Thales' Well

Nietzsche on Aristotle and Truth

2010-12-05T11:52:00.004-05:00

(NB: The introductory philosophy course I'll be the TA for next spring will involve reading Thus Spake Zarathustra, so in preparation I've been reviewing my notes on Nietzsche. -Dan)

For whom truth exists. - … How if this effect – the effect of consolation – were precisely what truths are incapable of? – Would this then constitute an objection to truths? What have they in common with the inner states of suffering, stunted, sick human beings that they must necessarily be of use to them?...[T]ruth, as a whole and interconnectedly, exists only for souls which are at once powerful and harmless, and full of joyfulness and peace (as was the soul of Aristotle), just as it will no doubt be only such souls as these that will be capable of seeking it: for no matter how proud they may be of their intellect and its freedom, the others are seeking cures for themselves – they are not seeking truth. (Daybreak 424, trans. R.J. Hollingdale)

In this passage, Nietzsche holds up Aristotle as an example of the kind of person who is truly capable of seeking truth. This may initially strike the reader as odd, since Aristotle seems to be a systematizer of the kind that Nietzsche rails against elsewhere. But I think what Nietzsche finds admirable in Aristotle is the pursuit of truth, not for the sake of utility (however defined), but for its own sake. He speaks of the error of seeking truth for the sake of consolation, and he seems to mean both consolation in a physical sense (hence the example of the non-medicinal plant), and consolation in a more emotional sense (cf. Sextus Empiricus’ description in Outlines of Pyrrhonism I.26 of the person who is troubled by philosophical problems and seeks to resolve them satisfactorily in order to obtain some kind of contentment). But the ideal seeker after truth, according to Nietzsche, will seek truth not out of weakness or a need to be cured of bodily or mental illnesses, but out of a desire for the truth itself, apart from any benefit it may happen to bring. I think that this is why Nietzsche describes such an ideal seeker as being “powerful and harmless, and full of joyfulness and peace”.

It seems to me that the danger Nietzsche is pointing out in seeking after truth for the sake of the consolation that we think it will bring is that if we find that consolation is not in fact the result of obtaining truth, we will cease to seek after truth, and try to find consolation in some other way. If we value truth only instrumentally, then we will cease to seek after truth if we find that truth is hard or painful, or even if it is irrelevant to our need for consolation. It is only the person whom Nietzsche describes as “healthy” that can genuinely value truth.

Adler and Reid

2010-02-16T17:45:00.002-05:00

Jonathan Alder, in Belief's Own Ethics, argues for the truth of the "subjective principle of sufficient reason":

When one attends to any of one's beliefs, one must regard it as believed for sufficient or adequate reasons. [1]

I'll not get into the full development of Adler's evidentialist ethics of belief (which is interesting). Instead, I'll just note that this is a pretty stringent requirement. The evidentialists I have the privilege of working with at the University of Rochester don't affirm this principle, for example, Earl Conee argued against it in his review of the book. I don't know where I stand on it. There are days that I think it's true, other days that I think it's not.

So, it was surprising when combing through Reid's conception of evidence in preparation for a seminar, that I ran across the following:

We give the name of evidence to whatever is a ground of belief. To believe without evidence is a weakness which every man is concerned to avoid, and which every man wishes to avoid. Nor is it in a man's power to believe anything longer than he thinks he has evidence. [2]

Some externalists, Plantinga not the least among them, have taken aid and comfort from Reid. It's not surprising that Plantinga finds much to like in Reid, his proper functionalism sounds at home among Reid's frequent references to "original constitution" and to being "fitted by nature" to believe in various ways. But in the above quote, it's interesting that Reid sounds like a strident evidentialist.

'Evidence' may be equivocal here, though. I'm still feeling out what Reid means by evidence. He does sometimes sound as though evidence is all mental (only a few paragraphs later, in fact). But in the Inquiry into the Human Mind Reid seems to say that some appearances are non-mental (though it's hard to find them in the physical world), and appearances seem likely to count as evidence. But at any rate, it's interesting to find an externalist muse saying something that sounds stridently evidentialist.

[1] Jonathan Adler, Belief's Own Ethics, (MIT: 2002), 26.

[2] Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, II.20.

Evidentialism and Memory

2010-01-19T17:46:00.004-05:00

John Greco, in his forthcoming "Evidentialism about Knowledge" makes the following complaint, which seems a typical one for non-evidentialists to offer.

Even if some cases of knowledge seem to fit the evidentialist model well, it is a stretch to extend the position to other cases, such as cases involving memory knowledge. What is my evidence, for example, that I ate eggs for breakfast, or that my car is parked in the driveway? There might be some vague phenomenology involved in remembering these things. My memory beliefs might be accompanied by a characteristic sort of feeling--a kind of confidence, or perhaps a kind of attraction. But it is a stretch to think that these states are evidence--to think that these states "support" my memory beliefs, or that my beliefs are evidentially based on such states. (pp. 5-6)

I get a bit irked about this, because the answer seems so obvious as to make the evidentialist suspect that the externalist is just being obtuse. I have three comments, first an argument that there is some sort of evidence on which memorial beliefs are based, then one strategy for explaining the nature of this evidence, and then an alternate strategy.

1. Earl Conee argues in "Seeing the Truth" that seeing the truth of obviously true propositions like

P Every golden trumpet is a trumpet

is, contra Alvin Plantinga's account in Warrant and Proper Function is not merely a matter of believing a proposition in a certain way. Seeing the truth, is, Conee thinks, a separate matter from believing what one sees to be true. Consider P - there will be, I think, if you attend to the experience of coming to believe P to be true, a separate experience apart from believing P, which believing P follows. This may be described as a "seeming that P" or "seeing that P", a kind of mental experience such that one bases a belief on it. One reason for thinking that this is a separate experience is that it is imaginable that it occur without believing P. Suppose you had good reason to think that you were liable to deception about P, perhaps you'd been assured that you'd been given a drug that would make things seem obvious in just this way and despite how seemingly true P is, you refrain from belief. Further, you could imagine simply experiencing it, but before forming the belief, stubbing your toe and being distracted by the intense pain. So, at least for me, I agree with Conee, there is a separate experience of seeing the truth of obvious propositions.

Likewise, I think that there is just this sort of experience with memory. I wonder what I had for breakfast, and it seems strongly to me that I had a clif bar and I believe that I had a clif bar. I can imagine this experience being separated from belief too. I might get distracted - stubbing my toe might do it. I might have a defeater. Suppose I also remember that as a favor to a friend today, I participated in a psychological experiment and was given a false memory that I ate a baloney sandwich for lunch. I am aware of this deception, but it still seems to me that I remember eating a baloney sandwich for lunch. It seems conceivable that I might have an experience as of seeming to remember having a baloney sandwich, but not also believe that I did, because I know that my memory to that effect is false. So, just as in the case of seeing the truth of an obvious proposition, there is an event prior to belief and separable from belief that seems (to me at least) to be a ground for my so believing.

Thus, there is some reason to think that evidence exists that may justify my memorial beliefs. The burden then, for the anti-evidentialist is to show that there are cases in which one genuinely remembers and should be justified in believing, but in fact, one has no evidence or insufficient evidence. I am inclined to think that such cases will not exist - the problem of forgotten evidence seems to me to be a non-starter too, but is a problem for another blogging.

2. So, supposing that there is evidence, what strategies are available for the evidentialist? I think that one obvious case is "seeming evidentialism" or "phenomenal conservatism". Michael Huemer has defended the view that seemings that P may play a role in justifying P. I find this view plausible, though it (of course) has its detractors. If seemings are evidence, the evidence mentioned above (separable from one's memorial belief) may be a seeming of this sort, and if so, then that seeming counts as evidence for belief in the remembered proposition. The following is true in cases of remembering that P: it seems to me (often quite strongly) that P is true (or was true). So, if seemings are evidence, then seemings with a particular character or phenomenology may provide the evidence in memory.

