Certain Doubts

The second issue of The Reasoner is up. This volume includes:

David Lagnado, “Causal models in cognition”.
Barry Hartley Slater, “Probability and logic”.
Amit Pundik, “R v Adams and the conclusiveness of DNA evidence”.
Hock Lai Ho, “Epistemic basis of legal fact-finding”.
Laurence Goldstein, “Why the substitution of co-referential expressions in a statement may result in change of truth-value (2 of 2)”.
Alan Baker, “A counter on counterpossibilities”; Reply to Brogaard and Salerno, vol.1 no.1.
David Corfield, “Pluralism about the justification of learning algorithms”.
Jean-Francois Bonnefon and Gaelle Villejoubert: “The wings are not on fire: How to turn contraposition upside down”.

Also, news on the FotFOS conference in Amsterdam and the Methodological Problems in the Social Sciences workshop in Tilburg.

What to do when your beliefs are contradictory – don’t panic!

Some philosophers talk as if there is no rational advice one can give to someone – oneself for example – who has just uncovered a contradiction in her beliefs. This seems wrong to me, and eventually I would like to write something about this. In the meantime, I thought that some brainstorming might help. Anyone want to join in?

Some relevant observations [edited to put them below the fold]. (No references here – but of course these are linked to many other people’s work.)
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Featured speaker: Tim Williamson. The conference will be held on January 11th and 12th, 2008. The call for papers and other information can be found at the conference website here.

this? (Thanks to Adam Morton, who e-mailed me the link.) Does that mean people in that area, or people in all of China, or perhaps that all of us, don’t know any more when we’re seeing a zebra at a park or a zoo?

Actually, after looking carefully at the photo, given the quality of the “disguise,” I’m feeling better about our knowledge.

Just got the program from Mylan for the conference this year. It is unfortunate for me that I had to withdraw from the program–the program looks so good. The program can be downloaded here.

There ought to be a prize for anyone managing to attend and listen attentively to every talk!

I wonder if anyone has insight into why Quine never ran any of his epistemology off of degrees of belief (unless, of course, I’m just unaware of something in the Quinean corpus, which there is some chance of, since I know I haven’t looked at all of it). I don’t know the answer, but here’s a guess.

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The blog for the conference can be found here. This first week includes two papers in epistemology and also includes CD-ers Juan Comesana, John Greco, Ernest Sosa, Ram Neta, and Duncan Pritchard. Looks fantastic!

Once upon a time D. Reidel/North Holland/Kluwer/Springer held a sizable chunk of the formal philosophy book market, and Elsevier a fair portion of what remained. Together they pushed the price of books in this niche to dizzying heights. College Publications (formally King’s College Publications) is a small publishing house that has been set up as an alternative to this racket, publishing titles that would normally come out in Elsevier’s red book series or one of Springer’s imprints but at 1/3 to 1/2 of their prices.

College keeps prices low by having no marketing staff; instead, books are listed on Amazon, and authors are left to get the word out about their books on their own. If the College experiment is successful, that is, if readers and authors embrace this house and its books, then we might begin to see a check on book prices in this niche.

Some of the titles already out in this series include:
A reprint of Jaakko Hintikka’s Knowledge and Belief;
A reprint of Chris Hankin’s An Introduction to Lambda Calculi for Computer Scientists;
The Advances in Modal Logic series (AiML);
David Makinson’s Bridges from Classical to Non-monotonic Logic;
Patrick Blackburn, Johan Bos and Kristina Streitnitz’s Learn Prolog Now!;
Benedikt Lowe (ed.) Algebra, Logic and Set Theory; and
Federica Russo and Jon Williamson (eds.) Causality and Probability in the Sciences.

I also have a volume with William Harper that is out with College Publications, which I’ll plug soon.

Two politicians disagree about policy. In the end, some resolution is necessary, since unending paralysis is intolerable (for whatever reason). So they compromise. Both think the result is less than ideal. To understand the result, we need to know not only the history of the process, what they used to think and why, but also what they presently think and why. They think that the compromise is best, in some sense, but also, in another sense, that it is not. Without some such internal conflict, we don’t yet understand the political process in question.

Two cognizers disagree about some claim p. Unlike politics, resolution of conflict isn’t necessary. So maybe they disagree forever, even after discussions aimed at resolving the disagreement. Maybe, though, the discussions are fruitful, and they come to agree. When they do, the explanation will cite past disagreements leading to present agreements. After fruitful discussion of this sort, there is no longer any present disagreement, either about p or what the evidence shows about p. But suppose no such resolution occurs.

Some epistemologists say rationality requires both disputants to give up their views about p. Suppose that is right. Call this result “epistemic compromise.” Now, situations of epistemic compromise are different from situations of full resolution of disagreement. When resolution occurs, the story we tell has present agreement as the outcome of past disagreement and discussion. When epistemic compromise occurs, we expect something different. Perhaps something like this should be said. As the disagreement continues, if the disputants are aware that they are converging on a point where rationality compels them to abandon their beliefs, they will view the approaching event with consternation. They will view it as a loss rather than a gain, and this sense of loss will not leave once the convergence point is reached. Even if we don’t like this particular account, we should expect, as in the case of political compromise, some present mark to distinguish it from cases of epistemic resolution. What might that present mark be?

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