Certain Doubts

I just noticed that Timothy Chappell’s article “Plato on Knowledge in the Theaetetus” is now available at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It’s very thorough and ends on a rather provocative note: the dialogue may be suggesting that understanding is more central both to knowledge and the theory of knowledge than we have thought.

Suppose, with Boghossian, that we distinguish epistemic rules and principles. Both are conditionals, but rules have imperatival consequents whereas principles are true or false. To each rule, there corresponds a principle: if the rule says “In C, believe p,” the principle can say either “In C, it is obligatory to believe p” or “In C, it is permissible to believe p.”

Let’s simplify a bit a say that a cognitive system operates in accord with a rule when the imperatival consequent is fulfilled and the antecedent describes the causal/explanatory factors that prompted (in the near enough past) the belief formation in question. We’ll have to say something at some point about deviant causation, but I’ll ignore that for now. Let’s then say, also simplifying, that the good rules are ones that, by operating in accord with them, a person can arrive at a doxastically justified belief. Not that this result is always achieved, but that it can be achieved, i.e., the rule specifies in its antecedent a possible basis for a doxastically justified belief.

Given this stagesetting, it is pretty obvious that the epistemic principles that correspond to the rules that we operate in accord with will be mostly false.

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I’m interested in a question in the neighborhood of the title, but not exactly. Suppose we think of epistemic principles as (propositional analogues of) rules of belief formation and revision (including reasoning but not limited to it), and that there is a difference between belief change in accord with a rule and belief change that follows a rule. If this is the right way to think about epistemic principles, then we should expect that they have something to do with the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification: only when a rule is followed can that principle be used in an explanation of why a belief is justified (rather than simply having a content that is justified, while the state or event of believing is itself unjustified).

If we assume that rule-following is essential in this way to the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification, then I think we’ll have to give a negative answer to the intended question.
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Greg Frost-Arnold at Pittsburgh has started a blog related to the philosophy of science called Obscure and Confused Ideas. It appears to have started on July 2, 2005, but I just ran across it, and it looks quite interesting and worth checking out.

Rich’s review of Alston’s Beyond Justification is now available here at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. It is a very helpful review, raising just the right questions while at the same time recognizing the significance of the book.

Fixed a few more things today. If you like one of the themes other than the default theme, you can now access the nice archives page without getting error messages.

The more important items for my own sanity have to do with spam. We’re now running both Bad Behavior and Spam-Karma2. I’ve kept spam off the site by moderating comments, but I’m tired of deleting 50-100 emails a day from sources telling us what a cool site we have. SK2 will stop that from happening, and BB is supposed to be good at stopping referrer spam as well, so the stats package will give more honest numbers in the future about traffic to the site as well as where they come from.

If the changes block you from the site in any way, please email me about it and I’ll try to sort out the problem.

Stew Cohen once argued that, though the language of justification regarding action was part of ordinary language, the language of justification regarding belief is not. I thought at the time that this was overstated, and so I watch for such language. I found another one, if Jorge Luis Borges counts:

He meditates on how he has shown himself capable of killing an idolater, but not of knowing for certain whether a Moslem is more justified in his beliefs than a Hindu. (from “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” in Ficciones)

Two new features sort of in place now.

Those of you who want previews of your comments before submitting them, I’ve finally gotten the plugin to work that gives live previews. They appear as you type, right below the comment box into which you place your comment.

I also have a nifty archives page in place as well, with a drill-down feature so that you can select the year, the month, and then the post. Right now, it only works with the default theme, so if you like one of the other two, you’ll have to wait a bit until I get those fixed as well.

In Knowledge and Its Place in Nature, Hilary offers an account of the nature of knowledge, in terms of reliably produced true belief, as well as an account of why knowledge matters, why knowledge is “worthy of pursuit” (p. 10). His answer is that the truth matters, even if you don’t care about it:

someone who cares about acting in a way that furthers the things he cares about, and that includes all of us, has pragmatic reasons to favor a cognitive system that is effective in generating truths, whether he cares about the truth or not.

I think the answer to the question isn’t adequate, and the question itself isn’t the right question to ask.

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Ram has a new paper called How to Naturalize Epistemology. I’ll put it on the “Works in Progress” page, and discussion is welcome here or separately to Ram. It’s good to see someone got something done this summer!

UPDATE: As of 8/9 at about 8:10 pm, there is a new version of the paper, using the same link above and the link in the Work in Progress page.

ANOTHER UPDATE: As of 9/6 at 9:40 am, there is another new version of the paper in place, same links as before