have hands

when the skeptic uses it. So there’s nothing contradictory about the skeptic’s being able to use (1) truly while Moore can so use (2).

One feels that something is awry. One wants to say that when the skeptic and Moore argue with each other…

(pp. 215-216)

Indeed, something is awry here — something beyond what Richard has in mind: This is not at all what the contextualist says about such confrontations…
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The success of our blog raises a question. Most of our entries are getting extended discussion, leading me to wonder whether there is a point at which the discussions could be returned to the main page as main entries. The question depends on the degree to which readers find the large numbers of comments an impediment, and if so any of us could take a long thread and summarize the main issues in a main entry (I expect that in the usual case it would be me doing it, but I certainly wouldn’t take a territorial attitude toward it!). Doing so would be valuable if it made it easier to use the blog to follow one’s interests.

So I seek some advice from your experience with longer threads. Is the length an impediment at all, and if it is, is it enough of an impediment that returning the threads to main entries to continue the discussion would be worthwhile?

One of the primary influences that can be seen in contrastivism is the pragmatic tradition stemming from Pierce and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Dewey. One way to develop this approach is to adopt a particular account of knowledge and argue as Schaffer does that careful attention to linguistic data supports contrastivism over alternatives viewpoints, beginning from the question of the function of knowledge ascriptions and tying the resulting theory to the theory of inquiry.

Pragmatists are wont to sound more dramatic here, however, to insist that one eschew concern over the degree to which the view is encoded in present linguistic practice. One way to do this would be to drop the claim that the theory was a theory of knowledge, and instead describe it as a theory of intellectual achievement or success, but if one wanted to use the term ‘knowledge’ for describing the achievements in question, pragmatists would be happy to hear one claim to be doing so because of the fact that ‘knowledge’ has the right honorific aspect to it, making it natural to use this term even if the resulting theory is not wholly in accord with, or supported by, present linguistic usage.

If the language of knowledge is still used, Schaffer’s linguistic arguments (binding, existential instantiation, the data about noun ascriptions and interrogative ascriptions, etc.) would still be important to such a pragmatist orientation, since they help to justify the co-opting of a term of ordinary language for theoretical use.

Why would one favor such a pragmatist contrastivism?

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The Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference looks fantastic, and the schedule includes papers by some of the contributors to this site: Stewart Cohen, “Knowledge, Speaker, and Subject” Juan Comesana, “A Well-Founded Solution to the Generality Problem” and Matthew McGrath, “No Objects, No Problem? Nihilism and the Puzzles of Material Constitution”. In addition, Jonathan Schaffer is commenting on Kent Bach’s paper, and Michael Bergmann on Juan’s. No links to the papers, though, but Juan’s paper can be found here.

Update: oops, I missed one–Jennifer Lackey is commenting on Sarah Stroud’s paper.

I’ve just put a draft online of a paper of mine on Two Approaches to Epistemic Defeat. It’s a follow-up to some of my earlier posts on the topic, and as always, comments welcome.

The central idea is that there is a frontdoor and backdoor approach to the concept of defeat. Where the house itself is the noetic system, the backdoor approach conceives of defeat in terms of putting something in the house and seeing what gets kicked out the back door. The front door approach characterizes defeat prior to entering the house, the primary example of which is a relationship between the propositional contents of possible beliefs. Pollock’s account of defeat is an example of the latter; Plantinga’s of the former. The argument is a further defense of the view that propositional justification is more basic than doxastic justification, since I argue that there are irremediable problems for a backdoor approach to defeat.

Contrastivism holds that the truth makers for knowledge attributions always involve a contrast, and Hawthorne thinks that if you know something, you are entitled to use it in practical reasoning. So one way to test what it is known is to see what kinds of practical reasoning we’ll allow are acceptable.

Depending on what the contrast is, contrastive knowledge may be easy or hard to have. So, it is easier to know “the train will be on time rather than a day late” than it is to know “the train will be on time rather than 2 minutes late.” One way to put the difference is that one is presupposing more in knowing the first claim that one is in knowing the second.

Consider then a piece of practical reasoning using the following conditional: if you are pointing a gun at me, and if your gun is loaded and if you intend to shoot me, I should shoot you first. Suppose I know that you are pointing a gun at me rather than a twig, and that I know that your gun is loaded rather than having just been disassembled for cleaning, and suppose I know that you intend to shoot me rather than give me a million bucks. Should I shoot you? Maybe this is an anti-gun sentiment coming out, but I think it is far from obvious that I should.

Compare this case to another. In this case, I know that you are pointing a gun at me rather than any non-lethal item, and I know that your gun is loaded rather than merely having the appearance of being loaded from where I stand, and I know that you intend to shoot me rather than anyone else in the universe. Now I think I should shoot you first.

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Think of ethical internalism as a view that insists that moral beliefs and attitudes are intrinsically motivating. This kind of internalism/externalism issue has had little play in epistemology, and its absence is puzzling.

So suppose we distinguish epistemic principles from logico-inductive ones, as we find in Chisholm. Suppose we then consider the position that insists that e can’t be evidence for p for S unless S’s being aware of e or believing e inclines S to believe p; unless, that is, e’s presence in S’s noetic system is intrinsically motivating with regard to belief that p.

I’m leaving out lots of subtleties here, but the details aren’t my present concern, which is two-fold. First, would such a view be somehow a lot less plausible than the similar kind of internalism in ethics? Second, would that kind of internalism in epistemology somehow give grounds for thinking that evidential connections are nonfactive?