3. Suppose one's not a fan of seemings. Other accounts seem available to the evidentialist. Suppose that P seems to be true in that way in which memories present themselves to us. If justification involves some proposition being the best explanation of our evidence, then it may well be the case that, given our background information, the best explanation of our memorial experiences are that the events we seem to recollect in fact did occur. The idea would be similar to the use of best explanation in justifying our perceptual beliefs. In fact, the situation is exactly parallel, just the class of propositions justified by these experiences are different. In one situation they are present-tense propositions about the external world, in the other, they are propositions what was the case - or at least about times earlier than the present (if one likes things put into B-theoretic terminology).

It's possible that one thinks that neither of the two ways I've offered are sufficient for justifying memorial beliefs. I think that it's plausible that either may work (they may not even exclude one another), or even that some other way might work (e.g. a Chisholmian approach where more finely grained epistemic principles govern justification of beliefs on certain sorts of experiences). But if these are controversially true, they warrant discussion rather than quick dismissal by anti-evidentialists (as do similar approaches for reductive strategies for justifying the acceptance of testimony).

Bergmann on Seeming Evidentialism and the Great Pumpkin Objection

2010-01-14T15:31:00.002-05:00

I have the privilege of taking a seminar co-taught by Richard Feldman and Earl Conee on the forthcoming volume Evidentialism and its Discontents (I think this is still the title) edited by my friend Trent Dougherty. I'll post some of my half-baked cogitations as I read through these articles during the semester.

Earl Conee, in "First Things First" argues that a version of evidentialism, called "seeming evidentialism" (SE) offers intuitive responses to skepticism and allows one to get started on the epistemic project with minimal methodological commitments. Michael Bergmann in his forthcoming article "Evidentialism and the Great Pumpkin Objection" argues that Conee's response to what has, following Alvin Plantinga's use, been called "The Great Pumpkin Objection" (GPO), fails and further, that evidentialism seems little better off than externalist theories.

First, the GPO. Briefly, if one offers a solution to a skeptical problem such that it can be mimicked by a silly view or an otherwise epistemically objectionable view in a way that appears to make the view epistemically respectable, then one's solution to the skeptical problem fails (Bergmann terms such solutions "inadequate". Presumably the inadequacy is that as arguments against skepticism, they include a false premise, thereby being unsound, rather than some more innocuous form of inadequacy, like failure to convince skeptics.) Bergmann distinguishes between two kinds of arguments against a GPO: a) the target solution has not been successfully mimicked by the silly theory and b) the target solution has been successfully mimicked by the silly theory but still deny that this implies that the solution fails to be a good reply to skepticism.

Bergmann's argument is that while Conee offers an argument that SE is not successfully mimicked by some silly view, his defense of SE fails, there are silly views that are able to successfully defend themselves by mimicking SE. I may deal with Bergmann's argument here at a later time. I haven't made up my mind about the success of his argument.

After concluding that Conee's defense of SE against the GPO fails, Bergmann considers the possibility of SE attempting to reply to the GPO in the same way that externalist theories like proper-functionalism might. The idea, in the case of SE, would be that, despite the fact that there are silly theories that can mimic SE to defend themselves, there is the important difference that SE is true, that seemings-as-if-true are good reasons to believe propositions, whereas silly theories like counterinductive theories or conjecturalist theories don't (in worlds in which they actually give the result that those theories are true).

Bergmann's complaint is that this defense of SE is externalist, and that evidentialists are likely to be less happy about this. It's true that evidentialism does seem to be positively correlated with being an access internalist. However, it bears mentioning that Conee and Feldman have defended understanding the distinction between internalism and externalism as better construed between those who think that one's epistemic justification is a matter of the mental states one has. Bergmann may quibble about how "internalism" and "externalism" ought to be distinguished (as I recall, he does just this in his presentation of his dilemma for internalism). Conee and Feldman, in "Internalism Defended", define internalism as "mentalism", according to which

The justificatory status of a person's doxastic attitudes strongly supervenes on the person's occurrent and dispositional mental states, events, and conditions. (2004, 56)

In the rest of the article, they defend the view that what one is justified in believing only varies with the mental states that one has: that two persons, in any worlds you please, that are alike mentally, will be exactly alike in the degrees to which they are justified in the doxastic attitudes they hold. In fact, their argument for internalism in that article does not focus on what a person is able to access (as Bergmann seems to take internalism to focus on), but which mental states a person has. Consider the birdwatcher case: S1 and S2 are birdwatching with equally good vantage points and looks at a woodpecker that flies by. S1 is an expert birdwatcher and believes what he sees is a woodpecker. S2 is a novice and also believes what he sees is a woodpecker. Being an expert, S1 knows what a woodpecker looks like, while S2 lacks this information. What matters is the mental difference between S1 and S2 for the evaluation of how reasonable each is in believing as they do (and S1 is more reasonable than S2). No mention is made of whether or not S1 is capable of accessing all of the mental states that are evidence for him in his belief that he has seen a woodpecker.

Given that this is the view that they have defended, it would be good for Bergmann to acknowledge in his use of "internalism", that Conee need not be committed to the view that one must be able to easily mentally access any factor that bears on one's being justified.

Kant and Extraterrestrial Life

2009-12-20T10:02:00.004-05:00

"If it were possible to settle by any sort of experience whether there are inhabitants of at least some of the planets that we see, I might well bet everything that I have on it. Hence I say that it is not merely an opinion but a strong belief (on the correctness of which I would wager many advantages in life) that there are also inhabitants of other worlds."

-Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A825/B853

Discussion of Forthcoming Term Paper

2009-12-14T17:49:00.005-05:00

For my proseminar paper, I'm thinking of drawing parallels between the generality problem for reliabilist theories of justification and the problem of action description in Kantian ethics, and I'm going to suggest that proposed solutions to the latter can be adapted to address the former.

Briefly, the generality problem for reliabilism is this: according to that theory, a belief-forming process confers justification on a belief token that is produced by that process only insofar as the process is reliable. But the degree to which a belief-forming process can be described as reliable seems to depend in part on the level of generality used in describing the process. For example, take the case of a belief "There is a tree outside my window" that is the result of a process of visual sense perception (for simplicity's sake I'll only consider the visual aspect of the seeing, and exclude other relevant processes such as the application of the concept 'tree'). If we describe this process as "visual sense perception" simpliciter, then it seems as though the process is not very reliable (compare e.g. my seeing the tree at night and without the aid of my glasses with my seeing the tree in the day with my glasses on), but if we describe the process in a very fine-grained way (perhaps so fine as to ensure that only that particular act of seeing fulfills the description) then the reliability of the process will be much higher. The problem is to give a criterion for determining whether and to what degree a process is reliable in a non-ad hoc way.

Briefly, the problem of action description in Kantian ethics is this: if we try to act in accordance with the categorical imperative (specifically, the universal law formulation), then whether an action is permissible seems to depend in some respect on the level of generality used to describe it. Take the paradigmatic case of the person who is questioned by the Gestapo and who lies about hiding Jews: if we describe the action as "lying" simpliciter, then it seems clearly wrong, since we could not consistently will that everyone lie. But, if we describe the action as "lying to an evil person in order to save the lives of innocent people", then it seems like we could consistently will such an action (I'm ignoring some potentially salient features of the example for the sake of simplicity, but I think the general idea is clear).

In both cases, we are presented with the problem of determining the appropriate level of generality to use in describing an action, as well as the implications that such a description has on justification (epistemic in one case and moral in the other). Thus, I think it is reasonable to suppose that progress in finding a solution to one problem can be applied to finding a solution to the other.

Kant's Factory of Thought: a Metaphor

2009-12-02T15:48:00.004-05:00

In an attempt to understand Kant's account of the formation of judgments, I developed a drawing that uses a factory as a metaphor for the mind. I intended the drawing to be fairly uncontroversial with regard to the interpretation of Kant's view that it presents, but I should say that precisely locating the transcendental unity of the apperception in the metaphor proved to be difficult.

