Certain Doubts

We’re having a workshop in the fall of 2006 here at Missouri. The dates are September 28-30, and the particular topic concerns the overlap between ethics and epistemology (touching on some of the same issues that have been posted and discussed quite extensively on this blog). The main speakers are:
Mike DePaul
Geoff Sayre-McCord
Scott Sturgeon
Brian Weatherson

I’ll put a link on the sidebar with more information when it becomes available.

It is obvious and well-known that it is one thing for it to appear to you that p is false, and another thing for it not to appear to you that p is true. The former prima facie justifies you in believing that ~p; the latter doesn’t.

Consider, then, know-how theories of perception. Such theories explain the way in which perception yields justification in terms of having learned how to identify the (kind of) truth in question on the basis of sensory input. It’s supposed to be like riding a bike: you’ve learned how to do it, and when you display your know-how, the result in the cognitive sphere is perceptual knowledge or justification.

Then suppose you are in a position where it doesn’t appear to you that p. Translate this into your favored perceptual theory: you’re not appeared to F-ly, there is no object of the sort required as a truthmaker for the proposition p, etc.

I wonder if such a theory can preserve the claim made in the first paragraph.

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Following up on the last post about the epistemological status of belief in free will, I suspect that the argument against free-willers (that they are hard-hearted) depends implicitly on the fact that it is a decidedly minority view, and if that’s right, one of the issues is the epistemic significance of disagreement by peers, which has been discussed here before. Here’s one more argument against a strong role for such disagreement. Let the issues and arguments surrounding free will be just as they are at present, with all parties aware of all the issues and the arguments of their opponents. Then let the non-epistemic facts change, that is, let the practical situation of the world change dramatically enough that all the non-free-willers change their view. (Maybe the free-willers convince by a Pascalian argument that belief in free will is somehow essential to a well-ordered society, and the social fabric is disintegrating so much that theory becomes commitment.) So, apart from the agreement/disagreement issue, nothing epistemic has changed. But now everyone agrees, and if the hypothesis is that disagreement by one’s peers is epistemically relevant, then our situation, in spite of the description, put the free-willers in an epistemically advantaged position over their present situation.

Moreover, the case is also relevant to the position that holds that agreement by peers is evidence in favor of a view. The elimination of disagreement by peers might improve one’s epistemic situation by eliminating defeaters, but the creation of additional evidence is another matter. In the present case, both positions must find the description given above incoherent–the description that it’s pragmatic features alone that have changed the situation.

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Over at the Garden of Forking Paths, they are having a discussion about the evidence for libertarianism regarding free will. Glossing details, the concern is that without strong reason to believe in free will, our punishment practices are not warranted. The next step of the argument is to question the quality of reasons for believing in free will, and to conclude that our punishment practices are too harsh (and that free-willers are hard-hearted).

The issue itself is interesting, and the epistemology is interesting as well. I’m inclined to think that we don’t know our positive views in philosophy, so if belief in free will counts as a philosophical view, we don’t know that it’s true. (We do know negative things in philosophy, of course, such as that the JTB analysis of knowledge is subject to counterexample, and if you push me on the difference between a positive and a negative thing in philosophy, I will raise my hands and surrender.)

Even so, one might think, that says nothing about whether we are justified in believing that we have free will. There are at least two interesting epistemological issues here.

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Consider the following sincere assertion in English:
“I don’t know whether Bush is the worst President of the last hundred years, but the evidence shows that he is.”

I’m trying to avoid using the language of epistemic justification here for the second conjunct and put the claim in more ordinary terminology. My question is whether such a remark is paradoxical. It strikes me that way, but I wonder if it strikes others the same way.

One might try to explain why it’s only unusual, though not paradoxical. It’s unusual because one ordinarily can’t distinguish between what one knows and what one is justified in believing. But not always. The usual kind of case in which one can recognize one’s own lack of knowledge even while also recognizing one’s justification is a lottery case: one can recognize that one doesn’t know that one’s ticket will lose, while at the same time recognizing that one is justified in believing that one’s ticket will lose.

But in such a case, we wouldn’t report that the evidence shows that our ticket will lose; we’d say something a bit more hedging than this. One might be tempted to think that the problem here is that “what the evidence shows” is easy to read as “what the evidence guarantees”. That makes the above assertion even more paradoxical, though, rather than merely unusual, for if the evidence guarantees p, then even the skeptic will agree that you know p.

