Defeating Perceptual and Theistic Knowledge (Frances)

You see a sock in the usual excellent viewing conditions: just four feet away, in perfect light, etc. It looks, and is, blue. But it’s your colleague’s sock, and his wife is a color scientist and he insists that he is wearing some of her “trick” socks she uses in her experiments, in that although they look blue and normal, they’re actually very weird and really green. We can suppose that he’s made an innocent mistake in that the socks he is wearing are entirely normal and blue. You mistakenly think he trying to fool you even though he’s actually a pillar of honesty, so you persist in your belief that the socks are blue. Suppose his wife comes in and says ‘Well there are those trick socks! We were looking for them all morning in the lab! What are you doing with them on?’ Other people concur with her (her lab assistants and children say). She and other color theorists have created various other strange objects, strange in ways having to do with their color appearances. You are somewhat aware of these objects, involving rapidly rotating disks with special holes in them, unusual materials, and the like. So you know of the existence of such objects.

Your blue-socks belief is true and reliably produced in the entirely ordinary way, but is this belief epistemically upstanding once you’ve encountered the weird-socks story, especially given that you’ve heard and understood loads of intelligent, sincere, and honest experts saying that the socks are really green—not just his wife, but her assistants, other professors, etc.? Don’t you have to rule out, at least to some significant extent (to ask for proof seems to be asking too much) the weird-socks hypothesis to retain the upstanding status of your belief that the socks are blue? I think you would be committing some significant epistemic crimes if you retained your belief.

I just described a case that seems to have the following features: one acquires a true belief under virtually the best and most reliable circumstances possible, the belief initially amounts to knowledge, and yet the awareness of some information that is ultimately misleading but endorsed by relevant professionals and plausible given other information ruins the epistemic upstandingness of the belief (when the belief is retained after the additional information has been encountered).

I find this story interesting. First, I wonder whether it’s really the case that after encountering the ultimately misleading evidence against the blue-socks belief your blue-socks belief is epistemically blameworthy. Second, does the alleged lesson carry over to the belief that God exists? That is, assuming for the sake of argument that one can know that God exists through some kind of quasi-perceptual spiritual experiences of Him, does the presence of alternative, expertly endorsed explanations of that experience render that theistic belief blameworthy—even though the explanations are ultimately misleading?

In the theistic case I assume that one is in the position of the person in the color case: one encounters the alternative explanations and can do nothing to suggest that they’re wrong. I don’t think one can just say, “Well, the alternative explanations must be wrong, as I already know through experience that God exists”. After all, the corresponding explanation in the perceptual case doesn’t seem to work: “Well, the trick-socks explanation being offered by the color scientists must be wrong, as I already know from visual perception that the socks are blue”.

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Philosophical Insults (Frances)

Thanks to Joe for the invitation to communicate.

Nowadays philosophers rarely call one another idiots in print (things tend to get a little nastier in private). But this doesn’t mean that they don’t insult one another in their publications. I thought it might be fun to catalogue some of the insults from recent literature. I’d like people to share their favorites in the comments.

My favorites are the more subtle ones. Suppose Jones publishes a criticism of Smith and then Smith responds in print. Smith can insult Jones in many ways. One common way is to use the phrase ‘It is curious that’, as in ‘It is curious that Jones thinks that my view includes the claim that P’. What is often (not always) meant is this: ‘Jones is a f**king idiot. He thinks I said that P, when any fool can see that I said no such thing’. Similar points hold for ‘It is interesting that Jones thinks that I said that P’ and ‘The proposal that Jones makes on my behalf is very strange, even borderline incoherent’ and ‘I am surprised that Jones says that P’.

Here’s a rather different way to insult: ‘In a useful article’, as in ‘In a useful article, Jones considers the claim that P’. What is often (not always) meant is something like this: ‘Jones wrote a largely boneheaded article on the claim that P; however, by working through his confusions we will be able to see the important points more clearly.’ I hope it’s legitimate of me to point out that Davidson did this in one of his classic articles, although I can’t remember which one. When I was a beginning graduate student at Minnesota, and full of myself, I did it as well in a paper written for a class. My professor, Joseph Owens, drew a line through the phrase and wrote in the margin ‘Out’. It was clear that I wasn’t going to get away with such nonsense.