Kant and Mathematics

2009-11-01T17:35:00.000-05:00

This is an excerpt from a paper in which I argue that in the first Critique Kant does not give good reasons for thinking that the truths of mathematics are synthetic a priori.

Mathematical judgments, Kant states, are an example of synthetic a priori judgments (A 10/B 14). Judgments such as “5 + 7 = 12” and “a straight line is the shortest distance between two points” are a priori, since they are both necessary and universal. However, according to Kant they are also synthetic. He states that the concept “twelve” cannot be arrived at solely by examining the concepts of “five,” “seven,” and “addition,” and the concept “shortest distance between two points” cannot be found in the concept “straight line” (B 16). In both cases, Kant argues, we must appeal to an intuition in order to the truth of the judgment. When we add five and seven, we must have recourse to calculating aids such as our fingers, or the visualization of discrete points, etc. (B 15). And in the case of the straight line or other geometrical truths, we must have recourse to intuitions in order to arrive at the correct answer.

But what exactly does Kant mean by appealing to an intuition in this context? As he explains at A 19/B 33, by “intuition” he is specifically referring to the means by which a cognition relates to an object when the mind is presented with that object. In the case of mathematical truths, it is these kinds of intuitions (e.g. the processes of counting or of constructing a geometric figure, cf. Dicker (2004) 27) that allow us to see the truth or falsehood of our judgments, rather than an examination of the concepts involved (Guyer (2006) 61). So an intuition is something over and above the particular concepts involved in a judgment.

In the case of the straight line being the shortest distance between two points, Kant states that the concept of straight “contains nothing of quantity, but only a quality” (B 16), and concludes that this judgment is synthetic. However, a closer examination of the concept “straight line” will reveal the judgment to be analytic. Euclid defines a line as “breadthless length” (Elements I def. 1), and a straight line as “a line which lies evenly with the points on itself (Elements I def. 4); in other words, a straight line is a magnitude in one dimension “which represents the extension equal with (the distances separating) the points on it” (Heath (1956) 166). In addition, Kant’s contemporary Legendre followed Archimedes in simply defined a straight line as the shortest distance between two points (Heath (1956) 169). So the judgment that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points turns out to be analytic after all.

In the case of “5 + 7 = 12,” Kant states that the concept “twelve” cannot be arrived at simply by examining the concepts “five,” “seven,” and “addition,” but requires a process of counting. But it does not seem to me that the process of counting “goes beyond” (B 15) the concepts of the particular numbers and the concept of addition, but that it makes explicit what is already contained in the concepts involved. The concepts “five” and “seven” surely include the concept “magnitude,” and the combination of two particular magnitudes must yield another particular magnitude; in this case, the magnitude that we happen to denote by the concept “twelve.” It seems that e.g. when we represent the concept “five” to ourselves, we unavoidably do so by imagining a certain number of distinct objects (even if those objects are components of another object, as if for instance we represent “five” by visualizing a pie with five slices). I suggest that what Kant calls an “intuition” in this and in similar cases of counting is nothing more than the act of examining the concept of a particular number. That we require this kind of representation in order to perform calculations should be understood as an indication of the genesis of our concepts of numbers (or perhaps an indication of the limits of our particular cognitive capabilities), rather than a proof that mathematical knowledge must be arrived at with the aid of intuitions that go beyond the concepts involved.

Not Getting It

2009-10-06T08:59:00.002-04:00

Socrates is my hero. That probably goes for most philosophers. I was a bit surprised at the degree of grief I suffered at reading student essays in which a sizable portion only understand argument as a rhetorical method of persuasion among others. In essay after essay, students failed to get that Socrates is not trying to win in the Apology through rhetoric - he has the option of doing so, but considers it shameful. Maybe it's too much to expect that the students actually read the Apology and noted the importation message of the dialogue that non-rational persuasion is different from persuasion by reason.

Grading is my main interaction with the students (as TA), so I won't have much chance to try to get them to really get Socrates. But it's early in the course and it is (mostly) their first course in philosophy, so after reading more Plato, maybe they'll get it. But if nothing else, I've gotten one of the student errors I want to make sure I address when it's my turn to teach Plato/Socrates to undergraduates.

On Authenticity

2009-09-28T19:16:00.002-04:00

A former classmate of mine, Matthew Anderson, recently written an article which raises the issue of authenticity. I'm going to take a stab at the subject, but I honestly haven't thought in great detail about the subject, and this is perhaps my first stab at it. Hopefully I'll better understand how authenticity, if a virtue of any sort fits into the ordinary network of duties, values, and virtues after further thought. But here goes - Anderson writes:

Fewer words find more frequent use among young evangelicals than “authentic.” Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee resonated with young evangelicals for the same reason: they appeared authentic in their positions and their mindsets... And while authenticity has a political dimension, it is also a social virtue. Young evangelicals frequently decry the inauthenticity of the mega-church and individualistic evangelical tradition, where people put on a happy face and “played church.” Experiencing “real life together” is the pursuit of the new evangelical small group, where “real life” is always “messy.” Authenticity in social settings is frequently an excuse for sharing sins and problems within a group of people who doubtlessly share the same sins and problems.

Anderson has as his target an issue among a certain group of people, and I don't doubt that he's right about it. My experience has been that this is far from an issue among evangelicals alone. It's a common theme in movies and when I've had deeper conversations with undergraduates and peers outside the academy, it's not infrequently something that comes up. If anything, I suspect that it's currency among evangelicals today has to do with osmosis from the rest of our culture. I suppose that there's an interesting history to the concept - I suspect that it's currency derives from trickle-down existentialism, but I'm far from positive about that - and it really deserves study.

I'm often inclined to get a bit restless when talk of "authenticity" or "being real" comes up. One of the reasons is the nebulousness of the term. I'm never quite sure what qualifies as being authentic. However, there does appear to be some genuine value to authenticity liable both to inflation and deflation.

The sense of the term I have in mind is that one is authentic if one acts honestly. One fails to be authentic if one talks about traditional values but belies those values by the hookers one is secretly meeting with on the side. One fails to be authentic if one hides feelings or desires because of how it will be perceived (being closeted is a failure of authenticity). Part of the concept appears to have to do with not realizing one's desires for the sake of appearance and part of it has to do with publicly speaking of high standards, but actually acting according to a set of lower standards. In brief, one doesn't act honestly. One intentionally acts in a way so that you communicate to others that you are a kind of person that you aren't.

Here's where it's important not to deflate the value of authenticity. The complement of authenticity is a kind of social fraud. Fraud undercuts human relationships extremely effectively, and I'm told that non-familial relationships are paramount for my generation and those following it. Given that virtuous friendships are of great value to having a flourishing life and that social fraud seems to undercut that value, there's something pretty important about authenticity. It may be that if there are such things as "intrinsic goods" of practices (in MacIntyre's), that authenticity is an important precondition for realizing whatever goods are intrinsic to the practice of friendship. Dante seemed to realize this in his placing fraud at the very deepest level of hell. Subverting relationships generated the worst sins in Dante's taxonomy.

However, there's also reason to think that the value of authenticity is often overblown. Firstly, authenticity seems to be mainly a precondition for having other values. If I'm socially honest, then I can participate in enriching relationships with others in a way that I might not otherwise have done. However, authenticity in the sense I'm concerned with is without much value if the person doesn't have many virtues. Authenticity is in some sense a bit cheap. After all, I can be fully authentic without many of the other virtues. An authentic rascal is still a rascal. If he's not authentic, then he's a hypocritical rascal, but removing the hypocrisy doesn't make him less than a rascal. And there does seem to be a bit of a problem here for people like me who are moral realists of some sort or another with authenticity. Authenticity is sometimes the only virtue that undergrads appear to think isn't relative or subjective. In such cases, I get the impression that one can be taken to be socially virtuous so long as one is honest about how deeply bereft one is of other virtues (paradoxically, I suppose that there's a kind of inauthenticity in this).

