Can't we leave Iraq alone already?

Wasn't this essentially W's policy?

All your epistemic views are belong to him

Good news! My theory of evidence survives what might be the coolest destructive argument in epistemology. See here. Warning: be prepared to kiss your favorite theory of knowledge and evidence goodbye. (I'm not bragging, by the way, my view gets off on a mere technicality. If interested, the view is defended here.)

This should cheer you up.

Hot Ziggety!

I just received word that 'Evidence and Armchair Access' has been accepted by Synthese! Thanks to my referees for slogging through the drafts and picking it apart like kind and supportive vultures. I believe it has been vastly improved thanks to your efforts.

Tea partying nativists

Video

UT vs. UCF

I went to my first UT game a few weeks ago and John (thanks John and Sherri!) sent me a link to this gigapan shot. Here's the blurb:

Gigapans are extremely large, high-resolution files created by digitally stitching, in these cases, hundreds of photographs together to form a complete whole. The process involves proprietary software, coupled with a robotic camera platform which measures, aligns, and moves a camera in precisely defined steps, and a viewing platform which allows for panning and zooming, all designed by GigaPan Systems.

Very cool. I still can't find us in this shot yet, but it's amazing/terrifying that the God's eye point of view is at most a decade away.

Death

Running errands tonight, I heard an interview on some sort of public radio station tonight with Bobby Hackney, the bass and vocalist of Death, a now defunct (pre-?) punk band from Detroit. Waterloo had a copy of For the Whole World to See, and it's really, really good. There are copies to be had, here and you can read their story, here. It's a good story, warm the cockles of your heart it will. One of the reasons we've probably never heard of them is that the record executives who funded their recording sessions asked them to change their name to something more commercially viable and their answer was 'No'. That was that. Flash forward a few decades and Bobby's son starts hearing bootlegs of his dad's band at parties. They found the tapes, and the album is finally released.

Get yer peasoup!

I'm taking the fight to Pea Soup.

(RC, I've added a section to address your concern. The concern is legit and I think The View's prospects for dealing with it are not good.)

Normative Judgment: Short draft

Here's a short draft of a paper I've just written up:

Justified Normative Judgment.

It's short, so please give it a look.

[Update: I've updated it on 11.15.2009.]

OIC and Justified Normative Judgment

I've been reading Zimmerman's, Living with Uncertainty and some remarks of his concerning the subject 'ought' inspired this.

Consider the view that obligations are rationally identifiable as such. If there's an obligation to act against one's own reasonable verdictive moral judgments (say, but doing what one rationally judges is worse than what one reasonably judges is best), it's not rationally identifiable as such. Consider a case where a subject reviews what she takes to be her options: A, B, and C and comes to judge correctly that:

(1) A is uniquely best and B is better than C. D (i.e., do nothing) is worst of all.

As a matter of fact, however, she cannot bring it about that A obtains. [In a vending machine, there's (A) a small child, (B) a small puppy, and (C), a small kitten. Agent has sufficient change to release any of these trapped critters, but the mechanism that would release the small child is broken.] So, if we assume that OIC, our subject is obliged to either bring it about that B or C. She knows B is better and that she could bring it about that either B obtains or C obtains. She reasonably but mistakenly believes that she could bring about A, B, or C.

Facts about what can be done are, well, facts. Facts like that don't directly affect what's reasonable to believe about what can be done, will be done, should be done, etc... So, suppose we identify reasonable judgment with justified judgment with permissible judgment.

(2) Agent judges reasonably/justifiably/permissibly that she should bring A about.

From (i) the principle that obligations are rationally identifiable as such and (ii) the observation that she cannot rationally identify any (alleged) obligation to bring it about that B obtains and refrain from trying to bring it about that A obtains, it seems to follow from (2) that:

(3) Agent's obligation cannot be to do other than A.

It follows from OIC that:

(4) Agent's obligation cannot be to do A.

What's Agent to do? You can say that A ought to act against A's judgment about what ought to be done, but this is just to give up the principle that obligations are rationally identifiable as such.

