Certain Doubts

I was re-reading BonJour’s wonderful classic “Externalist Theories of Empirical Knowledge” and was struck by the following comments, which come right before BonJour presents his cases against externalism:

Clairvoyance, the alleged psychic power of perceiving or intuiting the existence and character of distant states of affairs without the aid of any sensory input, remains the subject of considerable scientific controversy. Although many would like to dismiss out of hand the very idea of such a cognitive power, there remains a certain amount of evidence in favor of its existence which it is difficult to entirely discount

Apparently, this passage caught my attention in one of my previous readings (there is a question mark on the margin), but I don’t remember discussing this with anyone. So now I ask you: what scientific controversy is BonJour talking about? What evidence in favor of the existence of clairvoyance is there?

Anyone know why some trackbacks appear on the blog, but the vast majority never appear? I can find discussion of posts from here in quite a few places, but most never show up…

UPDATE: I thought about deleting this post, because I figured things out. Actually, I remembered: I disabled trackbacks! I did it to prevent spamming entities from getting access to the site by referencing our posts. I’ve always thought I wasn’t very good at remembering things, and this post is documented evidence for posterity (or whatever is the lifespan in cyberspace) of that fact…

This new item requires some explanation. It’s the sum of the following:
permalink views x 10
home views x 2
archive views x 4
category views x 6
feed views (full content only) x 1
comments x 20
pingbacks x 50
trackbacks x 80

Add all of these together, and the percentage popularity rating listed at the bottom of each post is the percentage of the highest rated post on the blog. Too bad I didn’t have this running from the beginning…

UPDATE: I’ve changed the weighting per Keith’s suggestions in his comment on “New Stuff” so that comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks are irrelevant, and views are all weighted equally. And I’ll change “Most Popular” to “Most Read”.

What do you all think of this claim; I call it the Knowledge Norm for Belief:

If one believes that P, then one is committed to the view that one knows that P.

This is the thesis of a paper I’m working on, here. Brief argument:

One can’t rationally assert things like, “It is raining, but I don’t know that it is”; that generates Moore’s Paradox. But actually, Moore’s Paradox can be formulated equally well in terms of belief: it’s irrational to think things like that to oneself, even without saying anything. But this wouldn’t be the case, unless thinking the first half of that committed you to denying the second half. So thinking that it’s raining commits you to your knowing that it’s raining.

Amendment:
Here’s some more to get you all excited to read the paper. The Knowledge Norm is explained by two further principles:

Metacoherence:

Believing that P commits you to comprehensively endorsing (epistemically) your own belief.

The Endorsement Theory of Knowledge:

Knowledge attribution is the most comprehensive (epistemic) endorsement of belief.

Roughly, then, if you hold a belief, you have to think your belief is generally epistemically acceptable; and attributing knowledge to someone is giving the most comprehensive endorsement of this kind, that is, saying that they have a belief that is acceptable in all epistemic respects. (This is not rendered trivial by the meaning of “epistemically acceptable”; it is non-trivial and interesting that there is a kind of evaluation, which applies distinctively to beliefs, such that knowledge attribution gives a kind of comprehensive positive evaluation of that kind, of a belief.)

Over at TAR, Jeremy has a quite interesting argument about the factivity of knowledge. Actually having an argument is interesting, since the defenses of factivity that I’ve seen amount to nothing more than explaining away counterexamples one at a time.

As I understand his argument, it goes something like this:
1. “S knows whether p” is factive: If S knows whether p, then what S knows is true.
2. If S knows that p, then S knows whether p.
3. So, “S knows that p” is factive as well.

One could escape the argument if we could imagine conversations involving knowing-whether that weren’t factive. Or perhaps someone thinks premise 2 is false?

I’ve put up one more layout for your viewing pleasure. In the Themes box in the sidebar, there’s a new one called “Dark Maple”. It’s not quite what I want yet, but it’s close enough, and it’s time to return to philosophy!

I think I have the bugs worked out on a new feature here. The default layout has the posts in the middle column, but if you go down to the bottom of the right sidebar, there’s a Themes box, with two entries. “Journalized Sand” is the default theme, and the other theme is “Connections.” You can click on “Connections” if you want a different look to the site. I got it running this morning, but changed back because of some problems with it, but I think they are fixed now. Please let me know of any glitches.

UPDATE: I’ve now reversed the default theme to “Connections.” You can switch to the other theme if you prefer.

I ran across this intriguing site, but haven’t figured it out yet:
Blogshares.
As best I can tell, it appears to be a game where blogs are treated like stocks: bought and sold, with share value rising and falling. (The link is to the page they’ve created for Certain Doubts.)

One of the most interesting charts is one that tracks “market share” (of links to our site from other blogs), among other things. Apparently, our incredibly small market share has been on the rise since the end of June. What’s interesting is that this datum from the site corresponds quite well with a rise in the number of hits to our site in the month of July. The changes to the site are going to prevent accurate numbers of the month of July, but we are going to have more than 40,000 pageviews this month, compared to the average of 1K per day that has been holding pretty steady since October of 2004.

Check out our share price from July 17 to July 26: apparently, the value of our stock has risen by 165% in ten days! Shoulda bet da farm…

If you’re a contributor, you can now bypass the delay in comments appearing. If you’re logged in, then your comment will appear immediately, bypassing the anti-spam routine I’ve been using that requires approval of all comments by me before appearing. Let me know if it doesn’t work for you.

As you can see, the new system is up and running, with most things working again. I’ve added a new item in the left column that ranks popularity of posts. I’m not sure it will add any interest to the items already included in the right column–most read and most commented–but I thought I’d try it for awhile. It will take some time for it to be meaningful, since it depends on stats tracked only starting today.

I’m still working on previews for comments. I’ve got a plugin for it, but since I’m using something other than the standard WP Theme, I haven’t been able to figure out how to get it to work properly. If you know something about this, let me know.

I’ll put the technical matter below the fold to see if anyone knows what I’m doing wrong, but I’m also querying a wiki about it too.
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