If the other virtues are whittled away so that only authenticity remains, then one is poor indeed. But, it's also true that adding authenticity to other valuable traits is, as Dante seemed aware of, a precondition for certain sorts of social moral goods.

Ancient Greek Paleontology

2009-09-03T10:58:00.003-04:00

This blog is not dead, only dormant.

It's always interesting when something about fossils shows up in antiquity. I was reading some fragments about Xenophanes (b. abt. 570 B.C.) and the following showed up:

He believes that earth is being mixed into the sea and over time it is being dissolved by the moisture saying that he has the following kinds of proofs, that sea shells are found in the middle of the earth and in mountains, and the impressions of a fish and seals have been found at Syracuse in the quarries, and the impression of a laurel leaf in the depth of the stone in Paros, and on Malta flat shapes of all marine life. He says that these things occurred when all things were covered with mud long ago and the impressions were dried in the mud.

- Hippolytus, Refutation (from Cohen, Curd, Reeve, Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy)

What's interesting here is that Xenophanes knew about fossils, had a vaguely correct notion of what they were (impressions of ancient plants and animals), and used them to formulate theories about prehistory and certain sorts of natural processes. His suppositions were wildly inaccurate, but it was a good early start for paleontology. Additionally, though the "proofs" cited appear to all be hearsay, they do accord with certain kinds of fossils. I wonder whether these were known via rumors passed about in the marketplace or if there were (since it was the dawn of natural science and philosophy in Greece - a self-conscious effort to collect this kind of information among those involved).

I wonder if there are a) earlier reports of fossils in antiquity and b) if Xenophanes was the first to draw paleontological sorts of conclusions from them. May we rightly call Xenophanes the first paleontologist?

-Bill

Gettiered Development

2009-06-30T17:34:00.004-04:00

Once one gets familiar with the Gettier problem, one finds it all over the place. Occasionally, one finds it in popular media, like TV. I happened to find what seems to me a very good case of it in the sitcom Arrested Development.

Unfortunately, if one's not familiar with the show, the clip may require some background. The Bluth family is a wealthy family fallen on hard times. George Bluth is on the lam, while his wife Lucille is living with his twin brother Oscar (distinguishable from his fugitive brother by his head of gray hair). Buster, who is actually the son of an illicit liaison between Lucille and Oscar (but does not know this) has been signed up for the Army by Lucille when challenged by a Michael Moore lookalike to do so, and is about to be deployed to Iraq. George has come to see Buster (since he too believes that Buster is his son), wearing a wig as a disguise so that he won't be arrested on sight. The key things to note is that Oscar is Buster's father, and George appears to be Oscar.

Buster believes, on the word of George, whom he takes to be Oscar, that Oscar is his father. His belief is true. His belief also appears to be justified. He sees a man that looks just like Oscar, testifying to him that he is his father.

It seems pretty obvious that at this point, Buster doesn't actually know that Oscar's his father, but he has a justified true belief that he is.

Unconscious Inference

2008-06-20T09:20:00.002-04:00

I received internalism about justification in my mother's milk, so to speak. Most of my earliest philosophical teachers were internalists in this way, and I have usually thought that this is about right when it comes to justification, despite my flirtations with proper-functionalism.

Recently, I have been more latitudinarian in my internalism - favoring what's been termed "mentalism" by Conee and Feldman in Evidentialism. Mentalism is a kind of bare internalism, it holds that what's justified for me to believe supervenes on my mental states. Thus, a brain-in-a-vat can have all the same justified beliefs that I have if he has all of the same mental states I do. That sounds about right to me (pace externalism about content worries). The upside of this form of internalism is this: my grounding for certain beliefs may not be easily accessible to me in the way that classical internalism envisions.

Philosophers often think (or it seems so) of the thinker as an intellectual, and perhaps even a caricature of an intellectual: a person who comes to all of their beliefs through conscious deliberation. But really, if I survey my own mind, and others seem to avow this, most of my beliefs are not formed this way: I have flashes of insight about theoretical matters when I'm working on something else (maybe after awaking from sleep, in the shower, while I'm working on an unrelated topic), I seem to make inductive inferences without going through any sort of explicit process (I see the groceries on the floor and immediately believe that my wife is home), I act in a way that shows that I have some sort of pro-attitude toward some proposition without it ever crossing my mind that I do (especially in skilled activity - like driving - I evade a road hazard without even thinking about it), etc.

The basing relation with mentalism points the way toward explaining how we have justified belief (or some other doxastic/quasi-doxastic state) in these cases. Various mental processes, those I don't have direct control over dispose me to form the correct attitude from my evidence without the slightest conscious thought about it. These seem to be operating when I'm thinking about other things, when I'm asleep, when I'm driving, and so on. Often the only indication of these processes are when they seem to 'pop' into my conscious mental landscape, but even then, like in the case of driving, I only seem to be aware of them from the way my mind has directed my behavior.

Anyway, this seems interesting and bears more thought.

Content Externalism

2008-06-05T15:47:00.002-04:00

(So, this is musing at this point... I'd love to be corrected by those who understand this issue better, especially if I'm making any simple mistakes due to my ignorance in this area. But blogs are good for this - exploring and figuring out when one has something seriously in error.)

I'm currently reading through Timothy Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits[1] and one of the crucial issues in the book is Williamson's adoption of an "externalist" theory of mental content. I wish to muse a bit on such theories, since I am undecided about what the correct attitude toward externalism of this sort ought to be. I think Williamson is right in at least so far as he sees that the adoption of externalism about content will require some serious rethinking of traditional epistemology.

Externalism has been typically argued for via "Twin Earth"-style thought experiments. I'll adapt for my own use one given by Tyler Burge. [2] Al is a fairly resident of Earth. Al has a variety of beliefs about aluminum. "He thinks that aluminum is a light, flexible metal, that many sailboat masts are made out of aluminum, that someone across the street recently bought an aluminum canoe."[3] Suppose that there is a duplicate of Al living on Twin Earth, a planet in every way like our own with one important exception, what plays the functional role of aluminum on Twin Earth. When twin-Al (call him 'Twal') runs his hand over twin-aluminum (call it 'twaluminum') he has just the same sorts of tactile stimuli as when Al runs his hand over aluminum. It weighs the same in each's hand, it reflects light in just the same way. Twal also calls twaluminum 'aluminum'. So, it would seem when Twal thinks of twaluminium, it's hard to see how his internal concept of twaluminum differs from Al's concept of aluminum. This is made more explicit on supervenience theses. If mental states, including intentional propositional attitudes, supervene on brains, then surely the mental state that Twal and Al are in are precisely the same. But if Al asserts, "This is a fine aluminum canoe" and Twal asserts, "This is a fine aluminum canoe" they surely are saying something different. Twal has never encountered aluminum and Al has never encountered twaluminum. But additionally, how could they be saying something different? If their mental act of asserting some proposition with those words supervenes on precisely the same (ex hypothesi) type of brain state, then surely they are making the same kind of assertative (sp?) act.

I think that it's intuitive, even with the rejection of a supervenience thesis about mind, that this problem occurs. I think that one of the central issues in these externalist thought experiments is that Al's and Twal's experiences underdetermine what it is that their intentional states are of. Suppose I don't have any beliefs about what the microstructure of aluminium is. All I know about it are the typical descriptive characteristics that accompany aluminum. When I am introduced to it, suppose that someone says "That's aluminum" and points at it. My experience underdetermines whether or not what I am seeing is aluminum or twaluminum. Every subsequent encounter with aluminum will be similar, because there is nothing that will tell the two metals apart without very close examination (let's say requiring a laboratory). So, how could my mental content about aluminum be different from my counterpart on twin-earth who has just the same sorts of experiences... someone points out to him twaluminum saying "That's twaluminum." He goes on to have the same sorts of experiences I do, but in every case with twaluminum instead of aluminum. What grounds do I have for saying that his concept of twaluminum differs in the least from my concept of aluminum? On the classical sense-datum conception of mental content, there doesn't seem to be any reason to think that there could be any difference between Al's and Twal's concepts, because all of the sensible properties that Al and Twal are aware of are exactly similar phenomenologically.

