Certain Doubts

I’ve been thinking more about closure, and what leads epistemologists to accept it in a theory of knowledge or justification. A standard way in which closure is defended is by appeal to something like intuitions. You consider all the examples you can think of, and note how closure is preserved. You also make some point about extending knowledge through competent deduction. All of this culminates in a predilection to explain away apparent counterexamples to closure, such as Dretske’s zebra/mule case.

Each of these steps can be questioned, especially when we consider how various deductive principles for first-order logic have to be abandoned when thinking about the logic of subjunctives. For a broad variety of subjunctives, hypothetical syllogism is just fine; but it only takes a good counterexample or two to undermine the rule. And notice that if you really want to preserve such principles for subjunctives, it is not that hard to see how to go contextual about them to preserve them (UPDATE: probably the best example here would be that of strengthening the antecedent, which is the example Heller uses). Moreover, extending knowledge through competent deduction doesn’t require a closure principle. It only requires that the method is justification-preserving or highly reliable, in a way that doesn’t normally introduce gettierization.

So the psychology of closure affirmation still puzzles me.

(more…)

Among the things I know are things that I can’t remember where or how I learned them.

If that description is correct, does it follow that I now know things for which I have no evidence? Well, if I pick one of them (say, the claim that I spent quite a bit of my childhood on land that was deeded to the Souix in the treaty of 1852, a treaty altered unilaterally by the U.S. in 1868 in such a way that the land was no longer within Souix territory), I can say the following: my evidence is that I learned it somewhere, sometime; probably by reading it in a book.

But consider my state before reflecting on it. I’ve known for quite some time this fact. During this entire time, was I also aware that I learned it from a book? Did I, throughout the entire time that I’ve known this fact, believed that I learned it from a book? I doubt that this is true. But then it looks like I’m stuck: there are times that I knew this fact, but had no evidence for it. What I did have, however, was a disposition to form beliefs which have contents that support the content of the claim I know to be true. But how could such a disposition itself be evidence?

One of the virtues touted by contextualists for their view is its capacity to preserve closure. But suppose one begins from a relevant alternatives perspective, and gives up closure because of it. One can strain to regain closure, as Stine does, but there are two problems here. First, there is a deep problem with a relevant alternatives theory that embraces closure, as I argue here. The second point is the motivation for embracing closure. As Mark Heller argues, in “Relevant Alternatives and Closure,” (AJP 99), the charge that closure must be abandoned shouldn’t be surprising if you’re attracted to modal epistemologies such as relevant alternatives theories. After all, quite a few of our well-entrenched first-order rules have to be abandoned in modal contexts as well–consider, for example, the failure of hypothetical syllogism for subjunctives. A RAT might go Stine’s way to avoid a loss of closure, but it is hard to see why one would be motivated by relevant alternatives considerations to do so.

The same points hold of contextualist theories, I think. Contextualism itself provides no special motivation for closure; it merely accommodates the view of those who are convinced of closure independently of their attraction to contextualism.

Here’s an interesting thought, however. If Heller is right, there are positive reasons to deny closure if one’s epistemology is modal, since the same reasons for abandoning some standard first-order principles apply to closure as well (namely, the shift between which worlds are relevant when semantically evaluating the conclusions of each argument). But then we should expect RAT’s who are also contextualists to be anti-closure contextualists.

I think I have an explanation. Those attracted to closure are so attracted on the basis of considerations that appeal to factors other than those at play in relevant alternative theories. For example, perhaps one accepts closure on the basis of broadly evidentialist considerations, and then transports that commitment into one’s explicit theory that embraces both the ideas of contextualism and the relevant alternatives theory. If I’m right, there’s a moral to this story, but it’s so obvious I won’t mention it.

One way of becoming interested in virtue epistemology is to be interested first in traditional epistemology, and hope that talk of the virtues can be useful for traditional topics such as knowledge and justification.

There is another way, though, that is interesting to think about. Think about the tradition in ethics that asks us to use thicker ethical concepts. We might think the same way in epistemology. One might think that, just as the language of right and good is rather thin, so is talk about justification and rationality. So, maybe, we’d begin elsewhere.

(more…)

I’d like to see what you think about one (and a half) versions of the surprise examination paradox. I’m not actually sure this case is paradoxical; it’s a variant of one of the variants Williamson considers in Knowledge and Its Limits.

It goes like this:

Mr. Chips is teaching a class that meets Monday through Friday for the whole semester (which is, let’s say, ten weeks long). On the first day of class, he announces, “There will be a test one day during the semester; I’ve scheduled it already, but I won’t tell you when it is yet.”

On the second day of class, he announces, “About that test: It’s not on the last day; and if it is on a certain day, you can’t come to know now that it’s on the next day–unless yesterday you already knew that it wasn’t on the next day. And when I say ‘next day’, I’m counting weekends.”

Mr. Chips is extraordinarily reliable, such that it would be reasonable to take any ordinary assertion of his as conferring knowledge. (more…)

Here’s a question about norms of assertion. As I see it, it makes little sense to require that the norms be indefeasible, so I’ll assume here that they’re not.

