Certain Doubts

I was looking at the online additions to the latest JFP, and noticed that the University of Houston at Victoria is looking for a chair of their Humanities Division. The expectations and qualifications are of the normal variety, but then I noticed this line:

the successful candidate should be eligible for tenure decision within three years of the initial appointment.

Wow! This is a chair position, right? So you get to give up tenure to take the job and in three years get voted on by, presumably, the department you chair. Don your boots and calm the horses; hordes upon hordes will be lining up for this opportunity!

It reminds me of an unnamed former chair’s motto: never explain the behavior of an administrator by appeal to malice when sheer incompetence will do just fine.

I am always looking for ways to connect epistemology to other subfields of philosophy (esp. within the “M” side of M&E). Here’s one I’ve been thinking of for some time.

If testimonial belief is to be knowledge, it must satisfy the anti-luck condition on knowledge. There are, it seems, (at least) three sources for luck to enter into the picture in a typical testimonial exchange: the testimony itself, though true, might be only luckily so (as when based on a guess); the recipient might be lucky in having accepted what in fact is solid testimony (as when one just happens upon the one truth-teller in a room full of expert liars); or the recipient might be lucky in having recovered the attested proposition (as when one didn’t really catch what was said, but guessed correctly). Of these the first two have been explored at length in the literature on the epistemology of testimony; the third not so.

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EPISTEMIC AGENCY
International Conference
University of Geneva 25-26 April 2008

THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO SUNDAY 9 MARCH 2008 See below the fold for details.

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Just finished teaching a section on epistemic principles or principles of evidence, as Chisholm sometimes calls them, using Jim’s paper “Foundationalism, Epistemic Principles, and the Cartesian Circle.” Jim rightly criticizes certain coherentists for first accepting the truth of certain epistemic principles and then insisting that they must also be known to be true or rational to believe in order to play a role in any story about why a given target belief is justified. So, consider the following representation of a ground for belief:

It appears to me that there is an electron path in that Wilson cloud chamber.
——————-
So, there is an electron path in that Wilson cloud chamber.

Complaints about this representation are manifold: the conclusion doesn’t follow (irrelevant, if “follow” means “follow deductively”), you forgot to rule out potential defeaters (hmmm…this raises issues I’ll bypass here), your description of your appearance is too theory-laden (good luck drawing the relevant distinction), you should have first concluded that it is reasonable to believe something and then detached the epistemic operator (no, I shouldn’t have, though perhaps I might have done so). The complaint I’m interested in, though, is the one that Jim criticizes. It’s the one that grants the truth of the epistemic principle “if you’re appeared to in a certain way, then it is reasonable to believe that things are as they appear (in the absence of grounds for doubt),” but then criticizes the representation in question for not including anything about “the epistemic status” of the principle in question. It is this criticism that I think goes wrong.

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From Diego Machuca, a conference he’s organized for August 6-8, 2008 in Buenos Aires. The website for the conference is here.

On a local television academic contest for two competing high school teams:

In the following sentence, how is the word ‘ball’ used?

“In this sentence how is the word ‘ball’ used?”

Answer: Direct object.

WTF? Wouldn’t it be great to hear one of the teams say: “It’s not used at all; it’s only mentioned!”

I just saw, at Leiter’s blog, that Stephen Grimm is moving from Montana to Fordham. Fordham was hurt significantly last year by Greco’s move to SLU, but they now have a really impressive trio of young epistemologists, with Grimm, Hazlett, and Frances.

David Pearce is offering four 4-year PhD scholarships for students wishing to pursue a PhD degree in Computer Science in the area of Computational Logic and Knowledge Representation at Rey Juan Carlos University, Madrid. The positions are part of an Agreement Technologies project, which involves over 50 researchers in Spain. David is also a frequent visitor to CENTRIA in Lisbon.

Preference is given to students with a strong background in computer science or equivalent qualifications. For information either contact David Pearce or take a look at the information page to find an application. (Ignore the deadline there. Start date is between June and October 2008.)

The Reasoner now has an ISN number (ISSN 1757-0522), which means that publications in The Reasoner can typically be listed as research outputs.

Do keep the submissions coming!

First Announcement and Call for Papers:

The Epistemology of Liberal Democracy: free speech, disagreement and common belief

University of Copenhagen, Denmark
November 20-21, 2008

One of the most important and cherished features of liberal democracy is the value placed on freedom of speech and inquiry. Regimes of free speech and free inquiry inevitably lead to disagreement, not only about issues of value, but also about very important factual matters. Another important feature of liberal democracy is the commitment to the toleration of disagreement, even over crucial factual matters.

Clearly, both features are extremely important for citizens within liberal democracies if they wish to arrive at true or justified beliefs about the world, and to correct mistaken views. Yet, these features of liberal democracies are rarely discussed from an epistemological point of view, despite their obvious epistemological import.

The aim of this conference is to foster new research in epistemology as well as cross-disciplinary research relating to the epistemological questions raised by liberal democracy. The topics for the conference will include but not be limited to the following:
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