There is Some Truth in That

Arché Methodology has a blog! Check it out.

A few highlights:

• I’ve posted a new paper on intuitions; a cool thread has developed.
• Here is a discussion of imagination
• Here is the beginning of what promises to be a cool bibliography
• The CFP is open for our giant awesome methodology conference. Deadline January 1!

I’ll still occasionally do philosophical blogging here, but only when it’s not about methodology. My methodology blogging will be there.

I have heard it alleged before that, at some point in the twentieth century, some philosophers thought that S knows that p entailed that S does not believe that p. They were brought to this absurd conclusion via a pre-Gricean confusion about the semantic-pragmatic distinction.

Does anyone know whether this is truth or urban legend? If it is truth, can you point me to a citation?

Thanks.

I am very excited to announce a major conference at Arché on philosophical methodology. It will be held 25-27 April, 2009.

Keynote Speakers:

David Chalmers (Australian National University)
Jonathan Schaffer (Australian National University, Arché)
Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University)
Tamar Szabó Gendler (Yale University)

All the information is here. Philosophers, please consider submitting — and help spreading the word about our event would also be much appreciated.

John Hawthorne discusses a puzzle in chapter 2 of Knowledge and Lotteries. I’m not inclined to accept his conclusion.

The puzzle is this: I read in the Times that Manchester United won; I trust the Times on good grounds, and it is fact reliable, and correct in this instance. So we should say that I know that w — that Manchester United won — and also that the Times said that w.

I also know that the Guardian includes results of football games, and, like the Times, is very reliable about it. (I’m inclined to trust both papers equally.) I haven’t read the Guardian today, but I know on inductive grounds that it says something about yesterday’s Manchester United game.

Since I know that the Times reported that w, and I know that w, and that the Guardian reported one way or the other about w, then you’d think I should be able to infer from these facts that:

Either both the Times and the Guardian reported correctly that w, or else the Guardian mistakenly reported that ~w.

But it is counterintuitive that I have knowledge of this disjunction.

An obvious move is to resort to contextualism. (Unsurprisingly, I like that move.) But Hawthorne is trying to resist it. Instead, he explains the counterintuitiveness of knowledge of this disjunction by reference to the fact that it is an unusual sort of disjunction: a ‘junk knowledge’ disjunction. Roughly speaking, a junk knowledge disjunction is a disjunction that is known only by virtue of knowledge of one of the disjuncts; were you to learn that disjunct to be false, you would reject the disjunction. This contrasts with the usual case, in which when you know that A or B, you believe that B when you acquire evidence that not-A.

The suggestion, I take it, is that junk knowledge disjunctions generate skeptical intuitions. “We are apt to confuse useful disjunctive knowledge with junk disjunctive knowledge. Having recognized that disjunctive knowledge is not useful, we are prone to think that it is not knowledge at all.”

The prediction would seem to be that whenever we encountered junk knowledge dispositions, we would illicitly form the intuition that it is not known. But this prediction is not borne out. I know that Obama was born in Hawaii, and on this basis, I know the disjunction that Obama was born in Hawaii or the Red Sox will win tonight.

Anybody have the strong intuition that I don’t know that disjunction? I don’t.

I’ve just posted to my website a draft of a short piece criticizing Williamson’s account of thought experiments in chapter 6 of The Philosophy of Philosophy. It’s for a Phil Studies symposium; I’ll be submitting it in the next week or so. If you have any suggestions in the meantime, I’d be interested to hear them.

Take it from the horse’s mouth.

I’m a contextualist about ‘knows’. I think that George, speaking in a non-skeptical context, can truly utter, “Jonathan knows that Cheney is the Vice President,” even as Peter, speaking in a skeptical context, can truly utter, “Jonathan doesn’t know that Cheney is the Vice President”. (Peter may go on to clarify: “For all Jonathan knows, Bush died ten minutes ago and Cheney is the President.”)

Here’s a powerful challenge to this view. (This is pretty much the challenge given by Timothy Williamson in “Knowledge, Context, and the Agent’s Point of View”.) Peter, who says “Jonathan doesn’t know that Cheney is the Vice President”, ought to criticize me if I believe that Cheney is the Vice President, since it’s bad to believe what you don’t know. (Imagine Peter saying, “Jonathan doesn’t know it, but he is right to believe it.” That’s crazy. He says rather, “Jonathan ought not to believe that Cheney is the Vice President.”)

George, by contrast, will endorse my belief: “Jonathan is right to believe that Cheney is Vice President — after all, he knows that Cheney is Vice President.” So George and Peter are not only apparently disagreeing about whether I know; they’re apparently disagreeing about what I ought to do, with respect to belief.

