Danish Epistemology Workshop

The Danish Epistemology Network, Namicona, and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen hosted an epistemology workshop on August 22. Speakers included Lars Gundersen (Aarhus), Jesper Kallestrup (Edinburgh), Berit Brogaard and yours truly.

Gundersen developed an account of why neither disjunctivism nor contextualism has the resources for dealing adequately with “abominable conjunctions”. The natural way for these theories to deal with such conjunctions leaves them vulnerable when we reformulate the conjunctions in terms of claimability/assertibility: (1) it is claimable that I know that p (where p is some ordinary proposition); (2) if it’s claimable that p and claimable that p entails q, then it is claimable that q; and (3) it is not claimable that I know that q (where q is the negation of the skeptical hypothesis).

Kallestrup’s paper, “Reliabilist Justification: Basic, Easy and Brute”, offered a way of blocking track-record versions of the easy knowledge objection. The key is to motivate a Wrightian restriction on the transmission of justification across valid deduction. Doing so blocks the very first inferential step in the track-record/bootstrapping arguments.

Brogaard in her presentation “In Defense of a Perspectival Semantics for ‘Knows’” first defends relativism against objections (including Stanley’s objections that it cannot accommodate the factivity of ‘knows’ and that it entails that circumstances of evaluation have features that cannot be shifted by any intensional operator), but then shows that a perspectivalist semantics can do all the same work without relativizing sentence truth to contexts of assessment.

I presented “Knowability Noir: 1945-1963”, which evaluates an unpublished debate between Fitch and Church in 1945. Their debate was primarily over the effectiveness of the proof we today call the “knowability paradox”. My primary concern was to offer an account of what Fitch perceived to be the significance of the proof in his 1963 paper. I argued that the significance was to draw general and special lessons about how to avoid conditional fallacies in philosophical analysis.

Epistemic Value (Day 2)

The final day of the epistemic value conference included a paper by Ward Jones. He developed some ideas about the nature of doxastic goods in his attempt to say what it is that makes knowledge valuable. Pascal Engel’s position was that none of the arguments for pragmatic encroachment on truth, evidence, justification or knowledge work. Christian Piller argued that our interest in truth is not captured by the idea that we desire to believe all and only truths. In particular, he argued, that we do not wish to believe only truths. And Martin Kusch developed an account of the social value of knowledge partially in terms of a very interesting fictional geneology of a proto-concept of knowledge.

Epistemic Value Conference (Day 1)

Here are some highlights from a full day of interesting talks at the epistemic value conference. Wayne Riggs developed a conception of epistemic luck to compliment his credit approach to the value problem. Much use was made of Jennifer Lackey's published criticisms of the credit approach and her criticisms of Pritchard's theory of luck.

Matt Weiner explained that knowledge is like a Swiss army knife. Its value is derivative of the value of its components. Moreover, knowledge is not more valuable that any of its proper parts. Matt's positions hinged on the connections between knowledge and practical rationality.

Berit Brogaard argued that a perspectivalist semantics supports epistemic value monism better than does contextualism or relativism. Along the way she denies that there are any genuinely relative truths.

Mark Kaplan came to terms with human fallibility by arguing that a determination of one's confidence that p does not determine her opinion regarding p; "being confident" is different from "being willing to say". Without paradox I can take it to be highly likely, say, that there are errors in my book, even though I endorse all of the claims therein.

There were other interesting talks as well. Must get some sleep before tomorrow's marathon.

Epistemic Value Conference (Day 0)

Today was the pre-conference workshop on epistemic value at the University of Stirling. Stephen Grimm set up a dilemma for epistemic value monism. Either epistemic appraisals apply only to "interesting truths" (Alston, Goldman) or they apply to all truths equally (Lynch). If the former, then absurdly epistemic appraisals such as 'is justified' do not apply to uninteresting true beliefs. If the latter, then believing that there are n blades of grass in the yard is absurdly as valuable as any other belief.

Jason Baehr argued that the guiding intuition behind the value problem does not warrant the standard formality and generality constraints on a solution. That is, the intuition that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief does not motivate the traditional thought that one or more components of knowledge must have "truth-independent" value or the thought that knowledge is always more valuable than true belief.

Jay Wood discussed a wide spectrum of epistemic values and argued against a sharp distinction between epistemic and moral value.

Epistemic Value Conference

This week I'm off to the conference on Epistemic Value at the University of Stirling. If my laptop isn't confiscated at the airport and I have internet access, then I expect to report from there.