Certain Doubts

Here’s a draft that might interest some folks here. The abstract:

Infinitists argue that their view outshines foundationalism because infinitism can, whereas foundationalism cannot, explain two of epistemic justification’s crucial features: it comes in degrees and it can be complete. I present four different ways that foundationalists could make sense of those two features of justification, thereby undermining the case for infinitism.

The Staggers. Update: “Teenage Trash Insanity” is now on

Orange Beach, Alabama
University of South Alabama
May 11-14, 2009
Conference Website

Keynote Speakers: William Lycan & Jonathan Kvanvig
Invited Speakers: Mylan Engel, Erik Olsson, Bruce Russell, and Matthias Steup

Interested in Participating? We welcome any philosophers interested in participating in this workshop. Please send Ted Poston an email by December 1st, 2008.

While there are differences between R. B. Braithwaite’s theory of “acting as-if” belief and Jason Stanley’s project, both share the idea that the higher the stakes are to an agent, the better evidence that agent needs before he may act as if (assert to know) that claim is true. The idea behind the more you care, the less you know has been with us for some time now. Even so, it is only half correct.

Stakes-sensitive intuitions are stoked, and nowadays tested, by examples of the following kind. You may act as if a vaccine against bird-flu is non-toxic to your chickens, but refuse to act as if the vaccine were non-toxic to your children. The idea is that since your children are more valuable to you than your chickens, and the stakes of losing a child are greater than losing a chicken, you’ll require greater evidence of non-toxicity for your children than you will for your chickens. And this seems right, so far as it goes.

But consider now an antibiotic which is the only treatment for an infection F that occurs in both chickens and children. The treatment has a fatality rate of 25% in both populations, but chickens almost always recover from F on their own whereas children nearly always succumb to F if untreated. Here you would have a reason to treat your children with the antibiotic but to refuse treating your chickens. That is, you would have a reason to act as if the antibiotic were non-toxic to your children but toxic to your chickens.
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This was going to be a comment on the X-Phi post, but it became too long.

FRAGILITY
Suppose baseball bats come to be made of a special wood so that, as we’d be prone to say, how fragile they are varies greatly with how humid it is: when the humidity is very low, they become quite brittle, and break much more easily; while they become very resistant to breaking when the humidity is high. Managers would find themselves saying things like this to their teams: “Remember that your bats will be very fragile tonight. The humidity is very low.” Here the manager uses “fragile” to describe how easy it is to break the bats right now (or at least that evening), in the current conditions.

But there would also be a quite different, but also very natural, way to use “fragile.” The bat-maker at the factory might say this, after making an especially good batch of bats: “Today’s batch is excellent. They’re much less fragile than the bats we made yesterday.” The bat-maker doesn’t seem to be describing how easy it would be to break the bats right now, given the humidity of the air currently around them, but rather how easy it will be to break them under a variety of different humidity conditions. (We may suppose that today’s batch of bats is still at the factory, where the humidity happens to be extremey low, so that the bats would be very easy to break right now, while yesterday’s bats have already been shipped out to various high-humidity locations, so they are right now hard to break, though today’s bats would be harder to break than yesterday’s bats if the both sets were exposed to the same humidity conditions. Still, what the bat-maker says seems very natural.)

CONFIDENCE
I think a similar thing happens with our descriptions using the likes of “confident.” (more…)

I am looking for the first discussion of the case in which a subject comes to form a belief about the temperature by arbitrarily selecting one of the thermometers in her bathroom, where the thermometer she chooses is in fact the only reliable thermometer of the bunch (and had she chosen one of the others she would have accepted its –false– reading). Can anyone remind me who first discussed this case, and where? (I have a hazy recollection that it’s Goldman’s case, but I haven’t been able to track it down.) Much appreciated. –Sandy

Bill Moyers, sitting in for Charlie Rose, interviews Dan Dennett.

Discussed at Experimental Philosophy, one study on bank cases and another on knowledge ascriptions being sensitive to practical concerns. The former is being done by Wesley Buckwalter and the latter by Mark Phelan and Ram Neta. The posts contain links to papers with the results, and the results give some evidence that ordinary folk don’t share the view that when the stakes go up, knowledge (or “knowledge”) goes down.

It’s interesting to ask such questions of non-philosophers, and I do it every time I teach epistemology courses. I don’t share the views, though, that make the results important for epistemological theorizing. (more…)