Certain Doubts

Posts by me will take on a more intermittent quality over the rest of the summer. I’ll be travelling some, but the main reasons are two. First, I’ve agreed to give some talks next year, and it’s always better to feel comfortable with your views in such situations (even if . . .), and that’s going to take some work. Second, I’ve seen my way through on a book project that ties together my interests in propositionalism (the anti-(reliabilism/properfunctionalism/virtueepistemology) view I’ve defended in several places), coherentist theories of justification, the nature of understanding, and value-driven approaches to epistemology. I think I now see how to defend a coherentist propositionalism about justification that is value-driven and forms a basis for an account of understanding. The key idea is to identify what I will call a “neutral” starting point: propositional contents that play the same role in the story no matter whether they are encoded in experiential states or in belief states. Combined with a suitable grasp of what makes justification matter to cognitive agents, such a neutral starting point provides a satisfying resolution to Sellars’ Problem and to Pollock’s Challenge. The former is well-known, and the latter is, to my mind, the strongest objection to propositionalism available. Pollock claims that justificatory relations are relations between mental states, not between their contents, since the same content can be the content of a variety of mental states. Whether that content functions so as to justify a given belief with a given content depends on what particular (kind of) mental state it is encoded in, for a belief with content p cannot justify itself, and yet an experience with content p can justify this belief.

Besides, Branden’s review of the Bovens-Hartmann book on bayesian epistemology has convinced me that I need to spend some time on it! (For the record, Branden, here’s my take: nobody should like L5; L4 looks right, and some form of L3 looks good as well; but L2 is not compelling, and L1 isn’t the right approach for a coherentist to take toward the issue of the truth connection, so they shouldn’t endorse it. There. I’ve said it. Now I’ll go read the book to see where I’m wrong!)

Suppose you wanted to teach epistemology using sources other than those by philosophers. You want to use literature, science, and other kinds of things when they provide a vehicle for discussing important epistemological issues.

To get things started, here’s one idea: “The Tree of Knowledge,” by Henry James (thanks to Robert Johnson for the suggestion). It raises interesting questions about the value of knowledge, in particular. Other ideas?

Foley says the following about irresponsible ignorance:

If I do not have beliefs one way or the other about P, but it is epistemically rational for me to believe that I have not expended enough time and effort in arriving at an opinion about P, given its importance, then my ignorance is irresponsible. (”Response to Woltersdorff,” Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, pp. 338-9

The concept of irresponsible ignorance is important for Foley to explain. He maintains that the fundamental notion of rationality is epistemic rationality and that our ordinary ways of assessing cognitive states can be explained in terms of this fundamental notion. Woltersdorff’s challenge is that irresponsible ignorance is not explained by Foley, and yet it is an important way in which we evaluate cognitive states.

I don’t think Woltersdorff’s challenge is met by the above account.

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At Erfurt, September 8-10, 2005. Conference announcement and program is here, and speakers include CD’s own Tim Williamson and Ernie Sosa.

The most heartwarming title of a talk at the conference goes to Frank Jackson:

“On Not Forgetting the Epistemology”

Thanks to enwe’s metablog for the pointer.

Uriah Kriegel defends the SOM Theory of consciousness, and I’m thinking about the application of the view to epistemological theories. To get to the application stage, we need to assume the following:
1. Conscious states have content, since they are assessable for accuracy.
2. The content in question is narrow content, since only such content can accurately be described as “present to the mind”.
3. Every conscious mental state M is constituted at least in part by an awareness of M.

Kriegel’s own version of 3. is that the constitution relation is identity, so that the resulting theory is a self-referential version of SOM. So the claim central to his version is:

A mental state M of a subject S is conscious iff there is a mental state M* that is a part of M and a mental state M** that is a part of M*, and M* is a representation of M**.

The simplest case here is where M=M*=M**, but my interest here is not in the variety of relationships here, but rather in the representation claim, so I’ll stick with the simplest theory on which M* must be a representation of M.

The question is what the representation must be and what mode it involves.

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Williamson and Hawthorne, among others, endorse a closure principle about knowledge that employs the concept of a competent deduction. The straightforward version is that if you know p and competently deduce q from p, then you know q. As most realize, there are qualifications needed, but I’ll ignore them here, as I did in the previous post about this idea.

