Certain Doubts

I’m working on Duncan Pritchard’s book, writing a substantial notice of it for PPR. One of the central elements in Duncan’s thinking is the idea he gets from Wittgenstein that there are bedrock propositions that fall outside standard epistemological assessment (he calls them “hinge” propositions). They don’t count as known or justified or rational, or something in that neighborhood.

It struck me, in noting this feature, the growing sentiment in this direction in recent epistemology. Gil Harman is defending a version of assumptional epistemology, and one way to understand Schaffer’s contrastivism is along the same lines (Jonathan uses the neat encapsulation phrase “what is presupposed rather than proved” in describing his view). And, of course, these views share a lot in common with the denials of closure found in Dretske’s work and in Nozick’s as well. I haven’t seen what Duncan has to say about closure yet, but I expect something akin to Dretske’s idea that closure is fine so long as the entailed claim isn’t a “heavyweight” one (though Duncan would likely call it a “hinge proposition” instead).

Contextualists like to claim that they hold the middle ground between skeptics on the one hand and Mooreans on the other, but they also can claim to hold the middle ground between assumptionalists and non-assumptionalists (of which Moore is a paradigm example). They are not alone on this middle ground, of course–there are also the invariantists who espouse pragmatic encroachment into the epistemic realm (e.g., Stanley, Hawthorne, McGrath&Fantl).

For those of us not the least inclined toward being sucked into the black hole of skeptical epistemology, this taxonomy is more congenial to our philosophical temperaments and not discussed as much as it deserves. There is the literature on closure, which may be the Achilles’ heel of assumptional epistemology, but the jury is still out on this question. But there is little direct discussion in mainstream epistemology addressing the primary and substantive commitment of assumptional epistemology. Or perhaps I’ve missed a body of literature on the subject?

October 20-21, 2007, with a deadline for the call for papers of August 5. The keynote speaker is Jim Pryor, with Earl Conee commenting. More information can be found here.

Scheduled for January 12-13, 2007. Keynote speaker is Jason Stanley, and the conference website, with call for papers, can be found here.

On 14/15 September 2006, there will be a workshop about implicit definitions and a priori knowledge in Berlin. Among the speakers are Tim Williamsson, Jason Stanley, Paul Horwich, Crispin Wright, and Dave Chalmers. The website for the conference can be found here.

Thanks to Vanessa Morlock for bringing this event to my attention. Given the workshop format, early registration will be important because of the limit on the number of participants.

How is a priori knowledge possible? The dominant recent response on the rationalist (pro-a priori) side to Benacerraf-style worries has been the conceptualist one, featuring prominent thinkers like Peacocke, Boghossian, Jackson, perhaps Hale and C. Wright, and a host of their followers. The approach concentrates upon our grasp of relevant concepts and upon their alleged a priori connections, and attempts to account for a priori knowledge in terms of the grasp. It attempts to preserve realistically factual character or substantiality of a priori knowledge. At the same time typical recent conceptualists subscribe to for a version of naturalism, albeit a somewhat weak one, and attempt to neutralize the worries traditionally connected to causal or causal-like explanations. The idea is that the mere possession of concepts, no matter how it has been arrived at, provides the thinker with substantial (factual) knowledge about the items concepts refer to. And this is valid for all concepts, empirical, mathematical, moral, or social-conventional; there is nothing very special about the traditional “a priori concepts” like mathematical or moral ones. The conceptualist development has been quite impressive, but there are some residual worries. The story is just too good to be true.
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I failed to note our second anniversary, which was June 9th. Thanks to all who have contributed over the past two years. The conversations here have been as good as any I’ve ever had in philosophy!

I’ll start with some unoriginal thoughts on originality here, because I think they lead to an interesting conclusion. Originality is an important intellectual virtue. In some, it looks more like a vice, because some people do not control their interest in being original by a metavirtue that recommends a decent balance between the impetus toward originality and the desire for sane and rational belief. Even so, traits don’t cease to be virtues just because they are out of balance in some individuals. So let’s stick with the idea that originality is a virtue.

It is not a truth-conducive virtue, however.

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Michael Hand just called me to ask a question, and thought I’d post about it. He seems to recall seeing a passing remark in some David Lewis paper against antirealist attempts to substitute some notion of warrant in place of truth in the theory of meaning, but can’t remember where. The remark was a very cursory argument against such attempts, to the effect that any clarification of the meaning of warrant will have to appeal to the concept of truth anyway (perhaps through some connection to likelihood of truth), so the antirealist attempts to replace truth with warrant are bound to fail.

I don’t recall seeing any such argument in Lewis, but others know his work better. Michael also wondered about the argument, whether epistemologists talk much about it, and whether it is thought to be a good argument. I told him what I thought, but I’d rather see what others think before saying here. Any thoughts on either question?

Externalists typically hold a strong interpretation of the truth connection. They hold that there must be a logical connection between justification and truth, that somehow or in some way, whatever factors make for justification must also make for objective likelihood of truth.

Internalists could subjectivize this requirement and hold that whatever factors make for justification must also make for subjective likelihood of truth, but they typically don’t go this route. Here the paradigms for internalism I take to be Chisholm and Lehrer, since they don’t endorse a view that they admit entails the strongest version of skepticism as does BonJour. These paradigm internalists don’t endorse the objective truth connection nor do they endorse the subjective version either. Chisholm wrote about the hope that our justified beliefs would be true (and Keith has endorsed a similar idea at least in conversation), and sometimes talked of iterational principles, such as when he claimed that justification doesn’t imply likelihood or probability of truth, but at most the likelihood or probability that our beliefs are likely to be or probably true.

There is now, however, a large body of literature on the connection between coherence and truth, expecting an increase in coherence to be correlated, at least under certain circumstances, with an increase of probability. To the extent that a coherentist takes a cue from Chisholm, as Lehrer clearly does, I don’t see why an internalist coherentist would find this assumption plausible. Instead, I think what one should have expected to see on the formal side is an investigation of the question of the conditions under which coherence is confirmation-inducing. In this respect, one would have expected formal investigations more like the nice paper by Luca Moretti with the fitting title “Ways in which Coherence is Confirmation Conducive”, rather than the truth conducive investigations that I have seen to this point.

Total pageviews for last month: 53,378, another new record.

Top-read posts for the month were:

1 Jim Hawthorne on the logic of nonmonotonic conditionals 1,674
2 Norms of Assertion and Constitutive Rules 1,669
3 Paradox vs. Surprise 1,641
4 The Logic of Appearing 884
5 The Value of Truth and the Disvalue of Pain 686
6 "Tall" Tales 673
7 Characterizing a Fogbank: What Is Postmodernism, and Why Do I Take Such a Dim View of it? 652
8 von Fintel and Gillies Against Relativism for Epistemic Modals 542
9 Against the "For an F" Myth: Drafts of Papers on Gradable Adjectives 464
10 Disagreement with Philosophical Superiors 358