Certain Doubts

An announcement and explanation. First the announcement: Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, which I’ll be editing, has now been approved for publication annually.

Second, the explanation: part of the goal of the series is to publish the work of top philosophers who typically work outside of philosophy of religion when they have something to say in the area, so I’m including the announcement here to solicit such work from contributors and readers of this blog. It would be great to have the quality of work of the sort typical of the list of contributors to this blog be included in future volumes!

Submissions and inquiries are welcome at any time.

The new issue of The Reasoner is up.

Features:
Jesse Steinberg, “Pierre may be ignorant, but he’s not irrational”.
Gerald K. Harrison, “Free Will and Lucky Decisions”.
Amit Pundik, “United States v. Shonubi: Statistical evidence and ‘The Same Course of Conduct’ rule”.
Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno, “Williamson on counterpossibles”.
David Corfield, “Mathematical blogging”.
Stephen Fogdall, “Does direct inference require Pollock’s Principle of Agreement?”.
William L. Abler, “The Pirahã language, the language template, and the mind”.

News:
Conference reports on Evidence in Medical Decision-Making and Contingency in Science: Its Origins and Outcomes, both held at the LSE, London, and also on The Formal Epistemology Workshop held at CMU, Pittsburgh.

From Harvey Siegel at Miami, I received the following information about this essay contest, which has a submission deadline of October 15, 2007:

The Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking invites applications for its fourth annual AILACT Essay Prize.

The value of the AILACT Essay Prize is US$500. The prize may, in extraordinary circumstances, be divided among entries judged to be of about equal merit. Additionally, AILACT intends to publish this winning essay in one of a continuing series of volumes containing the winning essays as well as some of the best essays from various years.

Essays related to the teaching or theory of informal logic or critical thinking will be considered for the prize. An essay may be unpublished, forthcoming or previously published. There are no restrictions on authorship. Published papers must have appeared on or after 1 January 2007. Essays should be in the neighborhood of 3500-6000 words.

More information below the fold.
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June 9 was our third birthday, but I’ve been traveling and failed to mention it that day. Thanks to all who’ve made the time so rewarding!

In the three years, we’ve had 628 total posts and 4700 comments. In the first year, we had roughly 300K pageviews; in the second, about 420K; and in the third 600K. So, we roughly average now about 50,000 pageviews per month.

One mark of the value of specialty blogs of this sort: of the refereeing I’ve done this past academic year in epistemology, about 3/4 of the submissions had references to discussions here.

This is just a reminder that the deadline for registration for the Social Epistemology conference at Stirling later in the year is *July 1st*, so if you want to come and you haven’t already registered then you’ll need to get your skates on. For more details about this event, click here. Speakers include Ernie Sosa, Jon Kvanvig, Lizzie Fricker, Sandy Goldberg, Miranda Fricker, Alvin Goldman, Scott Sturgeon, Peter Lipton, Peter Graham, Jennifer Lackey and Alan Millar. I’ll be posting regular updates about the conference on the Epistemic Value blog.

In a very interesting recent note in Analysis, “Ramsey + Moore = God,” David Chalmers and Alan Hájek have argued that the Ramsey test for conditionals, together with the rational requirement to avoid Moore-paradoxical beliefs, entail that all conditionals of the form “If p, then I believe p” and “If I believe p, then p” are acceptable. But I think that (a) Chalmers and Hájek’s result doesn’t apply to every rational subject, and (b) for those rational subjects to whom it does apply, appeal to Moore’s paradox is not necessary.
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Probability and Inference: Essays in Honour of Henry E. Kyburg, Jr., William Harper and Gregory Wheeler (eds.) (King’s College Publications, London, 2007) is now available at Amazon in the US and UK.

New essays by Gert de Cooman and Enrique Miranda, Clark Glymour, William Harper, Isaac Levi, Ron Loui, John Pollock, Teddy Seidenfeld, Choh Man Teng, Mariam Thalos, Gregory Wheeler, Jon Williamson, and Henry E. Kyburg, Jr.

A précis follows below the fold.
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A fairly standard approach to the preface paradox is basically Lockean. On the Lockean story, belief is degree of belief past a certain threshold. We then explain away the inconsistency involved in the paradox by an underlying probabilistic coherence. The preface claim exceeds the threshold of belief, is inconsistent with the beliefs about the contents of the book, but probabilistically coheres because it accurately measures the risk of error in the book (and since the book is large enough, the risk of error is high enough to exceed the threshold).

In other cases, though, we explain away an underlying probabilistic incoherence among degrees of belief by cogency at the coarse-grained level. Below the fold is a case of this sort.

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