Certain Doubts

Back when I wrote “Contextualism: An Explanation and Defense” (in Greco, Sosa, ed., THE BLACKWELL GUIDE TO EPISTEMOLOGY, 1999), I included a section called, “A Brief History of Contextualism.” And it was indeed brief! I’m now writing a section of a paper with that same section title. I’m still trying to be brief, but am trying to update and, hopefully, improve my account. I’m wondering how my new history strikes others: Does my sense of how things went match that of other? Any complaints, suggestions, comments? So I’ll put my draft of that section below the fold.

I should say that (as was the case in my earlier paper referenced above) I discuss David Annis’s “A Contextualist Theory of Epistemic Justification” in another section of the paper.
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This New York Times article on Creepy-Crawly Robotics highlights the ascendancy of “biologically inspired” design ideas in robotics. Some sense of the impact of this idea can be seen in the following sequence of 4 videos about a challenging mobility problem: bipedal walking. It is very hard to get a two-legged robot to walk about a room, much less step up a curb or down a flight of stairs, without it landing in a heap. Compare this mechanical mummy-walk (exhibit 1) to Martijn Wisse’s elegant design study at Cornell (exhibit 2) of an old toy patent from 1912, for instance. It is simply gravity and mechanical design that propels Wisse’s design down the ramp; see here those same principles applied to a level-ground walker (exhibit 3) from Jim Collin’s laboratory. Finally, and most recently, this cool dinosaur (exhibit 4) from Gil Pratt’s MIT LegLab is simply stunning.

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Ken Taylor, at Philosophy Talk, explains some of his disappointment with epistemology here. John Greco was on the talk show this week, which is what prompted the post, but the post itself caught my attention for a couple of reasons. First, there are assumptions involved in the disappointment that, though common in the history of epistemology, are rarer in recent history: that refuting or answering the skeptic is logically connected to the possibility of knowledge, that knowing requires ruling out all alternative hypotheses, or that rational belief is different from knowledge on the issue of what needs to be ruled out (not to mention the pressing question of what epistemic concept is being expressed by terms such as “ruling out” and “refuting”).

But it was really something else that was telling in the post. After expressing disappointment about answering the skeptic, the post notes how such a failure leaves untouched something really important. It leaves untouched the nature of rational belief and rational inquiry. So instead of expressing disappointment with epistemology, what the post really does is offer a defense of value-driven epistemology! Greco, of course, would demur on the idea that addressing arguments for skepticism isn’t important, and I would too. But the story of much recent epistemology, even if it would find much to disagree with in the post, fits quite well with its more general point.

The 3rd Workshop on Combining Probability and Logic (Progic 2007) will be held at the University of Kent, September 5-7, 2007. The focus of this year’s workshop is probabilistic logics and probabilistic networks. Selected papers will appear in a special issue of the Journal of Applied Logic devoted to this theme, which is to be edited by Federica Russo, Jon Williamson, Rolf Haenni Sola, Jan-Willem Romeijn, Gregory Wheeler, and Fabio Cozman.

Invited Speakers:
Gert de Cooman (Ghent, Belgium)
Fabio Cozman (Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Linda van der Gaag (Utrecht, The Netherlands)
Stephan Hartmann (LSE, UK)
Colin Howson (LSE, UK)
Manfred Jaeger (Aalborg, Denmark)
David Makinson (LSE/King’s College, UK)
Jeff Paris (Manchester, UK)

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Epistemologists typically cite William James for formulating the epistemic goal properly. James said there are two parts to the goal: getting to the truth and avoiding error.

It is true that James says this, but it is not clear to me that he should have said it. Recall that for James, the purely intellectual motivations are these:
1. Not to be duped; and
2. Not to miss out on something important.

One would expect, then, that the epistemic goal should be formulated in a way derivable from these motivations. James doesn’t actually derive the epistemic goal in this way, and it is worth noting that it is far from clear how to do it.
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Suppose you have a LaTeX2e article and you want to send it to a fancy philosophy journal but you discover that the editors frown on LaTeX submissions. Nevermind that for a journal to prefer Word to LaTeX is like a radio station preferring stereo 8 to digital; you want the editor to read your paper, and it doesn’t set a good first impression to send him something that is formatted nicely, er, incorrectly. But oh the misery of Word! The indig-(Ker-Plunk!)-nities of its equation editor! Why so much unnecessary suffering?

Well, now it is easy to give your articles the antique look and feel of old-fashioned WYSWYG document files. Your manuscript will look just like all the others in the pile! Instructions and links to the necessary packages are found at LaTeX for Philosophers. A brief description is under the fold.
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Episteme will hold its fourth annual conference at Rutgers University on June 29-30, 2007. The focus of this year’s meeting is testimony. Confirmed speakers include: Jonathan Adler (Brooklyn College and the Graduate School, CUNY), Albert Casullo (University of Nebraska, Lincoln), Paul Faulkner (University of Sheffield), John Greco (Saint Louis University), Paul Harris (Harvard University), Arnon Keren (NIH), Melissa Koenig (University of Chicago), Peter Lipton (University of Cambridge), Marc Moffett (University of Wyoming), Patrick Rysiew (University of British Columbia), and Linda Zagzebski (University of Oklahoma). For information about attending the conference, please contact Jennifer Lackey (Northern Illinois University) at jlackey@niu.edu.

Below the fold is information about epistemology at the Central meeting. Not quite as much as at the Pacific, but still a good amount.

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Looks again like there is lots of really good stuff at the Pacific meeting. Details below the fold. If you notice something I’ve missed, please note it in the comments. Hope to see many CD-ers there (names of CD-ers appear below in bold).
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On May 2-5, 2007, the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation at the University of Amsterdam is holding a conference called Reasoning about Probabilities and Probabilistic Reasoning, which is part 6 of the Foundations of the Formal Sciences conference series. The call for papers is here; the deadline for submissions is March 15. (Sorry this is last minute; the deadline crept up on me.)

Invited speakers:
Luc Bovens (LSE, Londen)
David Corfield (Tübingen)
Branden Fitelson (Berkeley)
Maria Carla Galavotti (Bologna)
Peter Grünwald (Amsterdam)
Joe Halpern (Cornell, Ithaca)
Barteld Kooi (Groningen)
Teddy Seidenfeld (CMU, Pittsburgh)
Jan-Willem Romeijn (Amsterdam)
Gregory Wheeler (UNL, Lisbon)
Jon Williamson (Kent, Canterbury)

Organizing Committee:
Horacio Arló-Costa (CMU, Pittsburgh)
Benedikt Löwel (Amsterdam)
David Makinson (King’s College, London)
Eric Pacuit (Amsterdam)
Jan-Willem Romeijn (Amsterdam)

PS: Also have a look at the 3rd Progic conference this September in Canterbury, which I’ll post about soon. The focus in Canterbury will be probability logics and probabilistic networks. The Progic 2007 deadline is May 1, 2007.