Certain Doubts

Jamie’s asking an interesting question about editorial policies for journals. Venture on over and weigh in.

Ryan Wasserman was here this week–what a great guy…and superb philosopher!–and we talked about knowability. He had an interesting idea. For standard knowability, you need to get from K(p&q) to Kp&Kq. Since nobody sophisticated about closure thinks that knowledge is closed under entailment, or that knowledge is closed under known entailment, he wondered how we’d get the argument to work. The most plausible closure principles are versions of competent deduction closure principles, and Ryan’s idea was that this might block the paradox. The idea is that some truths might be knowable only to incompetent deducers, and knowledge that a given claim is an unknown truth might be just such a knowable claim–only the logically challenged could have such knowledge.

Very interesting idea, and surely an advance beyond anything in the literature to this point. But conjunction seems special to me, so I’m not sure it works. To possess the concept of conjunction seems to be about as close to the Dummettian ideal as anything can be: to possess the concept is just to wield properly the intro- and elim-rules for &. If so, one wouldn’t be able to have any conjunctive beliefs without seeing that the belief either resulted from &-intro or was susceptible to &-elim. So conjunctive beliefs couldn’t be the kind that could only be known by incompetent deducers.

There’s also Williamson’s conjunctive knowledge bypass argument, but I won’t go into that here. Still, there are so few really interesting and new ideas about the knowability paradox that it is worth noting them when one finds them.

At some point in the future you’ll be able to read my new argument for the possibility of contingent a priori knowledge in the pages of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. For now you can read it here.

Thanks to Ezra Cook for alerting me to this conference. The website is here:
http://poincare.univ-nancy2.fr/Activites/?contentId=5657&languageId=1.

It includes a call for papers, and the list of keynote speakers is phenomenal:
* Johan van Benthem (ILLC, Amsterdam)
* John Hawthorne (University of Oxford)
* Vincent Hendricks (Roskilde University)
* Hans Kamp (Universität Stuttgart)
* Richmond Thomason (University of Michigan)
* Crispin Wright (Arché, The University of St Andrews)

The dates are November 12-14, 2009, Université Nancy 2 – Campus Lettres et Sciences Humaines.

Here is confirmation of why I’ve been quite vocal in objecting, and recommending to others to boycott this year so that the powers-that-be learn not to do this again. I love going to Chicago–I even love some people there!–but holding an APA meeting there in February is … bizarre. Change the time of year or change the location!

would the world be a better place?

I’ve often heard it said (and read it written, and witnessed first-hand) that students from elite graduate programs have an advantage on the job market. All else being equal (and maybe even in some cases when much isn’t), search committees prefer elite pedigree. Fair or not, reasonable or not, take it for what it is.

I’ve also heard it said (and read it written) that in order to make up for their disadvantage, students from non-elite programs basically need to publish, and indeed publish in very good journals. Fair or not, reasonable or not, take it for what it is.

Now I have a question. If things are indeed that way, then shouldn’t non-elite programs be (re-)structured to promote such publication by their students, to overcome the inherent disadvantage? And what sorts of restructuring might be appropriate?

Ralph got a good discussion about this going over on PEA Soup. You should check it out. In the meantime, let’s see what CDers think.
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The deadline for submitting papers to the 2009 Episteme conference on Disagreement is January 15.
Details here.

For those who doubt that there are good reasons to visit Chicago in February (!), consider the good deal of epistemology that will be done at the Central; see the following page for details.

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