Showing papers in "Philosophical Perspectives in 2005"

Can we do without pragmatic encroachment

Abstract: And John Hawthorne (2004) and Jason Stanley (2005) have argued that what it takes to turn true belief into knowledge is sensitive to the practical environment the subject is in. These authors seem to be suggesting there is, to use Jonathan Kvanvig’s phrase “pragmatic encroachment” in epistemology. In this paper I’ll argue that their arguments do not quite show this is true, and that concepts of epistemological justification need not be pragmatically sensitive. The aim here isn’t to show that (PC) is false, but rather that it shouldn’t be described as a pragmatic condition on justification. Rather, it is best thought of as a pragmatic condition on belief. There are two ways to spell out the view I’m taking here. These are both massive simplifications, but they are close enough to the truth to show the kind of picture I’m aiming for. First, imagine a philosopher who holds a very simplified version of functionalism about belief, call it (B).

How probabilities reflect evidence

Abstract: Many philosophers think of Bayesianism as a theory of practical rationality. This is not at all surprising given that the view’s most striking successes have come in decision theory. Ramsey (1931), Savage (1972), and De Finetti (1964) showed how to interpret subjective degrees of belief in terms of betting behavior, and how to derive the central probabilistic requirement of coherence from reflections on the nature of rational choice. This focus on decision-making can obscure the fact that Bayesianism is also an epistemology. Indeed, the great statistician Harold Jeffries (1939), who did more than anyone else to further Bayesian methods, paid rather little heed to the work of Ramsey, de Finetti, and Savage. Jeffries, and those who followed him, saw Bayesianism as a theory of inductive evidence, whose primary role was not to help people make wise choices, but to facilitate sound scientific reasoning. This paper seeks to promote a broadly Bayesian approach to epistemology by showing how certain central questions about the nature of evidence can be addressed using the apparatus of subjective probability theory. Epistemic Bayesianism, as understood here, is the view that evidential relationships are best represented probabilistically. It has three central components:

I Can’t Believe I’m Stupid

Abstract: It is bad news to find out that one's cognitive or perceptual faculties are defective. Furthermore, it’s not always transparent how one ought to revise one's beliefs in light of such news. Two sorts of news should be distinguished. On the one hand, there is news that a faculty is unreliable -- that it doesn't track the truth particularly well. On the other hand, there is news that a faculty is anti-reliable -- that it tends to go positively wrong. These two sorts of news call for extremely different responses. We provide accounts of these responses, and prove bounds on the degree to which one can reasonably count oneself as mistaken about a given subject matter.

Perceptual Belief and Nonexperiential Looks

Abstract: How things look (or sound, taste, smell, etc.) plays two important roles in the epistemology of perception. 1 First, our perceptual beliefs are episte-mically justified, at least in part, in virtue of how things look. Second, whether a given belief is a perceptual belief, as opposed to, say, an infer-ential belief, is also at least partly a matter of how things look. Together, these yield an epistemically significant sense of 'looks'. A standard view is that ''how things look'', in this epistemically significant sense, is a matter of one's present perceptual phenomenology, of what nondoxastic experiential state one is in. On this standard view, these experiential states (a) determine which of my beliefs are perceptual beliefs and (b) are centrally involved in justifying these beliefs. As an alternative to this view, I want to argue that there is a nonexper-iential sense of 'look' as well and that this sense of 'look' is at least as epistemically significant a sense as any experiential sense. That is, the connection between what an agent is justified in believing and how things look to her in this nonexperiential sense is more direct than the connection between what she is justified in believing and how things look in any experiential sense. In addition, this same nonexperiential sense of looks can be used to solve the classic problem of distinguishing perception from inference. I won't actually be arguing against the standard view; the goal is mainly to articulate an alternative. If, however, the epistemologically interesting sense of 'looks' is the one that is most directly connected to justified belief and/or to perceptual belief, then the epistemologically interesting sense is not an experiential sense. The existence of nonexperiential 'looks', 'sounds', and the like serves to undercut an important source of motivation for the standard view. So although I won't try to show that the standard view is false, I will show that there is considerably less reason to believe it than is usually assumed.

Three proposals regarding a theory of chance

Abstract: I argue that the theory of chance proposed by David Lewis has three problems: (i) it is time asymmetric in a manner incompatible with some of the chance theories of physics, (ii) it is incompatible with statistical mechanical chances, and (iii) the content of Lewis's Principal Principle depends on how admissibility is cashed out, but there is no agreement as to what admissible ev- idence should be. I proposes two modifications of Lewis's theory which resolve these diculties. I conclude by tentatively proposing a third modification of Lewis's theory, one which explains many of the common features shared by the chance theories of physics.

Vision, Knowledge, and the Mystery Link

Abstract: Imagine yourself sitting on your front porch, sipping your morning coffee and admiring the scene before you. You see trees, houses, people, automobiles; you see a cat running across the road, and a bee buzzing among the flowers. You see that the flowers are yellow, and blowing in the wind. You see that the people are moving about, many of them on bicycles. You see that the houses are painted different colors, mostly earth tones, and most are one story but a few are two story. It is a beautiful morning. Thus the world interfaces with your mind through your senses. There is a strong intuition that we are not disconnected from the world. We and the other things we see around us are part of a continuous whole, and we have direct access to them through vision, touch, etc. However, the philosophical tradition tries to drive a wedge between us and the world by insisting that the information we get from perception is the result of inference from indirect evidence that is about how things look and feel to us. The philosophical problem of perception is then to explain what justifies these inferences.

Doubt, Circularity and the Moorean Response to the Sceptic.

Abstract: Davies and Wright have recently diagnosed the felt inadequacy of Moore’s response to the sceptic in terms of a failure of transmission of warrant. They argue that warrant fails to transmit across the following key inference: I have hands, if I have hands then I am not a BIV, so I am not a BIV, on the grounds that this inference cannot be used to rationally overcome doubt about its conclusion, and cannot strengthen one’s epistemic position with respect to the conclusion. Here, for the sake of argument, I grant that the inference can neither rationally overcome doubt about its conclusion nor strengthen one’s epistemic position with respect to the conclusion, and examine whether, and in what way, this undermines use of this inference in a reply to the sceptic.