The solution that has generally been recommended is externalism about content. That a belief is about a given proposition is not only determined by the thinker, but by the thinker's environment. Putnam seemed to think it was the local linguistic community. It might just as well be determined by causal contact with the things "out there."

What makes this somewhat disturbing for the traditional epistemologist is something like this: I find the notion that epistemology is a first-person enterprise attractive and think that there are some propositions that I am the expert on, probably to the point of infallibility. If I am in intense pain, there is no way that I can be wrong about thinking that I am. If I am thinking about giraffes, there is some part of that thought that is simply not in doubt. But if content externalism is true, this first-person privelege seems somewhat fantastical. I cannot tell, just by inspecting my own thoughts what I am thinking about. I may not even be able to tell what propositional attitude I am in, if any. For instance, belief requires a proposition, at least on a standard interpretation (we do sometimes talk of believing in a person - but let's set those cases aside). Suppose that propositions have their subjects as constituents, so when I mentally token the proposition expressed by "That canoe is made of aluminum", I express a proposition that has a canoe as a constituent. Suppose when I take myself to token that proposition and believe it, I do it in a case where I do not actually see a canoe, but am the victim of an illusion. Thus, we a case similar to a Frege-puzzle. But unless propositions can have gaps (and they might), then there is properly no proposition that I am believing, so though it seems to me that I am believing a proposition, I am NOT. So, it would seem that I'm not in a believing state at all. But that seems batty in the extreme - how could I be mistaken about that kind of thing?

[1] Williamson, Timothy, Knowledge and Its Limits...

[2] Burge, Tyler, "Two Thought Experiments Reviewed", Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, Vol 23.3 July 1982

[3] Burge, 284.

Stoic Views on Value

2008-03-17T09:44:00.003-04:00

In EN 1096a2, Aristotle maintains that no one would call a virtuous person happy if she were suffering great misfortunes, except to defend a “philosopher’s paradox.” The Stoics, however, embrace this paradox by insisting that virtue is sufficient for happiness. But unlike Aristo and his followers, they also hold that so-called external goods, while not choiceworthy in themselves, do have a kind of value in that they are to be preferred to their opposites. However, it remains to be seen whether the Stoics can consistently maintain these two views of value without their position collapsing into either the Aristotelian view or the view of Aristo. It is this tension that Cicero highlights in the dilemma he poses to Cato in De Fin. III.10-12. I will argue that Cato’s subsequent attempt to reconcile these two commitments ultimately fails.

Cato states that what is valuable is that which is “either itself in accordance with nature, or brings about something that is” (III.20) and that the only things worth choosing are things that are valuable. He then describes “appropriate actions” as being impulses directed towards selecting what is in accordance with nature: initially as infants we seek to preserve our own existence, but as we become able to exercise our reason we see an overall order and pattern in the world that we come to seek for its own sake. Thus, we discover that acting virtuously, i.e. acting in accordance with the order and pattern of nature, is the only thing that is truly valuable and thus truly choiceworthy. Virtue is necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia, and all else is indifferent. But of the things that are indifferent, some such as health and beauty are in accordance with nature, and are thus to be preferred over their opposites such as sickness. It seems to me as though Cato is saying that virtue is the only thing we need in order to be happy, but if we are presented with the option of either having or not having certain external goods, we will take those things that are in accordance with nature. So, the Stoic sage will not go out of his way to obtain health and money, but if they happen to come his way he will not reject them. This view of virtue, taken with the Stoic belief that virtue is within our power, shows that for the Stoics happiness is something that is completely within our power, and not dependent on things such as external goods that are often beyond our control.

Cato sees the potential difficulty in making a distinction between what is to be chosen and what is to be selected, and at III.22-24 he tries to illustrate how the Stoics can maintain this distinction while still maintaining that virtue is the only thing that is ultimately valuable. His example of archery is rather confused (why else does the archer practice his craft, if not for the sake of hitting the mark?) but his examples of acting and dancing seem to work better, since they accord somewhat with his account of virtue in that the craft is practiced for its own sake, and not for the sake of some external object. But even dancing and acting are not perfect examples, Cato says, because their success can depend partially on what is outside of the dancer’s or actor’s control, such as the audience’s reaction.

However, it seems to me that the distinction between what is choiceworthy and what is selected cannot be consistently maintained. Earlier in III.20 Cato stated that what is in accordance with nature is valuable, and thus choiceworthy. But at III.44, Cato admits that health has some value, although he does not admit that it is a “good.” He seems to be saying that the value of heath and the value of virtue are different in kind, even if his comparisons of them at III.45 seem to imply a difference in degree. But he is faced with a dilemma: either health is in fact in accordance with nature, and thus is valuable and choiceworthy, or else it is not choiceworthy, and thus can be neither valuable nor in accordance with nature, and thus there would be no grounds for preferring it to sickness. As it is, Cato seems to want to say that health is both in accordance with nature, and yet not choiceworthy, which is inconsistent with his own stated system of value.

A Mereological Argument for Theism

2008-02-29T19:37:00.002-05:00

This argument, as far as I know, is novel. It mirrors an argument for the existence of God in Richard Swinburne's The Existence of God, which argues for the existence of God from otherwise inexplicable brain and mental event correlations.

Consider the Special Composition Question: "What necessary and jointly sufficient conditions must any xs satisfy in order for it to be the case that there is an object composed of the xs?"[1]

Ned Markosian has argued that every answer yet suggested for answering this question has failed. He argues that we ought to take composition to be brute: "There is no true, non-trivial, and finitely long answer to SCQ." [2] Let's agree with Markosian that all previous answers to this question have failed and hold off on endorsing his answer to the question.

Suppose however, that none of the views above work, but it is still the case that the some xs are such that the xs compose some y but some zs are such that they do not compose some w. That is to say, some, but not all mereological simples compose something. There should be some fact of the matter about this too. In theory, we should be able to draw up a list of all of the composite objects and their simples with their properties. On brutalism, there is not going to be any explanation for why these simples with these properties compose something, rather than not. The set of correlated xs with their properties and composite ys will be brute, with no explanation.

Brute explanations are only epistemically permissible if there is no uneliminated explanation. [4] I submit that there is an uneliminated explanation. The correlation of xs with their properties and composite ys has a personal cause, a la Swinburne. [5] In fact, whether or not humans are composite physical objects, they will be unable to make it the case that these correlations are true. This is easy to see, there was a time before the first human. It is not plausible to think that the advent of humans started making trees out of xs shaped tree-wise. So, if there is a personal explanation, then it is not a human person. Furthermore, the personal cause must be a mereological simple himself otherwise, he would be insufficient to explain his own composition out of some xs. God fits this description and it is more plausible that the correlations of simples and their properties and the objects they compose are the result of the action of a divine personal cause than that they are brute.

So,

1. There are correlations between simples and composite objects.

2. If there are correlations of this sort, then said correlations are either explained or they are brute.

3. Said correlations are either explained or they are brute. (MP 1, 2)

4. If the correlations are explained, they are either explained by some form of Contact (and all strengthened forms, up to Fusion), Life-ism, Nihilism, Universalism or have a personal explanation.

5. It is false that they are explained by some form of Contact, Life-ism, Nihilism, or Universalism. (Not argued here, between van Inwagen and Markosian every one of these is dispatched). [6]

6. If the correlations are explained, they have a personal explanation.

7. Said correlations either are explained by a personal explanation or they are brute.

8. It is more probable that there is a personal explanation than that they are brute.

9. If there is a personal explanation, then there is a God. (see argument above).

10. It is more probable that there is a God than that the correlations are brute.

Even if this argument works, it has a modest conclusion. As with Swinburne's argument from mental/physical event correlations, it works best as part of a cumulative case.

I'm interested to hear what people think. I have my doubts about premises 5 and 8.