Now, consider (LINK)

Link: If you judge that you ought to A (and oughtn't refrain from so judging), you ought to A.

In other words, you gotta do what you (judge permissibly) you gotta do. It seems that the argument above suggests that the justification for normative judgment is sensitive to objective facts (e.g., facts about what can be done) or LINK is incompatible with OIC.

Never step into a different dish twice

If it works for Wittgenstein and Oliver Sacks, why not?

I have this friend who eats cheerios every morning for breakfast, alternates tuna/pbj for every lunch, and finishes that off with veggie tacos every night for dinner. There's nothing wrong with that, right? Eat some oranges to stave of scurvy, sure, but I can't think of a reason for this guy not to stick with this and use the brain for something better. Like, philosophy or online tetris.

(That online tetris is addicting. I'm hooked on two player battle tetris with the monster map.)

Disjunctivism Draft

I've revised a paper I've written on epistemological disjunctivism: here.

Highlights:
* I defend the view that the reasons and evidence provided by veridical experience are better than those provided by hallucination.
* I defend the view that only beliefs in the good case are justified.
* I explain why these views do not require experiential disjunctivism and address McDowell's argument to the contrary.
* I use terribly unfair rhetoric having to do with the Innocence Project to beat up on internalists.

Comments and suggestions would be very much appreciated.

Poxes for both houses

I've been thinking about epistemological and experiential disjunctivism a lot lately, and I wanted to say some sketchy things about disjunctivism and infallibilism.

Some commentators (van Cleve, possibly but I need to check) think that McDowell is committed to a kind of infallibilism. Because McDowell says that the evidence someone has for her beliefs in the good case are better than what she would have in the bad on the grounds that only subjects in the good case have knowledge, some take him to be committed to the view that among the conditions necessary for knowledge is that the possession of evidence or reasons that the subject could have only in the good case. Because of this, some might take McDowell to be saying that it is impossible for the truth of a belief to be the only thing that distinguishes a good case of perceptual knowledge from the bad case. In turn, this suggests that his view is that a perceptual belief constitutes knowledge only if based on something that is incompatible with the falsity of that belief.

Does that mean that McDowell subscribes to the infallibilist view that S can know p only if S’s basis for believing p is incompatible with ~p? He might, but epistemological disjunctivism as such does not entail infallibilism. At least, I hope it doesn’t. Infallibilism leads to skepticism. It might not lead to a skepticism concerning perceptual knowledge, but it leads to skepticism concerning induction. (Actually, I think he denies this. But, well, c'mon!) If knowledge is possible only when we have infallible grounds for our beliefs, the external world skeptic might be wrong but I cannot see how the inductive skeptic could be.

Okay, so is McDowell committed to infallibilism? According to fallibilism:
(F) It is possible for a subject to know that p is the case on the basis of evidence or grounds that do not entail that p.

If fallibilism is true, subjects in the good and bad case could have just the same evidence or reasons for believing p, but one of these subjects will be mistaken in believing p. But, then it seems that the difference between the good and bad case will be ‘blankly external’ to the subjects in these cases. So, either there can be differences in epistemic standing that are blankly external to the subjects in the good and bad case or infallibilism is true and knowledge based on non-entailing grounds or evidence is impossible. If the former is true, we do not need experiential disjunctivism to understand how perceptual knowledge is possible. If the latter is true, we trade one skeptical problem for another.

A Response
While I am not entirely convinced that this response is sufficient (or necessary), McDowell could say this. One problem with the objection is that it assumes that p could be blankly external to the subject who knows p. Why would the truth of her belief be blankly external to her? Sure, you might say that the falsity of the mistaken subject’s belief is blankly external to her. Why can’t McDowell acknowledge this as a possibility and say that if someone is in the dark, there will be matters blankly external to her that explain why she believes p without knowing p? How much do you have to know to be ignorant?

