Certain Doubts

I’ve been reading Hawthorne and Stanley’s new piece “Knowledge and Action,” (downloadable here at Jason’s website), and will post a couple of things about this really fine piece.

So here’s one issue. Restrict what we are talking about to propositional reasons, either for belief or for action. Think, then, about transmission principles for rational belief. What must be true about the reasons in question for transmission to be possible? The usual answer is that an originating condition can’t transmit something it doesn’t possess already, so if a proposition is one’s reason for believing something, that proposition must itself be rational to believe. With H&S, I’ll assume that we should say similar things about rational action and rational belief on this score, and H&S give a stronger requirement here: in order for one’s reasons for believing q or doing A to be p, one must know that p. I know Peter Unger defends such a principle about rational belief, but he’s a rare exception (and motivated toward strong requirements in service of a skepticism of amazingly wide scope). The more ordinary viewpoint is narrower, insisting only that what gets transmitted must be present, but asking no more than this.

Here I’ll voice a worry I have about the stronger requirement, one concerning rational plans of relatively complex sorts.
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Wilfried Sieg of Carnegie Mellon along with Christian Schunn and Melissa Nelson of The University of Pittsburg have developed an online survey regarding introductory logic classes and are requesting that anyone who regularly teaches introductory logic (i.e., teaches a course covering an introduction to the syntax and semantics of sentential and predicate logic with identity, and a proof method) to please take a moment to visit the site and take the survey. Professor Seig writes:

One question is, which (if any) metamathematical issues are addressed; I am thinking, for example, of normal form theorems, truth-functional completeness, semantic completeness. We are most deeply interested in how the course is taught and whether technological tools are used.

This is part of a larger project investigating the effectiveness of different ways of teaching such a course; thus, our study should be of broad interest to the logical community.

Our survey is a first important step in this process. I expect that it should take you between 5 and 10 minutes to complete it. If you have any question, please, feel free to contact me.

The new issue of The Reasoner is up.

Guest Editor: David Corfield.

Interview:
with Brendan Larvor, by David Corfield.

Features:
Anand Jayprakash Vaidya, Conceivability, Possibility, and Counterexamples.
Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno, A Counterfactual Account of Essence.
Déirdre M. Dwyer, Knowledge, Truth and Justification in Legal Fact Finding.
John L. Pollock, The Principle of Agreement.
Cristian Constantinescu, A Note on Kripke’s Puzzle about Belief.

News:
The Reasoner would like to publish very short introductions to key terms, people and texts in logic and reasoning. Selected pieces will also be published in a book “Key Terms in Logic” by Continuum. If you would like to contribute, please contact TheReasoner@kent.ac.uk.

The latest version of the EasyChair conference management system is up. It is very easy to configure, supports automated submission, manages bulk rejection/acceptance notifications, and allows for several options for managing online discussion among referees. There is even an option for author rebuttals, and it can configure the final proceedings for printing (Springer LNCS) or for open source.

So, there is now one less reason why the reviewing for your next conference should not be efficient and transparent.

Every two months a battered envelope containing Foreign Affairs arrives in my box, and invariably I turn immediately to the reviews section to see what Walter Russell Mead thinks about what he’s been reading. In the current issue there is a primer on European Anti-Americanism (handy), and sometimes there are longer pieces, like this terrific bit on Keynes. But his crisp reviews are gems in style and substance, and you can appreciate the artistry in their construction even if you have little interest in the mechanics of global affairs – like this tight paragraph, for instance.

The Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies is an independent institute of the University of Helsinki which conducts cutting-edge research in the humanities, social sciences, law, behavioural sciences and theology, promotes interdisciplinary interaction, and supports international research cooperation.

The Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies invites applications for 8 – 12 Postdoctoral Researcher / University Researcher positions.

The electronic application will open on August 1, 2007 at 9 am (local Helsinki time). The application deadline is Wednesday, 12 September 2007, at 3.45 p.m. (local Helsinki time). At this hour the electronic application system will be closed. Late applications cannot be submitted. Decisions will be announced in the afternoon of 21 January 2008.

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More good news: Mainstream and Formal Epistemology, by CD-er Vincent Hendricks, Cambridge University Press 2006, Winner of Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title 2006, will appear in paperback in fall 2007.

From Vincent Hendricks, the following information about this important event:
November 16-17, 2007
Roskilde University, Denmark, Sponsored by PHIS – The Danish Research School in Philosophy, History of Ideas and History of Science

Jaakko Hintikka’s philosophical writings are some of the most lucid, enlightening and influential of 20th century philosophy. They range from his pioneering work in epistemic logic over his interpretations of important historical figures like Aristotle, Descartes, Kant and Peirce, to his work on the philosophy of science and logic. A common denominator for his writings across the board is his special take on inquiry in both epistemological and methodological terms. In November 2007, Hintikka’s collected papers on epistemology, entitled Socratic Epistemology, will be released with Cambridge University Press and what better occasion than this to reflect upon the epistemology and methodology of Jaakko Hintikka.

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Cambridge just informed me this week that they are putting out a paperback edition of The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding. The price appears to be about half that of the hardback version, though I still anticipate expected utility calculations by potential buyers to leave it off best-seller lists!

Some very exciting news: The Association for Symbolic Logic is starting a new journal, The Review of Symbolic Logic, which will begin publication in June 2008. The RSL will join The Journal of Symbolic Logic and The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic as the 3rd official organ of the ASL, succeeding The Journal of Philosophical Logic. RSL will publish research papers in all areas of philosophical logic, including formal epistemology, computer science, game theory, AI, and cognitive science; history of philosophy of logic, including the history of analytic philosophy; and philosophy of mathematics, including methodological studies in mathematics, past and present.

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