[1] Markosian, Ned, "Brutal Composition" Philosophical Studies 92: 211-249, 1998., 212

[2] Ibid., 214.

[3] Ibid., 223.

[4] I take it that this is plausible. However, I haven't the foggiest idea how to argue for it.

[5] Swinburne, Richard The Existence of God, 2nd Edition(Clarendon Press: Oxford), 2004, 35-51.

[6] van Inwagen, Peter, Material Beings, ( ), 1990.

On the Nature of Numbers

2008-02-07T23:09:00.000-05:00

The following definition of the number 2 has been brought to my attention: "[t]he set of all pairs." Against this definition, I raise the following objections:

I. It seems viciously circular: if 2 is the set of all pairs, what are pairs other than a set of two objects? The same objection seems to hold for defining 3 as the set of all triples, etc.

II. Even if this kind of definition can be used for the natural numbers, I am at a loss to understand how numbers such as fractions, irrational roots, pi, imaginary numbers, and negative numbers are to be defined in terms of sets of objects.

III. If “pairs” is understood to mean “pairs of physical objects,” then it would seem that in a possible world with only two physical objects, numbers larger than two could not exist, since e.g. “the set of all triples” would be empty.

IV. Or again, take two possible worlds which each contain only twenty physical objects, with the stipulation that each world contains objects that are entirely different than the objects in the other. In this case, it would seem that “2” in one world would not be identical to “2” in the other, since the set defined as “the set of all pairs” would have different members in each possible world.

Thales' Well

2008-02-07T10:11:00.000-05:00

The origin of this blog's name, from Theaetetus:

"[T]hey say Thales was studying the stars... and gazing aloft, when he fell into a well; and a witty and amusing Thracian servant-girl made fun of him because, she said, he was wild to know about what was up in the sky but failed to see what was in front of him and under his feet. The same joke applies to all who spend their lives in philosophy."[1]

This blog will be dedicated to the pursuit of looking aloft and will avoid discussion of what is at our feet.

[1] Plato, Theaetetus, trans. M.J. Levett, rev. Myles F. Burnyeat, from Plato: Complete Works ed. John M. Cooper, Hackett: Indianapolis, IN, 1997., 174a.

Aristotle on Knowledge and Necessity

2008-02-07T09:40:00.000-05:00

The determinist’s argument in De Int. 9 (as given by Aristotle and interpreted by Richard Sorabji[1]) runs as follows: it is either true or false that event X will occur. If the statement “X will happen” turns out to be true, then it will have been true in the past. But if the statement “X will happen” was true in the past, then there is no point to deliberating whether or not to bring it about that X, since “X will happen” was true in the past, and the past cannot be altered. Thus, “X will happen” is necessarily true.

As Sorabji points out, Aristotle seems to accept the inference from the premise that any given statement is either true or false to the determinist conclusion. According to what Sorabji calls the traditional interpretation, Aristotle answers the determinist by arguing that predictive statements like “X will happen” are not yet true or false, but become true or false when X actually happens (or becomes inevitable). Sorabji finds this response unsatisfying, because e.g. if a statement’s being true means that it corresponds to a state of affairs in the world (which was a fairly common understanding of “true” for the Greeks) then the statement “there will be a sea battle tomorrow” is true (when uttered) if in fact it corresponds to a state of affairs, viz. the sea battle happening tomorrow; to speak of it as “not yet true” seems odd (Sorabji 101).

Sorabji’s own solution is to deny the inference between the premise that any given statement is either true or false to the determinist conclusion by making reference to one’s power, or lack of power, to bring about a state of affairs. Thus, if the statement “X will happen” turns out to be true, i.e. actually happens, then I do not have it in my power to make it the case that not-X, since X has already happened and I cannot alter the past. But, Sorabji thinks that this scenario is disanalogous to a situation in which I have been told “X will happen,” but X has not yet happened. Sorabji argues that since the event X still lies in the future, we still have the power to bring about not-X, and thus even if the statement “X will happen” does turn out to be true, it is not necessarily true, as the determinist thinks.

However, it seems to me as though something like Sorabji’s reply was addressed by Aristotle. At 19a7-23, Aristotle argues that it is false that all events happen of necessity: before an event X happens, both X and not-X are possible states of affairs. Since not-X is possible, then if X happens, it cannot have happened necessarily since it was in some agent’s power to bring about not-X. This passage seems to mirror Sorabji’s discussion of irrevocability in the first paragraph on p. 102, and Aristotle seems to argue here for the same disanalogy between past events and future events that Sorabji does.

Returning to Sorabji’s objection that it seems as though statements about the future should be said to be actually true or false depending on whether they in fact correspond to a state of affairs, it seems to me that Aristotle could answer that they are not yet true or false simply because they do not yet correspond to a state of affairs, and that only when they can truly be said to correspond, or fail to correspond, to a state of affairs can they be said to be true or false. It seems to me that this is the line Aristotle takes in his conclusion to this section at 19b1. Thus it appears that Aristotle argues both for a qualified principle of bivalence (cf. Sorabji p. 94-95) and against the determinist’s belief that all events happen of necessity.

[1] Sorabji, Richard. “Necessity, Cause, and Blame: Perspectives on Aristotle’s Theory.” Duckworth, 1980, pp. 91-103.

A Phenomenological Challenge for Evidentialism

2008-01-25T10:27:00.000-05:00

"I think that the so-called analogical argument for the existence of other minds is a fairly good argument - as philosophical arguments go - but my belief that my wife has thoughts and sensations generally similar to my own is not based on this or any other argument. Not even partly."[1]

A friend of mine turned me onto this paper by PVI. It's very interesting, and fits in with some reading I'm doing for a seminar on rational disagreement. It's a fascinating paper - I enjoyed reading it - but I almost always enjoy reading PVI, whether or not you agree with him on a given point, he's a delightful writer.

At any rate, I see a challenge for evidentialism here. I mean by 'evidentialism' something like the following: p is justified for S at t iff p fits S's evidence E at t (cribbed directly from Conee and Feldman's Evidentialism). In the context, what PVI is talking about beliefs that we are "hardwired" for, beliefs that we come to "automatically" without having to resort to discursive reasoning.

I think there is also something to what PVI is saying - phenomenologically, there are many beliefs we arrive at that we don't obviously carefully survey our evidence, weigh it, and believe. Belief is frequently automatic. My belief in other minds is one of these things - if I walk into the grad office and see two students sitting there, I don't make a reasoned argument that I am aware of to the conclusion that by certain analogies with my own mind and behavior, the two objects in the room are actually intelligent human beings with minds more or less like my own. I think that PVI might be right also about the material world. I don't wake up in the morning, open my eyes, look out the window and conclude that the simplest explanation is that the things that I am experiencing are non-mental objects independent of my mind. However, I believe it.

So, there's a phenomenological challenge to evidentialism. Evidentialists need a way to account for automatic beliefs that seem to be justified. But I think that the problem is hardly one for evidentialism simpliciter, as an account of justification, but rather with evidentialism as part of the analysis of knowledge. The way I'm inclined to go with this (at least at the moment) is to take the automatic part of belief formation to be part of a basing relation that either causally or otherwise pairs beliefs and evidence (cribbed again from Conee and Feldman).

Aside: for an access internalist, is it necessary that both the justifier of a belief and the basing relation be accessible to the knower?

[1] van Inwagen, Peter, "Is God an Unnecessary Hypothesis?" God and the Ethics of Belief ed. Andrew Dole and Andrew Chignell (Cambridge) 2005, p. 146

Does the Denial of Maximal Justification Entail Infinitism?