From Epistemological to Experiential Disjunctivism
I take it that one of McDowell's arguments for experiential disjunctivism is contained in this passage:

The root idea is that one’s epistemic standing … cannot intelligibly be constituted, even in part, by matters blankly external to how it is with one subjectively. For how could such matters be other than beyond one’s ken? And how could matters beyond one’s ken make any difference to one’s epistemic standing?

If you endorse epistemological disjunctivism but think that experience embraces the same things in perception and hallucination, you end up having to say that facts blankly external to the subject are responsible for the superior epistemic standing of that subject’s beliefs in the good case when compared to the beliefs in the bad.

The response I offered on McDowell’s behalf earlier to the charge that his view led to a kind of infallibilism that came with skeptical consequences should work here if it worked earlier. The difference between the good case and bad will not be blankly external to the subject in the good case. Because she knows p, she knows something that rules out the possibility that she’s the one in the bad case. How could a fact known to her directly on the basis of observation be blankly external to her? How could it matter to her that the difference between her and someone else who is ignorant is a difference lost on the subject who is in the dark about a great many things? If McDowell insists that the difference between the good and bad case cannot be a difference that is blankly external to the subject in the bad case, it seems he is committed to the rather odd view that there is something available to the subject in the bad case that would allow her (in principle, perhaps) to work out her epistemic predicament. If he rests content with the much more modest principle that the difference between the good and bad case cannot be 'blankly external' to the subject in the good case, I guess I'd say that the truth isn't blankly external when you know the truth.

Scattered thoughts Fantl and McGrath on evidence and justification

I think the following view is right:

IKSE: p is part of S's evidence if S knows p non-inferentially.

Not only do I think that it's right, I think it's pretty harmless. If S knows p non-inferentially, S's belief that p is the case is non-inferentially justified. So, if we can show that IJSE is true, we can show that IKSE is true:

IJSE: If S's belief that p is non-inferentially justified, p is part of S's evidence.

It seems that IJSE is the sort of thing that Fantl and McGrath defend. They say:

(JKR) If p is knowledge-level justified for you, then p is epistemically eligible to be a reason you have for believing q, for any q.

In defense of (JKR), Fantl and McGrath say, “If your justification for a proposition is good enough for knowledge, then if it isn’t among your reasons for belief, it’s not for shortcomings in your epistemic position with respect to it.”

That seems right, but it gives rise to a worry (for me).
The Worry
If IJSE is true, anything we are non-inferentially justified in believing is part of our evidence. You can be non-inferentially justified in believing p when ~p. Thus, p can be part of your evidence even if ~p.

That's a worry because I think that only true propositions constitute evidence. One response is to deny that there can be false, non-inferentially justified beliefs. I think that's the right thing to say, but it seems we could distinguish between (IJSE) and the following:

(CIJSE) If p is a piece of evidence and S's belief that p is non-inferentially justified, p is part of S's evidence.

Whereas IJSE commits us to a claim about the possession of evidence and a claim about what constitutes evidence, a close principle (CIJSE) only tells us what it takes to take possession of a piece of evidence. It is, for that reason, weaker than IJSE. It also seems that Fantl and McGrath's motivation for (JKR) does not support anything stronger than (CIJSE). Someone who defended (CIJSE) could say that there are non-inferentially justified beliefs where the content of the belief does not constitute evidence. The proposition believed is not part of the subject's evidence, but this isn't due to some shortcoming in the subject's epistemic position.

If we opt for this line, it seems that we have to say that it can be permissible/proper to treat something that is not evidence as if it is evidence. That's not something I like, so I'm not entirely happy with a view that incorporates (CIJSE) without (IJSE). But, the worry is that if I go in for (IJSE), I can be forced to give up the truth requirement on evidence by those who have internalist intuitions about justification ascription (or go skeptical and say that the scope of non-inferentially justified beliefs is limited to a special class of propositions about us).