This assumption is useful for a variety of cases where we don’t seem to demand much of assertion. For example, we don’t complain when Gil Harman disavows believing the things he defends in print. Maybe the audience was in shock at the admission, but I doubt it. Now, if he had said he thought what he defends is false and thought so at the time of the defense, he’d probably hear about it. But in theoretical contexts, it looks like lack of belief does not always raise ire, and need not.

The same point about philosophical assertion holds for the positive epistemic status needed for knowledge. Most of us know that we don’t know the truth of the positive theses we assert. And our audiences know that as well, but they don’t complain that we have no business opening our mouths.

Positing defeasible norms of assertion allows quite a range of views on the matter to be compatible with these data. The question is whether the data about cases where belief and justification (of the sort needed for knowledge) are absent can all be handled by the defeasibility admission. Thoughts appreciated.

After the wonderful REC conference, I’ve been thinking some about the relationship between philosophy of language and various accounts of our use of the term ‘knows’ and its cognates. What follows are some thoughts about the connections between semantical theory as discussed in Jason’s nice earlier post here, and my own attractions to Kaplanian structure for semantical theories. What I’m trying to grasp is a certain kind of logical space for epistemological theories, and so I’ll abstract away from specifics of semantical theories to the major categories I see. And maybe those more versed in semantics than I can provide further, or alternative, illumination…

Logically perfect languages require very little complexity in a semantical theory, compared with what is needed for messier, natural languages. For a logically perfect language, we need a function from sentences to truth-values, and though the account of the function itself might be quite complicated, that’s about all we need.

But natural languages have various features that logically perfect languages don’t.

(more…)

OK, the semester is over, and I’m ready to vent. (Yes, I know I’ve already done it, but the urge to vent seems to recur more often in some of us…) This time it’s about gripes I have about student papers. Not the usual ones, like misspellings (”Plagitigna” “Chisum” and worst of all “Kavanig”!) and poor grammar; not even absurd structure or total lack of it, or attempts at arguments that make you shake your head in disbelief. No, this is about true minutiae on the grand scale of sins of the paper. And be sure to contribute your own in the comments!

I’ll start with two for Peter Markie:
1. Confusing “like” and “as”. I’ll let him explain himself on this one, but you’ve never seen such a gleam in the eye at finding it!
2. Confusing adverbs and adjectives, as in “Oh, it hurts so bad” when it should be “Oh, it hurts so badly”. (Of course, if it’s quoted in dialogue, he’s got no case…)

But here are some of mine:
1. Learned from journalists: using “refute” when you mean “rebut”. Either that, or it’s an expression of inordinate optimism, as in “In this section I will refute the objection to my view arising from virtue epistemology.” Maybe so, but I think you meant “rebut”; and even if you didn’t, it is a wiser choice: my standards for refutations are pretty high, but rebuttals aren’t nearly so difficult to come by!

2. “I could care less”. If you can’t see what my complaint is here, then read the antecedent of this conditional as “if you can see what my complaint is here”.

3. Burden of proof arguments. Leave them in the courtroom where they belong. Jeez…enough already!

4. Confusion on idioms, such as “for all intensive purposes.” OK, that’s not really an idiom confusion, but how about “cut and dry” as in “the inability of position X to explain Y is rather cut and dry.” Or try: “beyond the pail”, “eyes pealed” (poor guy…), “freighty cat”, “stand to loose”, “veil of tears”, “reek havoc”, etc.

5. Getting confused on an explanation of analogy argument by thinking that “A is like B” is an identity statement. Like, think about it…

OK, you’re turn…

Sosa raises the problem of the speckled hen for Fumerton’s account of justification, an account that depends on direct acquaintance with experiential states and the with the relationship of correspondence between these states and certain facts. The example involves the experience of a hen with 48 speckles, but where any belief formed on the basis of such an experience is unjustified (after all, if you’re a normal human being, forming such a specific belief upon seeing such a hen would be ridiculous).

I’m looking at a draft of a response to this problem by Rich, which includes a response of the sort I indicate below. But first, there is one kind of response to this problem that seems not to work. Rich agrees that it doesn’t work, though I think his reasons are a bit different from mine. The account asks us to distinguish between properties of the experience that one notices and properties that one doesn’t. So, on this account, one notices the property of being a hen and having speckles, but not the property of having 48 speckles, and that’s why we’re not justified in believing that the hen has 48 speckles.

(more…)

There is a growing number of those who smell the scent of pragmatic factors in epistemic justification and knowledge. On the former, it might be interesting to see how defenders of the view want to avoid the following argument, an argument that relies on a constraint on a theory of justification. The constraint is in the following ballpark: learning some epistemology shouldn’t undermine justification. I’ll make this more precise below.

I’ll give a first argument that even the pragmatists should be happy to accept, and then extend it in a way they’ll have to reject. After that, I’ll give a couple of ways of resisting the argument.

(more…)