Instead, I’ll remark on what competent deduction has to be like for this principle or a close cousin of it to be adequate. A first obvious point is that we must understand the phrase as a success term. First, the conclusion has to follow from the premise. Second, felicitous mistakes must not occur, though this is a bit murkier. For example, suppose a person misapplies a rule in reaching the conclusion, but the conclusion could have been reached by a correct application of a different rule. Maybe there’s a way to allow some such mistakes while ruling out others, but that will be hard. The fact of the mistake is surely a defeater, but if I don’t see how the fact that a different rule could have been used might be an overrider in some cases but not in others. So I’ll just assume that mistakes always undermine knowledge.

Surely competent deduction is not just correct deduction, however.

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One of my concerns about the Academy is the state of its administration. I’ve got no hard data on this score, but there don’t seem to be that many Foleys around (some though: Holly Smith, Myles Brand, and Marshall Swain come to mind, but that seems like a quite small number of elite philosophers in such positions). One explanation would be that there aren’t that many good philosophers interested in such positions, but I think that’s not quite right. I’ve been talking with friends at some recent conferences about this issue, and have learned of superbly qualified and very impressive individuals who, at least in principle, are open to considering such positions.

There is no Platonic vision of the philosopher-king behind these remarks, but there are two points worth mentioning. First, if we control for other factors, smarter is better when it comes to administrators. Anyway, I’ll leave as suppressed premises the rest of this argument! Second, and this is most relevant here, the future of philosophy in the Academy is not enough of a given that we don’t need people in such positions. We need people who understand the importance of philosophy to the Academy, and there is no better way to achieve that than to find ways to get the Foleys of our discipline in such positions.

These points, I expect, are commonly appreciated among philosophers, but if they are, I wonder about the lack of representation here. Maybe it’s that we are a small discipline and lose out to more powerful departments. Maybe it’s that there aren’t that many philosophers willing to take on such positions (though the discussions referred to above make me suspicious of this explanation). Maybe it’s that philosophers as a group are not gifted at the kind of political calculations necessary to make such appointments happen. Any other explanations? In any case, it’s worth seeing what we can do about this, and I’d be happy to recommend some of the people I’ve heard about if your university will be doing a search next year. It is probably best done by email, and I would need to get permission before passing any names along, but this is certainly worth looking into.

Williamson and Hawthorne, among others, endorse a closure principle about knowledge that employs the concept of a competent deduction. The straightforward version is that if you know p and competently deduce q from p, then you know q. As most realize, there are qualifications needed, but I’ll ignore them here.

Here’s a question about the principle. Suppose a competent deduction of q from p by S occurs, and suppose that the deduction is constituted by a certain sequence of brain states in S. Now, suppose we have another person, S’, just as competent at deduction as S who also knows p. Further, suppose that a mad neuroscientist produces in S’ the same sequence of brain states that constituted the deduction of q from p by S. Did S’ just competently deduce q from p?

Another question. Assume S’ comes to believe q as a result of what the neuroscientist does. Does S know q?

My internet connection supplier had a problem last night that shut down my access. I don’t know if it will be back up today, but if you comment and it doesn’t show up for quite a while, it’s because I don’t have internet access at home yet and so wasn’t able to approve the comment (a control I’ve put in place to keep the site from being filled with spam).

Update: everything is working now, so there shouldn’t be any delays out of the ordinary.

Over coffee yesterday, Peter told me of the following Dretske view (it’s in one of the recent Blackwell volumes edited by Steup, I think, but I don’t recall which one Peter said). To be appeared to banana-ly, one must be appeared to yellow-ly and some-particular-shape-ly. The banana appearance causes the belief that the object is a banana, and the other appearances cause their respective beliefs as well. So the banana belief is noninferential, but it depends on the more basic perceptual states in a way that requires for its justification some reason to think that yellow things shaped in this particular way are usually bananas.

Peter and I thought this account mistaken. It is true that there are basic perceptual properties, such as color ones, and non-basic perceptual properties, such as those involving natural kind terms. It may also be a necessary truth, at least for beings who learn from perceptual mechanisms. The initial cognitive activity of a belief-forming system relies on the existence of the basic properties, and uses these to develop the ability to perceive non-basic properties. This etiological point may also carry on throughout the life of the belief-forming system, so that in every case of perceiving non-basic properties, the basic ones are there as well and the non-basic ones depend at that very moment on the basic ones. Dretske describes this dependence as, according to Peter, “logical dependence”, and presumably means to contrast this kind of dependence with the etiological point made earlier.

But the logical dependence point is mistaken, both of us thought.

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