I don’t want to imply that these insults are never deserved. On the contrary, on many occasions the author is responding to some jerk. And even when one isn’t responding to a jerk, the insult can be non-personal in the sense that the author is such a lover of the truth and hater of the false that he or she hurls invectives not at people but merely at ideas that strike her as false. I once had a colleague who often publicly destroyed visiting speakers, but it was plain to most of us—and often enough the visiting speaker—that his target was the ideas he thought were false. It was never the person advocating the ideas. This made the behavior more tolerable, even admirable.

The insults noted above seem a bit subtle. But maybe that’s the wrong predicate. Perhaps not subtle but restrained?

Baker & Hacker insulted Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein with real gusto. Hacker also insulted the recent history books by Soames, who like Kripke is a rather mediocre philosopher. But their insults are usually unrestrained. Over the years Dennett and Searle have traded many insults, or at least remarks that looked pretty insulting. But I’m not sure that all those were real insults. Dennett has a good sense of humor, and it comes out in his writing. So perhaps he wasn’t really insulting Searle, although his Journal of Philosophy review of Searle’s Rediscovery of the Mind seemed pretty tough to me. I can’t speak with any authority about Searle. Of course, in that book Seale seemed to be telling us that just about everyone in the philosophy of mind had been making terribly elementary and boneheaded mistakes for many years.

As any child will tell you, being ignored can be quite an insult. In that vein, I recall a footnote in an article on the nature of belief by some moderately famous person. He noted that perhaps he should consider what Dennett’s theory would do with the example being considered in the body of the essay. But he declined to make the probe, saying that in reality Dennett’s exceedingly vague remarks could hardly amount to anything like a view worth considering. Ouch!

So: what are your favorite examples—restrained or not? Please don’t reveal the identity of the insulter, at least if he or she is still alive and isn’t already well known as one who insults opponents. I realize that it is easy to thumb through Nietzsche, say, and find some pretty potent insults. But I’m more interested in contemporary writers, not least because I think it might be fun to try to figure out the identity of the insulter!

It also might be interesting to note which famous contemporaries never insulted any of their many critics. For instance, did Rawls or Lewis ever insult any of their critics?

David Lewis and the Future of Formal Methods

SYNTHESE ANNUAL CONFERENCE


Synthese - An International Journal for Epistemology, Logic and Philosophy of Science hosts its first annual conference at the Carlsberg Academy in Copenhagen, October 3- 5 , 2007. The conference is sponsored by PHIS - The Danish Research School in Philosophy, History of Ideas and History of Science and Springer.

Title / Between Logic and Intuition: David Lewis and the Future of Formal Methods in Philosophy

Abstract / David Lewis is one of the most important figures in contemporary philosophy. His approach balances elegantly between the use of rigorous formal methods and sound philosophical intuitions. The benefit of such an approach is reflected in the substantial impact his philosophical insights have had not only in many core areas of philosophy, but also in neighboring disciplines ranging from computer science to game theory and linguistics. The interplay between logic and intuition to obtain results of both philosophical and interdisciplinary importance makes Lewis' work a prime example of formal philosophy. Lewis' work exemplifies the fruitful interplay between logic and intuition that is central to contemporary philosophy. This conference serves as a tribute to Lewis and as a venue for adressing questions concerning the relationship between logic and philosophical intuition. This first Synthese Annual Conference is the venue for discussing the future of formal methods in philosophy.

Invited Speakers / John Collins, Hannes Leitgeb, Rohit Parikh, L.A. Paul, Brian Weatherson

Program Committee and Conference Chairs / Johan van Benthem, Vincent F. Hendricks, John Symons (SYNTHESE) , Stig Andur Pedersen (PHIS)

Conference Manager / Pelle Guldborg Hansen

Call for papers / Synthese invites papers on the work of David Lewis and formal philosophy in accordance with the conference abstract. The final papers should be sent electronically to Editor-in-Chief, Vincent F. Hendricks at vincent@ruc.dk, using "SAC"-submission in the subject entry. The deadline for submitting a paper for consideration is April 1, 2007. Notification of acceptance for presentation at the conference is August 1, 2007.