2007-11-15T23:07:00.001-05:00

Since I’ve been reading about infinitism lately, here’s an argument for infinitism. Infinitism is the theory of the structure of epistemic justification according to which a belief is justified if and only if there is an available infinite regress inferentially related justifying reasons. Peter Klein is the most famous proponent of the view, though there have been some new infinitists in the literature of late, including Jeremy Fantl, whose argument I’m concerned with here:

If for any degree of justification there is a higher degree of justification, then there will always be a reason such that, were you to have it, the degree of justification would increase. But this is just infinitism. [1]

Fantl here is arguing that you deny that there are any completely or maximally justified propositions, justified and incapable of having its justification increased, then you are committed to infinitism. I think this argument is subject to a counterexample. Fantl’s argument seems to be that if for any p justified for any S, there is always a higher degree of justification that p could have, then there is always another reason that could justify p further. Therefore there are an infinite number of reasons, which is infinitism. But here is why I think that this argument doesn’t work. Infinitism doesn’t only require that there be an infinite number of reasons, indeed, infinitism is completely consistent with skepticism, if infinitism is true and there are no propositions for which there are not infinite regresses of reasons justifying the antecedent reasons, then there is no knowledge. The key to infinitism is that there cannot only be an infinite collection of reasons, but that the reasons must themselves be inferentially justified. The denial of maximal justification is consistent with there being an infinite number of beliefs which are both noninferentially justified and inferentially justified. Thus, infinitism does not follow from the denial of maximal justification

[1] Fantl, Jeremy. "Modest Infinitism." Canadian Journal of Philosophy 44, no. 4 (2003): 537-562., 538.

An Argument That You Can Never Know How Justified P is, If You Think P is Highly Justified

2007-11-14T17:26:00.000-05:00

Here is an odd argument

I have been asking around and a significant number of people seem to believe that coming to know or even merely to believe that p is highly justified for me, is to increase your justification for p. Call this principle J.

Given that, an odd argument can be made.

Suppose that p is justified for S with a degree of justification of .99 at t (if you don’t favor a numerical scale for justification, it works just as well to give a proper name to your degree of justification, dub it ‘Bob’ or something). Suppose further that at t+1, S believes p and the proposition p has a justification of .99. For the sake of argument, assume that if any belief is justified to .99, then it is highly justified and that S believes this. Thus, at t+1, S believes p and p has a justification of .99, but the latter belief is false, because S’s justification for p is now >.99, because of principle J. Thus, if J is true, if any S comes to believe that his belief in some p is justified to any specified level whatever, if he takes that level to be a high level of justification, then his belief is false, and thus, he can never know his level of belief in such a situation. If he infers from this level of justification, he may fall prey to Gettier cases, too. This works just as well for beliefs that S takes to have a very low justification, it may, in fact completely defeat his justification for the belief. Oddly enough, so long as S doesn’t believe that his level of justification is high (either because he simply hasn’t thought about it or because he believes that it would need to be more highly justified to be a high level of justification), he can know his specified level of justification holds.

It is also interesting that it doesn’t seem to affect temporally indexed beliefs: If S believes that p’s level of justification at t was .99, it doesn’t defeat it, for obvious reasons. It also doesn’t effect beliefs like, p’s justification is at >.99, for it will remain true that p’s level of justification is >.99 if S’s justification increases.

I’m not sure what to think of all this. Some I’ve talked to think this is an acceptable result, some even think it is welcome. I find it bizarre.

I’ll add one more thing:
Jeremy Fantl uses a very similar argument against reliabilism. Suppose that S believes p and p was caused by a 100% reliable process. Thus, it would seem that S’s degree of justification is 100%, that is, it cannot be increased. But, suppose that S became aware that p is justified at 100%. Principle J entails that S’s justification for p must increase in some degree. But then, S’s degree of justification for p was not at 100%, as was supposed.

I thought it was a clever argument, but since I’m not inclined toward maximal justification and even less inclined toward reliabilism, it doesn’t trouble me much. But I do wonder about principle J.

Fantl, Jeremy. "Modest Infinitism." Canadian Journal of Philosophy 44, no. 4 (2003): 537-562.

Epistemic Blowback in BonJour

2007-10-29T15:22:00.000-04:00

Test-balloon that's open for popping by discerning readers:

In "Can Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation?" Laurence BonJour made the claim that for any basic belief B to be justified for S, it must have some feature Φ, which makes B "highly likely to be true." [1] He then argues that either a foundationalist either must hold that this principle must be known by the B by "intuitions or immediate apprehensions" or it is not known. Since the kind of basic beliefs we have in mind are empirical, it just wouldn't do to have another empirical belief do that justification, nor would it do to have it justified by inference (on pain of regress). Then BonJour proceeds to remove the bunk from each lemma, leaving the foundationlist in a world of hurt. More could be said about his argument to this end, but to get onto juicier material, I'll skip it.

I've got in mind a tu quoque against coherentists who use this argument, such that, inasmuch as this is a problem for the foundationalist, it's a problem for the coherentist.

Suppose the following picture of coherentism: S's belief B is justified, it is justified by its coherence with his set of beliefs, M. Presumably this is some relation R that B bears to M. Something quite like BonJour's metaepistemological principle for basic beliefs seems to apply to relations like R. There are all sorts of relations beliefs bear to sets of beliefs, and some of them seem to confer justification for the coherentist and others don't (at very least the incoherence relation). Thus, let us say that there is some property γ such that if any R has γ, then a belief bearing R to his set of beliefs is highly likely to be true call this metaepistemological principle 2. But then there are two possibilities for any coherence theory. Either 1) S knows/believes/justifiedly-believes R has γ or 2) S does not.

1) is the interesting disjunct in this post. 2) allows some form of broadly externalist coherentism, which BonJour would be likely to reject for the same reasons he rejected broadly externalist foundationalism. Suppose the coherentist picks 1): then S has a new belief B* (R has γ) that must itself be justified by coherence with M. B* is a new belief that bears a unique relation R* to M. But R* must have γ in order to justify B*. And, consistent with 1) above, S must believe that R* has γ, B**. I think it is clear that this is clear that the coherentist who picks 1) is on an infinite regress. What's more, because each belief bears it's own unique relation to M, B will never "reappear" in this justificationatory regress.

Suppose that the following is true: BonJour's arguments against foundationalism are devastating, and that 2), being externalist, shares in the calamity. If I'm right, then 2) will trap the coherentist in an infinite regress and (providing there are no decisive objections to infinitism) infinitism is the right response to the regress.

Now, that's a lot to suppose - since I'm not sure BonJour's argument against foundationalism is good. But I'm inclined to think, from this reasoning, that if BonJour's right, he has proved more than he intended to (assuming he was trying to argue for coherentism - which I admit, he didn't say he was doing.)

-Bill

[1] "Can Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation?" in Epistemology: An Anthology ed. Sosa, Kim, McGrath, Blackwell: Malden, MA, 2000., 265.

Significance of Names in the Republic

2007-10-27T13:19:00.000-04:00

It seems to me that a case could be made that the names of the various characters in the Republic have a certain significance to their bearer's roles in the discussion. The characters are of course historical, but I think that Plato acted deliberately in populating his dialogue. Additionally, the characters seem to mirror both the tripartite image of the soul, and the classes in the image of the city.

In order of appearance:

Glaucon, son of Ariston: "bright" or "bright eyes" (cf. Athena's epithet "glaucôpis"). Historically, Glaucon was Plato's brother. In the dialogue, he is the interlocutor who appears to see the clearest, and who is able to follow Socrates' argument to the end of book X, when all other interlocutors have fallen silent. His spiritedness resembles that of the spirited part of the soul or of the Guardian class.

Polemarchus, son of Cephalus: In Athenian politics, the polemarch was the archon who oversaw the waging of war. In the dialogue, he seems to oversee certain crucial points in the discussion, such as detaining Socrates in the Piraeus at 327b, taking over the discussion from Cephalus at 331d, and compelling Socrates to revisit a large section of the argument at 449b. He seems to be the leader and spokesman for those characters who correspond to the appetitive part of the soul (the "many-headed beast"), or the artisan class.

Adeimantus, son of Ariston: "fearless." Like his brother, he undauntedly pursues the discussion, and seems to resemble the spirited part of the soul. However, unlike Glaucon he seems to relate more to the appetitive characters (cf. 327c, 449b-d).

