Certain Doubts

Following a couple of brief notes on what I call the “canonical form” of a paradox and on how the Paradox of Inference – the problem derived from Lewis Carroll’s dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise – has been received in the literature, I offer what seems to me a philosophically useful version of the paradox. This version of the problem places it more clearly into the epistemologist’s hands than does the original version.

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In Greg’s comment here, he notes correctly that when we form beliefs, we often do so on the basis of things assumed. In the example there, my wife says something, and I respond in a way that shows that I assumed that she wasn’t trying to trick me and that she thought there was something surprising about the case.

My question here is just what an assumption is. I agree that I assumed these things in the exchange in question, but it is not true that I thought of these claims, or drew inferences running through the claims either.

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DEADLINE EXTENSION: The deadline for submissions for the “Formal Epistemology” special issue of “Studia Logica” has been extended until February 15, 2006. Please send submissions and/or inquiries to the editor of this issue: Branden Fitelson (branden @fitelson.org).

Here’s a lighthearted example for a holiday weekend. Some background: my son often helps his girlfriend babysit for a brother/sister pair who are 3 and 5. He told my wife a story about one of them being unable to make the ‘m’ sound, so instead of saying, “I want to see a movie,” what comes out is “I want to see a wovie.”

Carol (my wife) asks me, “which of S and C would you expect the story to be true of?” I answered, “the older one, because you wouldn’t be asking me if it were the younger.” Pissed her off because she thinks the obvious answer is the younger one. So I told her I was taking into account the additional evidence that she was asking me the question.

In reflecting on the example, I wonder if it would be irrational (or unjustified, if you prefer), after being asked, to still think that the answer is the younger one. To do so, you’d have to fail to take account of the fact that you are being asked the question. Moreover, it’s not as if you didn’t notice that you were being asked, and you also know that it is relevant to the answer in question. So it’s evidence regarding the correct answer, and it’s evidence you possess. But it’s hard to see how the view that the correct answer is “the younger” is irrational. If asked about the implications of being asked the question, the answer would likely be: “Oh, I didn’t think of that.” And that’s a legitimate excuse.

If both answers can be rational, evidentialists need to talk both about the nature of your evidence and what you make of it, in order to allow the rationality of both answers. The phrase “the totality of your evidence” must include both the evidence and what one makes of it. Counting the latter as part of the totality of one’s evidence strikes me as a bit of a stretch, but I won’t press that point here.

The alternative is to say that you are irrational if you answer “the younger”. That seems wrong, and the fact that my wife is still pissed off at me for ruining the story is evidence that it’s not irrational (I believe I heard the remark “why can’t you just be normal sometimes”)…

I’ve been thinking over the past few months about the notion of epistemic obligations and permissions, and will record a few thoughts here. There’s also a quite nice discussion going on at TAR about the subject, prompted by Roger White’s piece in the new Philosophical Perspectives.

Quite a few epistemologists think we have intellectual obligations regarding what to believe. I won’t object here to the idea that there are intellectual obligations, but what interests me more is the idea of epistemic permissions. In particular, I’m interested in the restrictive view that limits permissions to obligations, that (purely intellectual) permission can’t outrun obligation. Such a view would seem to be at a disadvantage, since the concepts of permission and obligation do not usually coincide. How fast you are legally permitted to drive is usually faster than the speed you are legally obligated to drive; your moral permissions vastly outstrip your moral obligations, etc.

What interests me about the restrictive view is what the view is, precisely, and what a theory of evidence will have to look like for the view to look plausible. Here I’ll comment on the first, and maybe get to the second point in another post. The goal I’m aiming for is to show that nobody holds the restrictive view.

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The deadline for submissions to the Special Issue of Social Epistemology on “Collective Knowledge and Collective Knowers” has been extended. Extended abstracts (750-1500 words) are due March 1, 2006. Full papers are due August 15, 2006. For more information, see http://www.sir.arizona.edu/faculty/mathiesen/CFP.html.

This blog has been around for a bit, and I should have noted it sooner. It is Philosophy Conferences and Calls for Papers, and is maintained by Tina Huggins, a graduate student at FSU. It’s a very nice service to the profession, and well worth including in your RSS feed.

EPISTEME: Journal of Social Epistemology
http://www.episteme.us.com

2006 CONFERENCE:
WHEN DIFFERENCE MAKES A DIFFERENCE: EPISTEMIC DIVERSITY AND DISSENT

CALL FOR PAPERS

EPISTEME will hold its third annual conference at the University of Toronto on June 2-3, 2006. The focus of this year’s meeting, which will be run as a workshop, is a cluster of questions about the epistemic implications of diversity among knowers and the epistemic functions of dissent within and between communities of knowers. What constitutes epistemically relevant diversity and epistemically appropriate dissent? How does social and cultural, as well as cognitive, difference enrich the resources of an epistemic community? When is dissent productive, and why?

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

Please submit electronically
an extended abstract of 1-2 pages in length
and a short biographical sketch
(with references to or reprints of related work)

BY: February 15, 2006
TO: Alison Wylie

A special issue of EPISTEME, containing a selection of presented papers, will be released in conjunction with the conference. Alison Wylie (University of Washington, Seattle) will be the Guest Editor of the journal issue and James Robert Brown (University of Toronto) will host the conference.

Confirmed participants include: Elizabeth S. Anderson (University of Michigan), John Beatty (University of British Columbia), Sue Campbell (Dalhousie University), Miranda Fricker (Birkbeck College University of London), Alvin Goldman (Rutgers University), Miriam Solomon (Temple University), Daniel Marc Weinstock (Université de Montréal), and Alison Wylie (University of Washington).

Conference organizers are: Alison Wylie, program (University of Washington); James Robert Brown, local arrangements (University of Toronto); Alvin Goldman, Episteme editor (Rutgers University).

Here’s another google search that brought someone here: they were looking for a “perfectly rational ass”.

All of you who stood up should sit down, right now. . . for two reasons, if you’re lucky. . . (OK, if you’re into use/mention confusions, three reasons. . .)

And it is on epistemology. Contents below the fold (with CD-ers in bold), and here’s Blackwell’s link.
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