Certain Doubts

We are in the process of organizing our sixth annual formal epistemology
workshop (the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth workshops were all
great successes). The purpose of these workshops is to bring together
individuals, both faculty and graduate students, using mathematical
methods in epistemology in small focused meetings. Topics treated will
include but are not limited to:

* Ampliative inference (including inductive logic);
* Game theory and decision theory;
* Formal learning theory;
* Formal theories of coherence:
* Foundations of probability and statistics;
* Formal approaches to paradoxes of belief and/or action;
* Belief revision;
* Causal discovery.

Besides papers with respondents, each workshop will typically include
short introductory tutorials (two or three topically related
presentations) on formal methods. These tutorials will be oriented
particularly to graduate students.

The sixth workshop is scheduled for June 18 – June 21, 2009 and will be
held at Carnegie Mellon University. We are now accepting submissions for
FEW 2009. Please send submissions by email to Branden Fitelson.
Submissions are due — in the form of full papers — by Sunday, March 15,
2009; notifications of acceptance either as definite presenters or as
alternates will be sent out by Thursday, April 30, 2008. Some of the
papers presented at FEW 2009 will appear in a special issue of the
Journal of Philosophical Logic.

Those interested in participating, either by presenting papers,
responding, or providing tutorials, or in helping with organization,
should contact one of the local organizers listed below. We can
contribute $500 in travel funds for every graduate student who presents
or comments on a paper. We are also able to contribute $250 in travel
costs for a number (to be determined) of graduate students who attend
the workshop without presenting or commenting on a paper. Priority will
be given to graduate students who have not attended previous workshops,
and to women and minorities. Graduate students who wish to be considered
for travel funding should contact Kevin Kelly or Richard Scheines (the
local organizers this year) by May 1, 2009.

Kevin Kelly
Richard Scheines
CMU

Branden Fitelson
UC-Berkeley

Sahotra Sarkar
UT-Austin

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NOTE: The FEW website is now located at:

http://fitelson.org/few/

We hope to see you all in Pittsburgh in June!

Just got my copies of The Knowability Paradox in paperback, set for a December 15 release, according to Amazon.com, here. Used to be that maybe ten philosophers knew much about the paradox, but that has changed rather dramatically in the past ten to fifteen years.

As an example of greater interest, Joe Salerno’s edited volume New Essays on the Knowability Paradox is coming out about the same time. Joe is also editing a special issue of Synthese, titled “Knowability and Beyond,” which should be out soon as well, though I don’t know when that will appear.

It is getting close to the time for graduating seniors to submit applications to PhD programs, and I’ve been reflecting again on our discipline’s practices in this regard. Especially, I’ve been thinking about the role of GRE scores in the process.

The role of GRE scores in any given graduate program is fairly obscure, but it is fair to say that there are institutional pressures to recruit students with higher GRE scores. There are various ways to succumb to these pressures, from a crass preference for higher GRE scores to a system in which first cuts are made on the basis of GRE scores. I don’t mean to attach any significance to the question of whether such practices amount to succumbing to pressure, however; my concern is with the practices themselves.

My concerns about the role of GRE scores are two-fold: an issue of fairness, and an issue of substance.

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From Klemens Kappell, an interesting opportunity:

The Epistemology of Liberal Democracy
- truth, free speech and disagreement
With its emphasis on freedom of speech and inquiry and disagreement, liberal democracy may be viewed as a way of organising society that carries certain epistemological benefits. Liberal democracy promotes the acquisition of true beliefs, makes us less likely to adopt false beliefs, secures that the beliefs we do accept are known or justified rather than merely believed on authority. Yet, the epistemological dimension of liberal democracy is poorly understood, and it is far from obvious under what conditions the epistemological advantages of liberal democracy really ensues. The main aim of the research project is to contribute to an understanding of how various practices and social institutions of free speech and tolerance of diverging opinions contribute to the acquisition of true belief or knowledge, and related epistemic states. The research plan below details how we will address aspects of these questions. The output of the research project will be research papers published in scholarly journals and books, workshops and conferences for specialists of the international research community, as well as public outreach activities.

The project will focus on two naturally interconnected issues: freedom of speech and inquiry on the one hand, and diversity of opinion or disagreement on the other. Each is subdivided into several subquestions that form a cohesive structure of research questions consisting of four steps, starting from an elucidation of the epistemological properties of free speech to an analysis of the question of whom to trust when experts disagree. It is our aim to approach these questions in two distinct and mutually reinforcing ways, conceptual analysis and social simulation.

The project includes funding for two post-doc research fellows, and applications are now invited. See the website for the related conference, as well as the job advertisement here.

This is a reminder that the deadline for submitting an abstract for the Epistemic Goodness conference is November 1st. Abstracts should be submitted directly to me at duncan.pritchard@ed.ac.uk. For more details about the conference, click here.

I just finished teaching on Sosa’s safety-based defense of Mooreanism. Here’s a counterexample to safety I made up for my class. (An informal survey, on a 7-point Likert-scale, suggests the intuition enjoys strong support.)

BANNED ART EXHIBIT: The Art Institute is hosting an exhibit on banned art. There is one particular very valuable piece that incredibly irks you—it offends every one of your religious and moral instincts. You dash off an angry letter to the Institute threatening to destroy this piece. Your letter is so convincing that the officials would secret away that piece of art and replace it with a believable fake. You send the letter but it gets lost in the mail. Completely unaware of the intrigue, Sally goes to the Institute and sees the controversial piece of art. Sally knows that this piece is at the Institute even though her belief is unsafe; in close worlds where the letter isn’t lost in the mail she forms the same belief (through the same method) even though it’s false.

Eric Schwitzgebel argues that, due to recent empirical results illuminating some “genetic” “sources” of our intuitions, we’re past the point where philosophers can innocently take their intuitions at face value. We cannot responsibly proceed, as we have done previously, without “careful empirical reflection on the source and trustworthiness of” our intuitions.

I pointed out that responsible inquiry generally requires us to be open to evidence of our own defects. We never could have “innocently” ignored such evidence. These interesting empirical results don’t make that general point more plausible; they only alert us to specific areas where we perhaps should be especially careful.

Can Schwitzgebel, or those sympathetic to his point, accept what I say here without supplementation? My argument proceeds by relying on a seemingly obvious intuitive point about a requirement of responsible inquiry. Of course, aiming as I do to inquire responsibly, I’m open to the possibility that I’m misled about this seemingly obvious point. But Schwitzgebel tells us that “careful empirical reflection on the source and trustworthiness” of this intuition is (now) in order. I’ve not done any of that. Have any of us?

It would be ironic if we were simply, or even mainly, relying on intuition when pronouncing that empirical work should take a central role in the methodology of our erstwhile largely a priori discipline. If we argue for this genetic turn based on that intuition, shouldn’t we be supplementing it with empirical work indicating when or under what circumstances the intuition that a genetic turn is advisable in discipline X is trustworthy?

Here’s the general question this raises to my mind: can a thoroughgoing geneticist consistently rely on intuition without backing it up with the relevant empirical work? (The consistency here is of course methodological, not logical.)

It seems to me that he cannot.

Maybe the appropriate response is to take a more nuanced genetic turn, embodied in the maxim: supplement intuition with empirical work wherever you can, but provisionally rely on intuition alone when you must.