Certain Doubts

June 25-27, 2007
Brussels, Belgium
http://www.tark.be

Sponsors

University of Namur, CORE – University of Louvain, CEREC – Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, and National Fund for Scientific Research(FNRS)

About the Conference

The mission of the TARK conferences is to bring together researchers from a wide variety of fields, including Artificial Intelligence, Cryptography, Distributed Computing, Economics and Game Theory,Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology, in order to further our understanding of interdisciplinary issues involving reasoning about rationality and knowledge. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, semantic models for knowledge, belief, and uncertainty, bounded rationality and resource-bounded reasoning, commonsense epistemic reasoning, epistemic logic, knowledge and action, applications of reasoning about knowledge and other mental states, belief revision,and foundations of multi-agent systems.

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Brian suggested here that a blog, maybe this one, could provide a useful service of trying to do what The Philosopher’s Annual was attempting to do.

Sounds like a great idea, though it might be more appropriate for this blog to focus on the best articles in epistemology. Before leaping into this, though, I wanted to mention it and get some feedback about whether it is worth doing and what kind of mechanism would be best for making the selections. So, 3 questions:

1. Is this worth doing?
2. Is it better to try to do all areas here or focus on epistemology?
3. If the answer to 1 is “yes,” what suggestions do you have for the kind of procedures to use?

Brian suggested here that a blog, maybe this one, could provide a useful service of trying to do what The Philosopher’s Annual was attempting to do.

Sounds like a great idea, though it might be more appropriate for this blog to focus on the best articles in epistemology. Before leaping into this, though, I wanted to mention it and get some feedback about whether it is worth doing and what kind of mechanism would be best for making the selections. So, 3 questions:

1. Is this worth doing?
2. Is it better to try to do all areas here or focus on epistemology?
3. If the answer to 1 is “yes,” what suggestions do you have for the kind of procedures to use?

Hamid Vahid sent this paper and has agreed to have it placed here for discussion. Dr. Vahid is with the Analytic Philosophy Faculty at the Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics (IPM) in Tehran, and given the growing interest in recent years concerning Moore’s proof and what value it has epistemically, it is a very timely paper. A word version can be downloaded here.

I thought it was worth observing the apparent passing of The Philosopher’s Annual (website here). The PA described its mission as follows:

Our attempt each year in The Philosopher’s Annual is as simple to state as it is admittedly impossible to fulfill: to select the ten best articles published in philosophy the previous year.

The PA’s run began with papers from the year 1978 in vol. 1, and appears to have ended with vol. 26, which was for papers from the year 2003.

I was on the Nominating Board at the end of that run. If I’m recalling correctly, I submitted nominations only one time. And if I’m remembering right, an e-mail went out to the nominators in fairly early 2005, asking for nominations for papers published in 2004, but no selections were ever announced for that year, and nominations weren’t even solicited in 2006 for the literature from 2005.

Those interested can see the lists of papers that appeared in the PA at the website, following the links for “CURRENT VOLUME” and “PAST VOLUMES.”

To make this post relevant to this epistemology blog, I’ll list, below the fold, the epistemology papers that appeared in PA.
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Suppose that there is a predictor – let us call him Peter – who is an astoundingly reliable predictor of what beliefs human beings will form. He is not infallible, but has in fact never made an incorrect prediction about what belief a human being will form. On tens of thousands of occasions, he has predicted what belief a human being will form, and on every single one of these occasions, his prediction is correct.

Now suppose that you know about Peter’s track record. Suppose that you also know that Peter has filled a big jar with a number of coins, and has made a prediction about what belief (if any) you will form about whether there is an odd or even number of coins in the jar, and then acted on his prediction as follows:

• If he predicted that you would believe that there is an odd number, he made sure that there was an odd number of coins in the jar;
• If he predicted that you would form the belief that there is an even number, he made sure that there was an even number of coins in the jar;
• If he predicted that you would not form any belief about the number of coins in the jar, then he filled the jar randomly, not caring whether there was an odd or an even number of coins in it.

In this case, I claim, whatever belief you form about the number of coins in the jar, it will be rational for you to form that belief. If you form the belief that there is an odd number, that belief is very probably true, and so it is rational for you to form this belief; and if you form the belief that there is an even number, that belief is also very probably true, and so it is rational for you to form that belief too.

If my claim is true, then it seems to show that the correct theory of rational belief is more like Evidential Decision Theory (EDT) than like Causal Decision Theory: The relevant probability that should guide one in rationally forming one’s beliefs with respect to a given proposition p is not the unconditional probability of p given the evidence, but the conditional probability that p has on the assumption that one believes it.

This also explains the following striking fact: Even though it might be highly probable on my evidence that It’s raining but I don’t believe it’s raining, this is not a belief that it is rational for me to form, because the conditional probability of this proposition on the assumption that I believe it is extremely low.

What evidential/motivational support relations do the following four claims (which all seem to be ‘internalist’ claims, in one sense or another) bear to one another?

1. Whether a person is justified in her doxastic attitude towards p (or whether a certain attitude towards p is justified for her) supervenes only on factors that are “internal to her perspective,” in some to-be-specified sense. (See John Greco’s essay in the book called Contemporary debates in Epistemology, Blackwell, 2005.)

2. The concept of justification is conceptually independent of the concept of truth; ‘S is justified in her doxastic attitude towards p’ (or ‘attitude D is justified for S’) can be defined without using the concept of truth. (See Chisholm’s definition of ‘internalism’ in Theory of Knowledge, which I think appears in all editions, certainly in the third.)

3. S is justified in her doxastic attitude towards p (or D is justified for her) only if S has evidence, reasons, or arguments that support the legitimacy of her adopting that doxastic attitude towards p. (See Ernest Sosa’s paper called “Philosophical Scepticism and Epistemic Circularity,” in a 1994 Aristotelian Society Supplement.)

4. S is justified in her doxastic attitude towards p only if S is aware (i.e. believes) that the doxastic attitude she takes towards p is justified. (Mutatis mutandis for a necessary condition on D being justified, for her.)

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Have intuitions, will travel — but not very far this time without your help. Recent work by Peter Klein on benign falsehoods leads to the recognition of conflicting intuitions about testimonial knowledge in a particularly bewildering case for all parties in the epistemology of testimony. In what follows, I sort through this thicket of problems with a view to laying out the hard choices. In the course of doing so, I also make some exploratory remarks for an epistemology of fiction.

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Many scholars now post drafts of articles they are writing online before they are accepted for publication. If a submitted article is going through a process of blind review, very often all that a reviewer has to do to to spoil the blindness of the review is to Google the title of the article. Do you think that the proliferation of posting works in progress online threatens the integrity of the blind review process? If so, does anyone have any suggestions about what to do? Simply telling reviewers (perhaps in a stern tone of voice) that they shouldn’t Google article titles does not seem to be a promising solution. And, although a single author who is concerned about having her paper reviewed blindly can simply avoid posting it online before acceptance, this too has its costs. Many scholars want to make their work available for discussion and comment before being accepted so that the article can be improved and so that their work can become part of an ongoing debate as soon as possible. Any ideas?