Certain Doubts

I just looked at the Philosophy Job Market Wiki, wondering about current interview practices. I divided departments into three groups: those doing eastern division APA interviews, those doing phone interviews, and those just bringing top candidates to campus. The numbers are as follows (as best I can tell):
APA interviews: 113
Phone interviews: 16
Only campus interviews: 32

As a defender of the idea that short interviews provide nothing more than “vivid noise” (Gil Harman’s nice phrase), I think these numbers are revealing. If we go back 25-30 years or so, I’d be shocked to see as many departments going straight to on-campus interviews. But I have no data with which to compare, so my attitude here is largely impressionistic.

If I’m right, though, perhaps the significance of Fundamental Attribution Error and the studies surrounding it are affecting interview practices in philosophy departments. To my mind, that would be a very good thing, both in terms of the quality of the hiring process itself and also in terms of the financial burden placed on graduate students to go to APA’s to interview. Lifting that financial burden will require a much larger percentage of departments bypassing APA interviews, and here’s hoping they see the light!

Topics include:
Categories and Structures, by Steve Awodey (June 8-12);
Decisions and Games, by Teddy Seidenfeld (June 15-19);
Logic and Formal Verification, by Jeremy Avigad (June 22-26).

Tuition and housing is free for a class of 20 or so undergraduate or first-year graduate students. The application deadline is March 15, 2009. See details here. (Thanks to Jeff Helzner, at Philosophy, Science and Method, for the tip.)

Note, too, that FEW 2009 is also at Carnegie Mellon this year, from June 18-21.

I am happy to announce the publication of the special edition of Philosophical Studies (Volume 142: 1) containing the final versions of the papers presented at the first Midwestern Epistemology Workshop (MEW), held at Northwestern in November 2007. The papers in the volume are by Robert Audi, Al Casullo, Richard Fumerton, Sandy Goldberg, John Greco, David Henderson, Jennifer Lackey, Matt McGrath, Baron Reed, and Ernie Sosa (who was the keynote). A link to the Phil. Studies site, where those with authorized access can download the articles, can be found at the bottom of the MEW I page, here.

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FORMAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF RELIGION

June 10-12 2009 @ KU Leuven (Leuven, Belgium)

Co-organized by the Formal Epistemology Project, KU Leuven
and the Center for Philosophy and Religion, University of Glasgow

Conference website: http://formalphilosophy.org/fmer

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The organizers of the conference invite contributions bringing
formal methodology — decision theory, statistics, epistemic logic,
game theory, etc. — to bear on issues in the epistemology of religion.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

– Pascalian arguments

– Cosmic and organic design arguments

– Arguments from miracles

– Problems of evil

– Religious pluralism and disagreement

Authors are invited to submit a 400-600 word abstract for a paper of
30-40 minutes reading time. The abstracts are to be submitted by e-mail,
as an attachment in a common format (preferably pdf, doc or rtf).

The submission deadline is Monday 16th of February 2009, with decisions
expected to be reached by Monday 30th of March 2009.

The language of the conference is English.

In addition to contributed papers, the program will also include the
following invited speakers:

– Paul Bartha (British Columbia)

– Branden Fitelson (Berkeley)

– Alan Hajek (ANU)

– Tim & Lydia McGrew (Western Michigan)

– Graham Oppy (Monash)

– Richard Swinburne (Oxford)

– Michael Tooley (Boulder)

Further details regarding the event will be posted in due course on the
conference website.

Please send abstracts and requests for further information to

jacob.chandler@hiw.kuleuven.be.

and cc. to

v.harrison@philosophy.arts.gla.ac.uk

I suppose the upside of the financial meltdown and dismal job season is that loads of us will have plenty of time to kill at the Eastern so we can actually go to the talks and talk shop. Below the fold are the epistemology talks I’ve found on the program. If I’ve missed something, post a comment. You’ll note that some of these talks take place late on Tuesday. There’s time yet to change your plans for travel and New Year’s Eve.
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Ralph and Keith are tough acts to follow, but here goes …

In her paper “Norms of Assertion” (Nous 41:4, 2007), Jennifer Lackey argues against the knowledge account of assertion (KA). She says that some “selfless assertions” are counterexamples to KA.

This post presents an interpretation of Lackey’s argument and offers a couple responses.
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Back when I was interviewing for jobs (so this would have been during the last few days of the year 1989 in Atlanta), my writing sample was “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions” (which later appeared in PPR), and a quite famous* philosopher insisted to me during an interview that it was in fact extremely uncommon for people to say that they do or do not “know” things, and that I only thought otherwise because I spent all my time talking with other philosophers. I remember him exclaiming, “Why, I go whole weeks without using that word!” I tried to convince him otherwise (well, not about his own usage, which I couldn’t really speak to, but about his general point), citing all the various kinds of situations in which it is utterly natural to use “know(s)”. He wasn’t budging: “No, I almost never hear that.” I in fact spent a whole lot of time with non-philosophers, and I thought this guy was, well, full of shit, as my non-philosophical friends liked to say (almost as much as they liked to say “know(s)”!) (more…)

There are three kinds of justification: (i) propositional justification, (ii) doxastic justification of mental events of judgment, and (iii) doxastic justification of enduring belief states. This distinction is relevant to the debates about the “closure” of justification under logical consequence.

In this post, I shall propose three different closure principles, corresponding to these three kinds of justification; each of these closure principles is most plausible when applied only to the corresponding kind of justification. I suggest that this gives us a way to respond to the alleged counterexamples to closure.

(more…)

Al Casullo and I are delighted to announce the venues for the next four Midwest Epistemology Workshops. They are as follows:

MEW3 (Fall 2009): St. Louis University (local organizer: John Greco).
MEW4 (Fall 2010): Purdue University (local organizer: Matthias Steup).
MEW5 (Fall 2011): University of Iowa (local organizer: Richard Fumerton).
MEW6 (Fall 2012): Indiana University (local organizers: Adam Leite and Jonathan Weinberg).

For additional information on MEW click here.

We want to thank everyone you for the support that you have provided for MEW over the past two years, which has exceeded our wildest expectations, and we look forward to seeing you at MEW3 or another future MEW event.

Sandy Goldberg