Maybe I can show that internalists are playing with fire. The dialectical situation is complicated, but the embarrassment for the externalist about evidence is that it seems they have to say that there's a gap between the things that we can properly treat as evidence and the things that are evidence. Maybe internalists have to recognize this gap as well. Consider:

(JE) If S's belief that e is part of S's evidence is justified, e is part of S's evidence.

I suspect that this claim is not one that the internalists can actually defend, but then we either all need to distinguish between the evidence a subject has and that which the subject can properly treat as her evidence or question the justification ascriptions that seem to be at the root of the problem here.

Experimental philosophers discover that the folk are likely enrolled in philosophy courses where they are surveyed by experimental philosophers

There's an interesting discussion over at Experimental Philosophy (here). The question is whether 'the folk' are objectivists and there's some interesting evidence that suggests that some folk are not. In the comments, Angel floats the possibility that the students in the course might not be immature moral agents. It seems there's something to that suggestion. I noted half-jokingly that if we were given surveys as undergrads (I'm only speaking of some students who went to Rhodes, not the students who took the actual surveys), our profs would discover that sleep-deprived, binge-drinking, prescription-drug abusing undergrads sometimes speak as relativists do when answering survey questions. I worry that such results tell us little about our friends and neighbors who aren't college students. I worry that they tell us little about our students' attitudes when not in phil class. Two worries. The students are a bad sample because they aren't morally mature. The students responses don't provide clean data because students will take relativism more seriously in the context of a philosophy course than they would if they were just reading the paper or watching the news. So, what's an experimental philosopher to do?

Williamson on Evidence and Truth

This is from The Philosophy of Philosophy:

Why is it bad for an assertion to be inconsistent with the evidence? A natural answer is: because then it is false. That answer assumes that evidence consists only of true propositions. For if an untrue proposition, p, is evidence, the proposition that p is untrue is true but inconsistent with the evidence.

That's an answer, but it seems there is an equally promising answer that does not assume that evidence consists only of true propositions. Someone might think that:

JE: If S's belief that p is justified, p is part of S's evidence.
R: If S's belief that p is justified, the processes that produced S's belief were reliable.

Whatever is justifiably believed is a part of our evidence and whatever is justifiably believed is likely to be true. This is because whatever is justifiably believed is the result of a reliable method of belief formation. Thus, if an assertion is inconsistent with the evidence, it is likely to be false. In a conversational context where one speaker asserts p and then both speakers discover that p is incompatible with what is justifiably believed by the other speaker, it is natural to retract p until additional reasons for believing p or for discounting the justification that supports believing ~p. We can explain why it is bad for an assertion to be inconsistent with the evidence without having to assume EST.

Adequate response? I want Williamson to be right, but I can't see what's wrong with this response.

Blog first, think later

and waste no time when the opportunity to attack Muslims presents itself:

I really do not think this most recent act of jihad can be allowed to pass without some comment here at W4. We should also not let pass the sheer cravenness of our Dear Leaders--at the highest level and in the media--in discussing it. I note that when I bring up Yahoo mail, the story doesn't even appear as a top story. Atlas says that Shepard Smith at first would not say the murderer's name--Malik Nadal Hasan--and more recently has been giving a platform to Hasan's cousin who informs us that...

you guessed it!

It's our fault. Yup. Hasan was "harassed." Oh. Well. That explains it.

According to The Messiah, this was an "outburst of violence." An outburst. You know, violence does that sometimes. It bursts out. Impersonally.

I envy her superpsychic abilities. It's the day after, and I still don't know what Hasan's intentions were.

A useful antidote.

Son of insane clown posse

Randall Terry is running around the middle of this.



From TPM
"Like a bad game of telephone, the crowd spread rumors without anyone having witnessed exactly what happened. Several people said the group had been arrested for praying. Others said the group was arrested for ripping up pages from the nearly 2,000-page health care bill. To show support for them, members of the crowd started ripping up their pages from the bill, which rally organizers had handed out for the purpose of reading them to members of Congress.

"Here's a piece of paper, I'm tearing it," one woman shouted as another joined in: "I tore a piece too!"

