Certain Doubts

I got back yesterday from the conference on formal and traditional epistemology at Oklahoma organized by Jim Hawthorne and Wayne Riggs. It was utterly fabulous! Except that I was really sick when I talked, and had to leave early to get home (with a fever of 102!). I have very little idea what I said, except for one remarkable lapse: I forgot what my last argument was supposed to be! I don’t know what I said, but what I wanted to say, I’ll write here.

It’s about David Christensen’s DBA from his beautiful book Putting Logic in Its Place and the way in which subjectivists should understand the perspectival character of rationality. The book is easy to read, very entertaining, and the arguments quite compelling, especially the ones about the import of the Preface Paradox for deductive closure principles about rationality. But the argument that I don’t think quite succeeds is the argument for probabilistic incoherence being a defect.

Here’s how the argument goes.

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I got back yesterday from the conference on formal and traditional epistemology at Oklahoma organized by Jim Hawthorne and Wayne Riggs. It was utterly fabulous! Except that I was really sick when I talked, and had to leave early to get home (with a fever of 102!). I have very little idea what I said, except for one remarkable lapse: I forgot what my last argument was supposed to be! I don’t know what I said, but what I wanted to say, I’ll write here.

It’s about David Christensen’s DBA from his beautiful book Putting Logic in Its Place and the way in which subjectivists should understand the perspectival character of rationality. The book is easy to read, very entertaining, and the arguments quite compelling, especially the ones about the import of the Preface Paradox for deductive closure principles about rationality. But the argument that I don’t think quite succeeds is the argument for probabilistic incoherence being a defect.

Here’s how the argument goes.

(more…)

I’ve updated the LaTeX for Philosophers page to include a few concrete typesetting solutions, including how to typeset the non-monotonic squiggle (|~), and how to define new commands that take argument variables. There is also a proposal for rotating \vDash instead of \models for representing probabilistic independence.

The idea behind this new section is to share some LaTeX tips, with a focus on those who are either new to LaTeX or who may be running a front-end program, like Scientific Workplace, but who might need to hand-code some symbols that aren’t in the standard packages. I would be happy to list or link your favorite trick or tip.

The page still has instructions and links for using philosophy.sty to typeset double-spaced review manuscripts.

Rather than use fresh parchment to transcribe the Archimedes Palimpsest prayer book, John Myronas, a 13th century scribe, reused pages from other books of that period. Apparently the scrubbed-off ink is readable with new imagining technology, and researchers are discovering that Myronas’ transcription is a gold mine. There are pages from a book by Archimedes, and the only known writings of the 4th BC Athenian politician Hyperides are among the prayer book’s page stock. Now a passage about Aristotle’s Categories has been identified!

From this BBC report:

A provisional translation of the commentary is currently being undertaken. It reveals a debate on some aspects of Aristotle’s theory of classification, such as: if the term “footed” is used for animals, can it be used to classify anything else, such as a bed? The passage reads:
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The first issue of The Reasoner, volume 1, no 1, is now online.
Feature articles by Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno, Laurence Goldstein, Amit Pundik, and
Gregory Wheeler.

The deadline for vol. 1, no. 2 is May 15.

Sometimes we defer in opinion. When we should so defer is an interesting question, but here’s one possibility I haven’t seen discussed. Should we defer to ourselves? Consider the following deference principle:

Self-Deference: C-me-now(p/C-me-now(p) = x) = x.

This principle says that my present credence for p, conditional on that credence being x, is x.
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In anticipation of the upcoming Rugers Epistemology Conference, I’ve put my (brief!) collection of non-factive uses of ‘knows’ online. I welcome suggestions for additions, especially anecdotes of spoken uses.

Back at Acme, our team of epistemologists are on the scene looking at Inspector 14’s record of length measurements for pole 453-01-120. Name this pole “p”. To simplify, suppose there are n physical measurements, the conditions for measurement were standardized, the measurement device was calibrated, errors are distributed normally, et cetera, et cetera:

1. The measured length-1 of p is 6.005 meters.
2. The measured length-2 of p is 6.003 meters.
…
n. The measured length-n of p is 5.099 meters.
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Many philosophers argue that paradoxes like the so-called “preface paradox” show that it is not a requirement of rationality that the contents of one’s beliefs should all be consistent with each other. (For example, David Christensen argues for this in his recent book Putting Logic in its Place.) I believe that this argument is mistaken.

As a matter of fact, I don’t actually accept that it is a requirement of rationality that the contents of one’s beliefs should all be consistent with each other. If the contradictions are lurking in obscure hidden parts of one’s belief set – so that it would take an extremely long and complicated chain of reasoning to derive any contradiction from the contents of one’s beliefs, and one has not in fact performed any such long and complicated chain of reasoning – then it need not be irrational for one to persist in one’s beliefs (or so I am inclined to think).

However, I am prepared to defend a different connection between consistency and rational belief. If one consciously considers a set of propositions, and this set of propositions is obviously logically inconsistent, then one should revise one’s beliefs in such a way as to avoid fully believing all members of this inconsistent set. (The paradigm case of a set of propositions that is “obviously logically inconsistent” is the set {p, ‘¬ p’}, but other sets of propositions may also count as “obviously logically inconsistent” as well, such as {p, q, ‘¬ (p & q)’}, and so on.) (more…)

An issue that comes up in discussions of the value of knowledge (and which will come up this week at our session at the Central meeting on the value turn in epistemology) is the special value knowledge is supposed to have when compared with mere true belief. If knowledge is only sometime and somewhere more valuable than true belief, it won’t be as difficult to explain its special value. But if it is always and necessarily more valuable than true belief, things get harder. So which is it?
My proposal is that it is the latter, but to make the claim plausible, some qualifications are needed. (more…)