Certain Doubts

Second call for The Fourth International Workshop on Computational Models of Scientific Reasoning and Applications CMSRA-IV, to be held September 21-23, 2005 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Invited Speakers:

Teddy Seidenfeld, H. A. Simon Professor of Statistics and Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon
Wiebe van der Hoek, Professor of Computer Science, University of Liverpool

Important Dates and Links:

CMSRA-IV welcomes submission of original work in all areas listed in the call. Submissions should be formatted using LNCS standards, facilitate blind reviewing by our Program Committee, and should not exceed 14 pages. Papers should be received by the submissions page no later than May 20, 2005. Authors will receive notification of the status of their papers no later than June 30, 2005. Camera ready versions of accepted conference papers are due July 15, 2005. Authors of accepted conference papers will be invited to submit for review extended versions of their work for a 2006 special issue of The Journal of Applied Logic devoted to the best papers of CMSRA-IV.

Lisbon is an unusually seductive city year-round, but is particularly charming in late September. Interesting talks during the day, good food and wine during the night…what more could you want? Questions? Please contact Gregory Wheeler or Luís Moniz Pereira.

It’s that time of year again. The forms for fall 2005 textbooks are sitting in my mailbox. And I am genuinely stuck.

I’m slated to teach a graduate course in the Philosophical Uses of Probability. I can expect the students to have genuine interest but uneven background in mathematics, ranging from folks who did undergraduate science and math majors down to people who dimly recall that once, in the senior year of highschool, or perhaps it was the junior year, they might have done some math.

I want to introduce them to probabilistic confirmation theory, discuss the varieties of Bayesianism, look at some philosophical problems that have been tackled using this apparatus (lots of good stuff here; one thing that comes to mind is John Earman’s assessment of the value of testimony in Hume’s Abject Failure), talk about some of the challenges (esp. the problems of old evidence) that have been raised against a broadly Bayesian approach, examine the classical statistical tradition, compare the classical and Bayesian approaches to some problems of inference, discuss the plausibility of direct inference as an answer to the problem of induction, and explore the possibility of giving a broadly Bayesian analysis of explanatory inference (vide the Lipton/Salmon exchange in the Hon and Rakover volume). Many of these issues are things I’ve published on, but they all require some stage setting before students can enter into the current debates. My job in this course is to do that stage setting in an accessible way.

So what shall I use for a text? (more…)

This is the final call for papers for the Fourth International Workshop on Scientific Models of Scientific Reasoning and Applications, CMSRA-IV Lisbon, to be held in Lisbon, Portugal, September 21-23, 2005. Note the extended deadlines: submission of abstracts are now due by May 24, 2005. (This will give you a key to upload your paper. Deadline for uploading full papers is May 29, 2005). Full instructions for working the paper submission webpage are here, and a recent NY Times travel article about Lisbon is here.

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In the previous post Jon writes:

I’m thinking of the following kinds of cases: empirical disputes, political disputes, moral disputes, etc. There are two, er, bizarre views here: the first is that unanimity of testimony is required for rational acceptance of the content of the testimony, and the other is the position… that no amount of disagreement matters.

How about this viewpoint? Testimony creates a presumption in its favor that requires defeating information to block rational acceptance, and the defeating information must itself be something more than that there is contrary testimony. What else? I can’t say, but I can list some things: some sketch of an explanation of why the testifier is mistaken or unreliable; the existence of contrary testimony plus a claim to the effect that there are no rational grounds on which to prefer one piece of testimony to another; etc. Central to the position is that testimony is a generative source of justification (or rationality or (non-Plantingian) warrant). Many here have worked on testimony much more than I, so I ask: does this position withstand scrutiny (or better: is there is precisified version of it that withstands scrutiny)?

My view is that a precisified version will withstand scrutiny, but that we need to distinguish a whole bunch of distinctions first. The question seems to me very sensitive to what exactly we mean by justification and rational acceptance. Maybe the best way to explain is to start with the Thesis

(T1) Testimony creates a presumption in its favor that requires defeating information to block rational acceptance, and the defeating information must itself be something more than that there is contrary testimony

and then precisify in stages. (more…)

Over at Prosblogion, they are having a discussion of the argument from religious experience. One of the comments says the following:

I’ve always thought that the argument from religious experience had a certain strength to it. In order for it to be cogent, only one of the billions of religious experiences needs to be veridical. In order for the argument to be proven false, every one of the billions of religious experiences must be false. With these large numbers, and the remarkable burden of proof that rests on those who wish to reject the argument, it seems that the argument from religious experience has a certain initial plausibility to it.

This point is surely mistaken.

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From Adrian Haddock, an announcement of a conference this June:

Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge
Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience
University of Glasgow
Saturday 4th & Sunday 5th June, 2005

Overview

Disjunctivism became well-known with work in the philosophy of perception by J. M. Hinton, Paul Snowdon and John McDowell. Today, interest in perceptual disjunctivism is greater than ever – as a recent issue of Philosophical Studies (Volume 120, Issue 1-3, 2004), given over to the idea, attests. Disjunctivism is also a feature of recent work in the philosophy of action and in epistemology. This conference brings together some of the most prominent writers on disjunctivism in an attempt to explore its implications for our understanding of perception, action, and knowledge. It should interest people working in each of these fields, and should be of particular interest to those working at the interface of issues in epistemology and the philosophy of mind.

Speakers

Jonathan Dancy (Reading/ Texas at Austin)
Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck, London)
Mike Martin (UCL)
Mohan Matthen (British Columbia)
Alan Millar (Stirling)
Ram Neta (Chapel Hill, North Carolina)
Duncan Pritchard (Stirling)
David-Hillel Ruben (NYU at London)
Sonia Sedivy (Toronto)

Registration

The conference will be held at the Glasgow University Union. Prospective participants are encouraged to register early. The full registration fee is £60, which includes lunch on both the Saturday and the Sunday, tea/coffee throughout the conference, and the conference dinner on the Saturday night (including wine). A reduced registration fee of £40 is available for those who do not wish to attend the conference dinner.

Further information about the conference, including a registration form and accommodation details, is available at the conference homepage:

http://www.gla.ac.uk/Acad/Philosophy/CSPE/disjconf

Alternatively, you can contact the conference organisers directly:

Dr. Fiona Macpherson (Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience, Department of Philosophy, University of Glasgow) (f.macpherson@philosophy.arts.gla.ac.uk)

Dr. Adrian Haddock (Knowledge, Mind and Value Project, Department of Philosophy, University of Stirling)

(adrian.haddock@stir.ac.uk)

Two distinct features of the Keynes-Kyburg conception of probability are: (i) probability represents a logical relation that is objective, and (ii) not all probabilities are comparable. The non-comparability of probability is the starting point for this work in progress, which is a study of conjunction and disjunction for rationally accepted propositions understood to be an event’s lower probability. An abstract appears below the fold. Comments welcome!

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Should have posted earlier, but there’s some epistemology going on at the Pacific as well. CD-er’s in bold again and I’ll put the info below the fold.

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I goofed and deleted the last entry on epistemology at the Central Division. So here it is again, below the fold. CD’er’s are in bold, and if I leave something out, add it to the comments.

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The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has two new entries on perception. Tim Crane’s The Problem of Perception is up, and so is Susanna Siegel’s The Contents of Perception. Together with Larry BonJour’s Epistemological Problems of Perception, there’s as good an introduction to the philosophy of perception here as anywhere.