Cephalus of Syracuse: "head." The historical Cephalus was a resident alien in Athens who owned a shield factory. In the dialogue, he is an old man who lacks the spirit and appetite of the other interlocutors. He seems to symbolize traditional Homeric piety, and leaves before the philosophical discussion gets under way, even though he gently chides Socrates for not visiting him enough. Plato is perhaps either making a comparison between traditional Homeric religion and philosophy, or making a statement about what kind of character the philosopher must possess (whole-souled, not just "heady"), or both.

Thrasymachus of Chalcedon: from thrasys "bold, spirited" or negatively "rash, reckless"; and machos "fighter." His first appearance in book I is likened to a wild animal, but at 449c and 450b he emerges as a generally useful and productive participant in the discussion. Like the appetitive part of the soul, he must be tamed (by the rational part in concert with the spirited part) before he can be a useful part of the whole.

Integration vs. Insulation

2007-10-25T08:58:00.000-04:00

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus." Boswell: Life of Samuel Johnson[1]

Should our common, everyday beliefs and actions have an affect on our theoretical and philosophical beliefs? Or is there a layer of insulation between them, so that although we may doubt the reality of time and matter, we will still schedule dental appointments for next week and avoid walking into brick walls? (In the interest of conciseness I will refer to the former view as “integration” and the latter as “insulation” in this essay.) Myles Burnyeat considers this question from the viewpoint of ancient and modern attitudes towards the kinds of skeptical arguments advanced by Sextus Empiricus.[2] He notes that although the modern attitude seems to be that everyday beliefs are not in fact affected by our second-order philosophical theories, this kind of notion would be foreign to the ancient, medieval, or renaissance philosopher.

Burnyeat points out that Sextus relies on our everyday views affecting and being affected by our philosophical views in his overall project of using all manner of arguments to induce the suspension of judgment and to produce tranquility. He argues that for Sextus and his predecessors, there is no separation between first-order questions such as “is this action just?” and second-order theoretical questions such as “what is justice?” (Burnyeat 115). This is because our first-order statements involve the use of theoretical concepts such as good, evil, place and time; and if those concepts are called into question, then so are the first-order statements that make use of them. Thus, Plato may refute Protagoras’ famous dictum on grounds of self-refutation, and in a similar manner G.E. Moore may argue against skepticism concerning the reality of time and space by observing that “it is true that yesterday my body was for some time nearer the mantelpiece than the bookcase” (quoted in Burnyeat 93).

This integral view of Moore’s, however, is not widely shared today, and Burnyeat embarks on a brief overview of the history of philosophy to determine when this became the case. After going through many of the early moderns and showing how their various arguments against skepticism rely on the integration of our common beliefs with our philosophical theories, he arrives at Kant, and concludes that it is he that is responsible for first making a strict demarcation between the two. Burnyeat concludes that while Sextus “innocently” discerns no insulating gap between the empirical and the transcendental, Moore does so “naively,” since he cannot behave as though Kant did not exist.

And this is where Burnyeat leaves us, with the dictum that once lost, innocence “can never be regained” (Burnyeat 123). But on Burnyeat’s own account there are modern philosophers such as Quine who will not have “anything to do with insulation” (Burnyeat 93), and as Quine seems to escape the charge of naivete (although Burnyeat remarks that affirming a belief in integration is one thing, actually living it out is another), perhaps it is after all possible or desirable to unlearn what Kant has taught. Further, Descartes was able to maintain his views on the integration of common beliefs and theory in the face of Gassendi’s and Montagne’s insulating “country gentleman” interpretation of Sextus, so perhaps the position of Moore (and Quine) is not as untenable as Burnyeat makes it appear.

Additionally, it would seem that the integral view has certain advantages: chiefly among these is the consideration that it does seem more internally consistent that my beliefs about this or that object being in a certain spatial relation to me be informed by (and inform) my beliefs about bodies and space. After all, if my theories are not influenced by my experience of the external world, even if they are internally coherent it is an open question as to whether or not they are likely to be true.[3] Finally, I will note that the integral view forces the skeptic to deal with the apraxia objection head-on, rather than deflecting it by finding refuge in his ordinary experience.

[1] For an interesting philosophical interpretation of this scene, cf. Douglas Lane Patey, Johnson's Refutation of Berkeley: Kicking the Stone Again. Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 47, No. 1. (Jan. - Mar., 1986), pp. 139-145.

[2] Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede, ed., The Original Sceptics: A Controversy. Hackett, 1998, pp. 92-126.

[3] Cf. the input objection against coherentist theories of justification and the move to introduce an observation requirement: e.g. in Laurence Bonjour, Epistemology: Classic Problems and Contemporary Responses. Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, p. 208.

Pyrrhonian Skepticism and Objective Values

2007-10-24T16:51:00.000-04:00

In her article “Doing without objective values,” (Malcolm Schofield and Gisela Striker, eds., The Norms of Nature: Studies in Hellenistic Ethics, pp. 3-29.) Julia Annas states that in Sextus Empiricus’ arguments from the tenth Mode of Anesidemus, he is confusing moral realism with moral absolutism. Sextus proposes several arguments like the following: what is good by nature should be good for all, just as fire which is warm by nature warms all (PH III 179). But since different cultures have different beliefs about what is good, and are thus not similarly affected by what is good, we may conclude that nothing is good by nature. Hence, we should give up our beliefs about this or that object being good by nature and, suspending judgment, arrive at tranquility.

But, says Annas, this is a mistake since moral realism, which Sextus is trying to argue against, is not the same position as moral absolutism, which he actually argues against. Annas states that this confusion is one that “Sextus could reasonably have been expected to avoid,” (Annas 10) for three reasons. First, Sextus seems to argue that beliefs about what is good by nature are a source of anxiety, but that if we consider that goods are relative to persons or societies then we can suspend judgment on whether something is good by nature and achieve ataraxia. However, this supposition is unwarranted, since it could still be the case that a good relative to me is a real good, and this could presumably still be a cause of anxiety. Second, Annas produces Polystratus the Epicurean as an example of a philosopher who lived before Sextus and who made the distinction between moral realism and moral absolutism. And third, she points out that moral relativism is a far cry from skepticism, since the moral relativist will still have beliefs about what is good, even if it is relatively good.

I will grant here that Annas is correct in asserting that Sextus conflates the two positions, but I will offer responses to her arguments that this is a mistake that Sextus could and should have avoided. First, given Sextus’ overall project of producing ataraxia by whatever means necessary, it is unclear what advantage he would have gained in relation to his dogmatic opponents by distinguishing between moral realism and moral absolutism, given that most of his opponents would have held to both. Annas seems to be of the opinion that Sextus overlooked the possibility of his interlocutors’ taking refuge in the position that “this is really good, but only in relation to me” (Annas, 10). But while this is perhaps a possible move, it is, I think, highly improbable that Sextus’ opponents would have actually made such a move given their philosophical commitments, and thus Sextus is not to be blamed for not attempting to counter it.

And while Annas can point to one philosopher who made the distinction between moral realism and moral absolutism, this seems an insufficient objection unless it can be shown that this position was so widely held or influential as to warrant its own branch of skeptical arguments. No doubt Sextus, if confronted by a special individual case, could produce arguments suitable to his opponent’s particular dogmas; but in a work like PH, where he spends so little time on ethical issues, I believe it is sufficient for him to address the beliefs of the majority of his audience.

As to Annas’ third objection, it seems that she assumes that Sextus was arguing for a position (relativism) in order to get his opponents to accept the conclusion of his argument. If I am in fact reading her correctly, by way of reply I need only observe that Sextus did not advance relativistic arguments in order to get his opponents to be relativists, but in order to counterbalance their other ethical beliefs in an attempt to produce epoche and ataraxia. He is not committed to the position of relativism any more than he is committed to the position that fire is actually warm by nature. Thus, in light of Sextus' overall project I think that this particular criticism of Annas' is misguided.