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Over at Pea Soup, Jason Kawall considers Russ Shaffer-Landau’s argument tying realism in morality with what Russ takes to be an appropriate view in epistemology:

I think that intrinsic normativity is ineliminable. To see this, consider the parallels between conditions of epistemic and moral assessment. We say that agents, if they have reason to believe anything at all, have reasons to believe the truth, and to conform their reasoning to truth-preserving schemas, even if believing the truth is not conducive to the goals they set themselves (205).

I believe that there is intrinsic reason to think that two and two are four – the fact itself provides one with reason to believe it. […] The basic idea here is that certain things can be intrinsically normative – reason-giving independently of the value actually attached to them by agents (206).

I favor positions that tie the normativity of ethics and epistemology together, but I doubt this account will work.

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If you’re attracted at all to relevant alternatives theories in epistemology, you’ll find some attraction in the contrastivist suggestion that some epistemic predicates are 3-place predicates. For example, you might be attracted to the idea that knowledge is best represented in terms of S’s knowing that p rather than q, instead of simply in terms of S’s knowing that p.

Here’s a question about such an approach: can this contrastivist suggestion be maintained “all the way down”? That is, if we suppose that knowledge is best represented as a 3-place relation, and we hold that justification is necessary for knowledge, can we also hold that justification is as well? If so, then we should talk in terms of S’s being justified in believing p rather than q, instead of simply in terms of S’s being justified in believing p. Furthermore, if you’re an evidentialist, you’ll want to understand justification in terms of evidence, so to go contrastivist all the way down will require making sense of the idea of something’s being evidence for p rather than q, but not evidence for p rather than r (making, of course, the entirely reasonable assumption that what is justified is a function of the quality of one’s evidence).

I’m not sure, however, how to understand the idea of something’s being evidence for p rather than q.

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As a follow-up to the discussion he began here on epistemic possibility, Michael now has a draft of his paper on epistemic possibility at: http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/epistemic.pdf. Check it out!

Dale Matthew, a grad student at York, sent me a case that raises an interesting issue for evidentialists. Here’s the case:

It is the consensus of a scientific community that P. In coming to accept P they used all the available resources (theories, observation equipment, etc.) as best as they could. Further, in coming to accept P they were as epistemically responsible as they could be. In other words, they are blameless all around. But then a genius scientist, Insight, arrives on the scene, and through his sheer brilliance is able to discern that instead of P being true, -P is true. Further, Insight is able to discern that the basis on which the scientific community in question came to accept P made P unlikely to be true, highly improbable in fact. Insight relates his, well, insight to the scientific community and the community promptly recants its acceptance of P. Now was the community justified in accepting P before Insight arrived to save the day?

Notice that it is central to the case that the body of evidence is the same for Insight and the rest of the community; what’s different is the assessment error made by the community and the correction by Insight. Since it’s obvious that such cases can occur and that after being corrected by Insight, the community is no longer justified in accepting P, the evidentialist can’t accept the description that the community was justified before hearing from Insight and also hold that justification is a function of total evidence.

I believe this is the issue that Dale hangs his argument on, though he can correct me if I’m wrong. He’s hoping for responses from blog readers, and I’ll hold off commenting on the issue here in the main post to allow the case and the issue to stand on their own.

Sandy was here last weekend, and one of the issues that came up in discussion had to do with the internalism/externalism controversy and its connection with the Gettier problem. Sandy conjectured that externalists take, or are entitled to take, their condition to be what distinguishes knowledge from true belief, whereas internalists need not only their condition but also a condition to assuage Gettier.

My reaction was to cite the history of Plantinga’s similar approach, in which his early theory of warrant attempted to bypass the Gettier problem, identifying warrant first with whatever closes the gap between true belief and knowledge and later with that quantity enough of which turns true belief into knowledge. In response to criticisms from, among others, Swain, Feldman and Klein, in the collection of essays I edited on Plantinga’s theory, Plantinga came to see that some condition to assuage Gettier was needed in addition to his theory of warrant. I proffered that this history is instructive and shows that Goldberg’s conjecture should be rejected.

I’m beginning to have doubts, however.

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