Certain Doubts

Allan Hazlett over at Fake Barn Country has put together some interesting statistics about how many epistemology articles (and how many articles from other lemming areas) each of many leading journals has published in recent years: link. (His post is more than a week old, but I’ve just noticed it now.)

I have serious interests in the conditional fallacy, and just noticed that Dan Bonevac, Josh Dever, and CD’s David Sosa have a draft of a joint-authored paper on the logical structure of the fallacy here. It’s not epistemology, but the implications for epistemology are significant enough to make it worth mentioning.

The context of discussion is the conditional analysis of dispositions and finkish disposition counterexamples to such an account.

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One brand of skepticism claims that we cannot have knowledge because there are no true statements. In Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? (Oxford, 2004), a very clear and stimulating defense of moral objectivism, Russ Shafer-Landau argues that this form of skepticism—global nihilism—is self-refuting: “If there are no truths at all, then nihilism itself cannot be true. If we correctly apply the theory, it turns around and bites its own tail. If global nihilism is true, then there is at least one truth, and that is contrary to the claim global nihilism makes. Being self-contradictory, it cannot be true.” (p. 52)

I understand this argument to run as follows:
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In his Stanford entry on defeasible reasoning, Koons says the following:

In particular, a logical theory of defeasible consequence will have epistemological consequences. It is presumably true that an ideally rational thinker will have a set of beliefs that are closed under defeasible, as well as deductive, consequence.

I’m not sure either of the two claims are true, but I want to focus more on the claim about the defeasible consequence relation. (For deductive consequences, I think some closure principle is true, but even ideally rational thinkers do not engage in every deduction within their intellectual purview.)

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One more new Stanford entry: Rob Koon’s extensive and impressive piece on Defeasible Reasoning.

Another new Stanford entry in epistemology: Tom Senor’s Epistemological Problems of Memory.

There’s a conference August 25-27, 2005 in Amsterdam on Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Understanding. The organizers don’t explicitly mention the epistemological connection, but that’s not surprising, given the infancy of exploration of the concept of understanding in epistemology. Besides, Amsterdam!

In case you haven’t seen it yet, George Pappas’s entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia is now online, on Internalist and Externalist Conceptions of Epistemic Justification.

Suppose that coherentists can find a solution to the problem of justified inconsistent beliefs. I’ve argued that they can: the argument requires distinguishing between two kinds of necessary falsehoods and between ordinary and epistemic justification.

There’s still somewhat of a problem remaining, however. Given the distinctions above, a necessary falsehood can occur within a coherent belief system. The kinds of inconsistencies that can’t be tolerated await a solution to the question raised in the earlier post about evidence and propositions you’ve never considered. Once we determine how much of the set of logical consequences of your evidence set are evidenced by that set, then we can say exactly what kinds of inconsistent beliefs cannot be part of a coherent system and which can be. The important point, though, is that some impossibilities and perhaps some inconsistencies can be tolerated within a coherent system of beliefs.

On the whole, however, coherentists will be averse to inconsistency, and the question is why.

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Last Call for Application
VISU/SWC 2005
Extended Deadline: February 15, 2005

VIENNA INTERNATIONAL SUMMER UNIVERSITY
SCIENTIFIC WORLD CONCEPTIONS 2005

Chance and Necessity
Vienna, July 18-29, 2005
organized by the University of Vienna and the Institute Vienna Circle

A two-week high-level summer course on questions related to chance,
probability, and necessity from a historical and systematic
perspective.

Main Lecturers:
Theodore M. Porter (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
Wolfgang Spohn (University of Konstanz, Germany)
Assistant Lecturers:
Franz Huber (University of Konstanz, Germany)
Deborah R. Coen (Cambridge, Mass., USA)

More information here.