Publication / A selection of the best papers will be published as an anthology in the Synthese Library book series.

Website Link

Is Knowledge Composite or Prime?

In Chapter 3 of Knowledge and Its Limits, Timothy Williamson offers recombination arguments for the primeness of knowledge (and other mental states). To say that knowledge is prime is to deny that it is a composite of narrow (internal) and broad (external) conditions. Each argument begins with two cases of knowledge that are like with respect to their internal condition but different with respect to their external condition. If knowledge is composite, then recombining the internal condition of one case with the external condition of the other case will produce a third case of knowledge. Williamson needs one such recombination that fails to produce a case of knowledge to undermine the thesis that knowledge is composite. Here's Williamson:

...in [case 1] there is water on the right and gin (which looks just like water) on the left, and a brain lesion causes one visually to register only what is on the right. In [case 2] there is gin on the right and water on the left, and a brain lesion causes one visually to register only what is on the left; in the [case 3] internally like [case 1] and externally like [case 2], there is gin on the right and water on the left (as in [2]), and the brain lesion causes one visually to register only what is on the right (as in [1]). Thus, given appropriate background conditions one sees water in [1] and [2] but not in [3]. (70)

My criticism of Williamson's argument is this. It is all but clear that cases 1 and 2 are in fact cases of seeing. After all, for Williamson seeing entails knowing (Chapter 1), and he is sympathetic to the thesis that one can know only if she could not easily have gotten it wrong (Chapter 4). But it would seem that in cases 1 and 2 the subject could very easily have gotten it wrong, since she could very easily have looked at the gin when forming her water-belief. The worries here are the same for barn-beliefs in Barn County. Just as it seems strange to say that I know that there is a barn when there are fake barns in the vicinity, it seems strange to say that the subject in cases 1 and 2 knows that there is water when there is gin (indistinguishable from water) in the vicinity. Additionally, the subject in each of the two cases has a brain lesion blocking half of her visual information! One would not be remiss to pause and question the respectability of the partially disabled visual process. In sum, two worries arise. There are Ginet-Goldman style barn considerations to worry about, and there are Bon Jour-Plantinga clairvoyance-brain lesion considerations about the epistemic respectability of strange but reliable belief-forming processes. Both worries go against a claim to knowledge in cases 1 and 2. And so, if seeing entails knowing, then arguably the subjects in cases 1 and 2 fail to see. Related worries surround Williamson's other arguments. Here is Williamson arguing more directly for the primeness of knowledge.

Let [case 1] be a case in which one knows by testimony that the election was rigged; Smith tells one that the election was rigged, he is trustworthy, and one trusts him; Brown also tells one that the election was rigged, but he is not trustworthy, and one does not trust him. Let [2] be a case which differs from [1] by reversing the roles of Smith and Brown.... Now consider a case [3] internally like [1] and externally like [2]. In [1], one does not trust Brown, because one does not trust him in [1], and [3] is internally like [1]. Equally in [3], Smith is not trustworthy, because he is not trustworthy in [2], and [3] is externally like [2]. Thus, in [3], neither Smith nor Brown is both trustworthy and trusted. Consequently, in [3], one does not know that the election was rigged. Thus the condition that one knows that the election was rigged is prime. (72)

My criticism here is this. In recombining the internal condition from case 1 and the external condition from case 2, Williamson fails to include the entire external condition from case 2. Part of the external story in case 2 is that the belief in question was produced by reliable testimony. In case 3, the belief was not produced by reliable testimony. But if in case 3 the belief was not produced by reliable testimony, then Williamson has not properly recombined the cases. He has not included in case 3 the full external condition from case 2. Therefore, the recombination is incomplete.

A general criticism that I am making is that Williamson, in all of his recombination arguments, fails to include some causal or counterfactual conditions as part of the broad (external) condition of the subject in cases 1 and 2. The result is a mistaken attribution of knowledge in the first argument and an incomplete recombination in the second argument. Therefore, the question about the primeness of knowledge remains open.