According to contextualism, neither is incorrect about whether I know. If, as seems plausible, their reasoning is cogent, neither then is either incorrect about what I ought to believe. But this is crazy: what one ought to do is not only true relative to some circumstance of evaluation.

I’m inclined to the following somewhat radical — but maybe, on reflection, independently plausible — solution: contextualism about ‘belief.’ Suppose that I am responding properly to my evidence. I rule out, on the basis of memory, the possibility that Bush selected somebody other than Cheney for VP. I do not rule out on any basis, however, the possibility that Bush died five minutes ago. (How would I have known?) I am, let us suppose, ignoring this possibility, as is George. And we’ll stipulate that it’s sufficiently unlikely such that we can, in Lewis’s sense, ‘properly’ ignore it. So George can truly say, while properly ignoring Bush’s recent possible death, “Jonathan knows that Cheney is Vice President,” and also, “Jonathan believes that Cheney is Vice President.” I’ve ruled out (psychologically and factively) all the possibilities where Cheney is not Vice President, except the ones we’re properly ignoring. George praises me for believing what I know.

What about Peter? Peter is not ignoring the possibility that Bush died five minutes ago. Since my evidence doesn’t eliminate the possibility that he did, Peter truly says, “Jonathan doesn’t know that Cheney is VP.” But should he therefore criticize my belief? Only if he also truly says, “Jonathan believes that Cheney is VP.” But I don’t even pretend to have ruled out the case where Bush died five minutes ago. I was just ignoring that case. I never pretended to know it not to obtain. (Rough-and-ready test: if you asked me whether Bush had died five minutes ago, I’d reply that I had no idea.) So here’s my claim: it is false, relative to the skeptical context, that “Jonathan believes that Cheney is VP.”

Call the “relevant domain” the context-variant set of all possibilities that are not properly ignored. A subject “rejects” a possibility by psychologically ruling it out. (If a subject is misled, he may reject the truth.) An utterance of the form “S believes that p”, then, could have the truth conditions, S rejects all the not-p cases in the relevant domain.

I find this view appealing for a number of reasons, not least that it allows us to avoid the Williamson objection. However, I haven’t yet thought through what other consequences it might have downstream. Maybe it’ll cause trouble elsewhere. Any ideas?

Here is a seductive argument against armchair philosophy:

Empirical research shows that humans are susceptible to lots of surprising sorts of systematic errors in a wide range of cases. There is every reason to expect that sometimes, philosophers will be led astray in ways like these. And it’s of no use to keep doing armchair philosophy while just “being careful” not to make mistakes, because without empirical investigation, there’s just no way to know what sorts of errors we’re susceptible to; we literally don’t know how to be careful in the relevant sense.

I think I’m right in reading a pretty explicit form of this argument into a paper that Steve Stich and Jonathan Weinberg presented at an Arché workshop last week.

I think this argument goes twice wrong. First, I think it overstates the ignorance of careful philosophers with respect to noticing funny features’ impacts on intuitions. (Jason Stanley productively emphasized this point at the Arché workshop.) Philosophers do have a better-than-terrible record at noticing when intuitions are pulled in funny directions; we’ve been engaged in the project of ‘explaining away’ unfriendly intuitions for, well, a lot longer than X-phi has been around.

Second, the empirical data do not, at least as far as I have seen, suggest that, even in the presence of a confounding factor of which the subject is ignorant, a subject may not improve his epistemic position to some significant degree by proceeding carefully. So my desk is messy, which is likely to bias me toward more negative assessments; can I not decrease the effect of my bias by thinking deliberately and questioning my first judgments? Part of careful traditional methodology, of course, is reflection on judgments over time, in a variety of circumstances, as well as comparing the judgments of other individuals.

I am, of course, making a speculation about an empirical claim; it strikes me as extremely plausible, but it is open to empirical refutation or corroboration.

There are many reasons to be terrified of Sarah Palin (e.g.). One of the most widely discussed ones, however, does not appear to me to be true. It has been widely reported that Sarah Palin described the Iraq war as a “task from God”. This quotation is taken terribly out of context — about as far out of context, really, as the recent McCain ad that accused Obama of calling Palin a pig.

The full quote, transcripted from this video:

Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right also for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending them out on a task that is from God; that’s what we have to make sure that we are praying for.

The Right knows that its only chance to win this election is to tell lie after lie after lie. The Left has truth on its side; it therefore can and should do better.

I’ve been playing with imovie!