Certain Doubts

Volume 1, number 5 of The Reasoner is up:

Editorial – Eric Pacuit
Interview with Rohit Parikh – Eric Pacuit

Features:
Kripke, Pierre and Constantinescu – Laurence Goldstein
The Mechanist’s Challenge – Bhupinder Singh Anand
Does conceivability entail possibility? – Clayton Littlejohn
A note on conceivability – Roger Harris
On the Paradox of Rationality’s Rationality – Nader N. Chokr
Abstraction vs. Idealization – Steffen Ducheyne
Is the Answer to this Question No? – Martin Mose Bentzen
The Divine Liar Resurfaces – Daniel J. Hill

News:
New Centre for Reasoning at Kent – Jon Williamson
SIPTA Newsletter, including an interview with Isaac Levi.

Congratulations to Jason Stanley for winning the APA book prize for 2007. In case you are really, really not with it, the book is Knowledge and Practical Interests, and according to Jason’s arguments, since his practical interests are more at stake here than the rest of ours, he’s much less likely to know that he won. Maybe this post will help, but I doubt it.

There are several interesting items in this chapter from a CIA handbook on expertise and aggregating expert opinions, but one point raises an issue for those in the business of teaching “Critical Thinking”.

Experts are individuals with specialized knowledge…but that expertise does not necessarily transfer to other domains.[6] A master chess player cannot apply chess expertise in a game of poker; although both chess and poker are games, a chess master who has never played poker is a novice poker player. Similarly, a biochemist is not qualified to perform neurosurgery, even though both biochemists and neurosurgeons study human physiology. In other words, the more complex a task, the more specialized and exclusive is the knowledge required to perform that task.

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Ernie Sosa will be visiting Edinburgh’s Department of Philosophy this November. As part of his visit, we’re hosting a postgraduate conference on Knowledge and Understanding on Tuesday November 13th. Sosa will be the keynote speaker, and I’ll be responding to him. The rest of the papers will be PG papers. There is a call for papers on this score. For more information, contact the conference organiser Adam Carter.

If you’re in the Edinburgh area, there will also be a reading group on Sosa’s forthcoming book organised in preparation for his visit. Just drop me a line if you’re interested in coming along to this.

Once I’ve settled in here, there will be a proper Edinburgh webpage detailing all the forthcoming epistemology-related events that we’ve got planned.

Branden Fitelson has edited a very nice special issue of Studia Logica (subscription needed) devoted to formal epistemology.

Features:

Branden Fitelson, Introduction.
Igor Douven, Fitch’s Paradox and Probabilistic Antirealism.
Lina Eriksson and Alan Hájek, What Are Degrees of Belief?
Don Fallis, Attitudes Toward Epistemic Risk and the Value of Experiments.
Jim Hawthorne and David Makinson, The Quantitative/Qualitative Watershed for Rules of Uncertain Inference.
Franz Huber, The Consistency Argument for Ranking Functions.
Patrick Maher, Explication Defended.
Carl G. Wagner, The Smith-Walley Interpretation of Subjective Probability: An Appreciation.

MOVING TO THE TOP, to reflect new info about UCLA: Normore is leaving and that puts them in the top 10 in terms of losses, in my opinion. Changes reflected below:

Since the Leiter Reports has moved away from Leiter’s own evaluations alone, Brian has had to dance a bit of a tightrope between recording his own view of the significance of changes and not trying to influence the outcome of his surveys. One result is that we hear less than some of us would like about the significance of various moves in the profession, so I’m going to say what I think!
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