Certain Doubts

Just got word that Keith has received advance copies of his book on contextualism, linked at Amazon here:
The Case for Contextualism: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, Vol. 1.

Amazon says the availability date is September 30, 2009, but I expect with advance copies already available, one should be able to get the book sooner. Perhaps in time to teach it for fall courses, if so inclined.

One might think that there is some connection between low (or inscrutable) probability and defeat. Plantinga, for example, rests an entire argument against evolutionary naturalism on this point, and the argument is generally viewed to fail on this point. Tom Crisp and I were talking about this issue at a conference this past weekend, and I was skeptical of the connection.

Here’s the concern. (more…)

Congratulations to CD-er Jennifer Nagel on her 2009 Canadian Research Grant!  Details from Richard Zach:

LogBlog: 2009 Canadian Research Grants to Philosophers | Richard Zach | Philosophy | University of Calgary.

Choice and Inference, maintained by Jonah Schupbach and Jake Chandler, is a new blog covering topics in uncertain and ampliative inference, coherence, paradoxes of belief and / or action, belief revision, disagreement and consensus, causal discovery, epistemology of religion, etc., as well as the formal methods used in the field, including game theory and decision theory, formal learning theory, probability theory and statistics, networks and graphs, and formal logic.

Jonah has an interesting post there about a connection between Bayesian and formal epistemology.

Here’s an interesting experiment.  Figure out how susceptible you think the word of an intellectual superior should be in defeating whatever evidence you have for believing what the superior denies.  Then figure out how susceptible you think the word of an intellectual inferior should be in defeating whatever evidence you have for believing what the inferior denies.  Plot each on a scale from 0 to 1 (where zero reflects never revising in the face of contrary testimony, and 1 reflects always acquiescing).  Should the results sum to 1?

Obama sure is tough on pirates. So forget about Lincoln. Never mind FDR. How will he measure up to Jefferson?

(Hat tip to Jeff Lax, at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.)

I’ve gotten so used to pessimism about the quality of APA presentations that I’m perhaps too selective about what I’ll make the effort to go hear, and I was pleasantly surprised to be reminded of this point by some excellent sessions this past week.  Three sessions in particular stood out in my mind as particularly worth attending and thinking about after the session was over.  Remarks below the fold about sessions by Coffman, Salerno, and Leite. (more…)

Just got back from the APA pacific, and have developed the obvious generalization of the principle that allows the pacific meeting of the APA to be in Vancouver, BC,… CANADA (It is a fantastic location, by the way):  if the pacific can be in Vancouver, the Central can be in Cancun, and the eastern can be in Jamaica… or Aruba… or Cuba, once the travel restrictions disappear.  I vote for Havana!

The error concerns the relationship between modal axioms and frame properties. The current SEP entry provides a table

that indicates axioms, their names, and the corresponding conditions on the accessibility relation R,

but the entailment only holds in one direction, from a specified frame property to that line’s modal schema. The implication does not hold in the other direction, for it is false that a specified modal schema must have that line’s frame property. To illustrate, consider the schema (M), which the author uses as an example. According to his table, the models in which (M) is valid are all based on reflexive frames. But here is a model that isn’t reflexive. (more…)

So, no more fiddling with themes.  The look I’ve used for the last four years is going to be the default look, but the theme switcher plugin will stay so that individual readers can modify if they so choose.  The decision to use the old standard is in part about branding and recognition, but a really big factor is that the comments function in this theme numbers the comments, which I find helpful (Keith pointed it out to me).  I can change the comments functions in the other themes to number as well, but it requires going from a “div” structure to an “ol”, which requires more codework than I want to take the time to do.  So the default is Connections Reloaded, with the switcher option for those who like one of the other looks.