Certain Doubts

The UCLA Cognitive Systems Laboratory, in partnership with the Medical Imaging Informatics Group at the University of California, Los Angeles, have constructed a new blog to discuss causality, its principles, recent results, applications, and related philosophical controversies.
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I’ve been thinking about the connection between restrictivism and the equal weight view about rational disagreement. There are different versions of the equal weight view, but the rough idea is that the existence of disagreement has a tendency to undermine the rationality of one’s belief. What’s interesting is what kind of restrictivism must be accepted to undergird this view. In particular, the revised restrictivist position discussed here won’t be strong enough. Below the fold I say why.
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In defending (what I call) Restrictivism, Roger White, in the piece I talked about earlier here, characterizes the view something along the following lines: on the assumption that one takes some attitude toward a proposition, there is only one attitude that is permissible (for any given proposition and total body of evidence (or other good-making epistemic factors)).

(What I call) Optionalism is the view that more than one attitude can be permissible relative to some proposition and total evidence. Given this characterization of the opponent, one might expect Restrictivism to be characterized as the view that no cognitive attitude is merely permissible: any attitude is either forbidden or obligatory.

White doesn’t want to endorse this strong characterization because it conflicts with cognitive efficiency considerations that Harman has emphasized. Consider bigger and bigger disjunctions entailed by one’s total evidence. Who would want to claim that believing this things can’t be merely permissible? Since White doesn’t want such an argument to undermine Restrictivism, he adopts a conditional characterization of Restrictivism to avoid that result.

There is something surprising, though, about this particular way of avoiding Harman’s worries. What is surprising is that we no longer have any basis for saying that total evidence makes certain doxastic attitudes inappropriate. The conditional formulation leaves open the possibility that when one takes no attitude toward a proposition at all, any number of attitudes are permissible. But that possibility entails Optionalism, and Optionalism is supposed to be at least a contrary of Restrictivism.

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Fourth Annual Formal Epistemology Workshops, FEW 2007

The organizers are in the process of organizing the fourth annual formal
epistemology workshop. The purpose of these workshops will be to
bring together individuals, both faculty and graduate students, using
mathematical methods in epistemology in small focused meetings.
Topics treated will include but are not limited to:

* Ampliative inference (including inductive logic);
* Game theory and decision theory;
* Formal learning theory;
* Formal theories of coherence:
* Foundations of probability and statistics;
* Formal approaches to paradoxes of belief and/or action;
* Belief revision;
* Causal discovery.

More info below the fold.
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Here are three principles of varying plausibility:
1. There can’t be any justified inconsistencies: propositions which are justified for a person and which logically imply a contradiction.
2. There can’t be any justified contradictories: no instances of p being justified for a person while ~p is also justified for a person.
3. There can’t be any justified contradictions: no instance of p&~p can be justified for a person.

The question I want to ask here is whether these principles stand or fall together as a group.
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