That woman later told the officers, "I know you guys are just doing your job but don't you hate your job?"

"I'm embarrassed," another woman told her friends.

"Read your history books," another woman shouted at the officers.

"Thugs from Chicago," a man shouted at police.

"Arrest Nancy Pelosi for treason. You're arresting the wrong people," another shouted."




The buttons scream socialist and extremist. The vest says terrorist.

Who doesn't love a tea party?

"The attitude we're facing right now is very hostile," Tea Party Patriot national organizer Jenny Beth Martin said on a conference call for regional leaders TPMDC sat in on Wednesday night. "The [members] don't even want to hear from us on these issues."

It's like they don't even want us to corner them in their offices while waving guns around and screaming in their faces that they are Nazis because they want to give the poor health insurance like Hitler did or something.






UPDATE:

Tales from today's events can be found here.

Favorite juicy bit:

Without those official details, protesters in the crowd watching the arrests were furious. They shouted "Let them go!" and one man yelled at the police that "Martin Luther King" was being dishonored and shouted "Letter from Birmingham Jail!"

One woman told officers they were "shameful."

"This is America, this is not the Soviet Union," one woman said.

Like a bad game of telephone, the crowd spread rumors without anyone having witnessed exactly what happened. Several people said the group had been arrested for praying. Others said the group was arrested for ripping up pages from the nearly 2,000-page health care bill. To show support for them, members of the crowd started ripping up their pages from the bill, which rally organizers had handed out for the purpose of reading them to members of Congress.

"Here's a piece of paper, I'm tearing it," one woman shouted as another joined in: "I tore a piece too!"

That woman later told the officers, "I know you guys are just doing your job but don't you hate your job?"

"I'm embarrassed," another woman told her friends.

"Read your history books," another woman shouted at the officers.

"Thugs from Chicago," a man shouted at police.

"Arrest Nancy Pelosi for treason. You're arresting the wrong people," another shouted.

Packages & Posts

This isn't news to most of you, but if you're really, really impatient and can't wait for the Williamson collection to come out in the U.S., you can order it from Amazon UK (here). My copy has been "dispatched". The good folks at J Phil have sent me my 10 free copies of the August 2009 issue. It contains my response to Hawthorne and Stanley. Very exciting morning for me. I will celebrate tonight by splitting a bottle of wine with my houseplants.

I'll probably be posting a lot in the months to come as my life has taken a turn for the pathetic. My girlfriend selfishly applied for a Fulbright, won the Fulbright, and will be spending about a year in Iceland making work while eating rotten shark and singed sheep faces. (Are you reading this?) I've caught up with my 30 Rock episodes, so now I have plenty of time to blog and work on my cooking. There might also be some furniture building and biking.

As much as I enjoy making stew and editing papers ...

JB and E

The following seems to me to be a pretty good objection to the view that p is part of S's evidence if p is justifiably believed by S (JBJE).

Let 'p' = Verna is a vixen.
Let 'q' = Verna is a female fox.

Suppose that S believes q on the basis of inductive grounds, ig, and that ig are sufficient for justifiably believing q. I'm not a foxologist, so I don't know what ig would consist of. Describe whatever behavior you think makes it quite likely that Verna is a female fox. S deduces p from q and knows that p and q are logically equivalent. S thus knows that she ought to be equally confident in p and q. If she knows that q is justified for her and knows JBJE, by JBJE, she knows that ~q is inconsistent with her evidence. She thus could deduce that ~p is inconsistent with her evidence. According to JBJE, in acquiring ig, S thereby acquires the sort of evidence such that ~p and ~q are hypotheses inconsistent with S's evidence. Which is crazy, of course, because ~q and ~p are consistent with ig.

Why does this matter? Well, it doesn't. It does show that there's no problem in saying both that evidence consists of truths and that there can be justified beliefs where the propositions believed are not part of the subject's evidence. And that removes a major obstacle to defending the view that evidence consists of truths because it helps to show that it's no consequence of such a view that Gettier cases are impossible.