Virtue Epistemology

Knowability and 'Valuability'

2008-07-20T21:11:00.002+01:00

One reason the knowability paradox seems so paradoxical is that the principle of knowability (taken on the paradox to entail the omniscience principle) seems so darn plausible. That principle states that all truths are knowable. Suppose this modal principle were extended to evaluations. We might say then that if X has value, then it is valuable--that is, it is possible that someone, somewhere, at some time, value X. Jointly, the principle of knowability and the principle of valuability imply that if some X has value, then it's possible that one know that she values x. Problematically, though, if knowing p is more epistemically valuable than merely truly believing p, then by the principle of valuability, it is possible that one value knowledge of p to her own mere true belief that p; and by the principle of knowability, it is possible that one know that she values knowledge that p above her mere true belief that p. But given the fact that we can't know of any mere true belief we have 'that' it is a mere true belief, (i.e. given that (p & ~Kp) is not a knowable proposition), it seems as though we must reject that anyone could know THAT she values knowing p over her mere true belief that p. But given the principle of valuability, this would imply that knowledge that p isn't more valuable than mere true belief that p. But it is! It seems, then, that we've got a paradox of valuablility that runs parallel to the paradox of knowability.

Intellectual Virtue and Causation

2008-06-10T06:58:00.002+01:00

Intellectual virtue and causation is one of my favourite topics, mostly because I think it's really important. Here's why: for starters, I think that virtue-based epistemology is the right way to go. (I won't defend this here, but just trust me :) If you're on board so far, which you should be, then it should be clear that an important task will be to clarify the relationship between, on the one hand, an agent's exhibiting intellectual virtue, and on the other, her coming to form a true belief. Literature on VE and epistemic luck shows us that within a VE account, there must not be a disconnect here.

How to block worries about a disconnect? Greco, Sosa and Zagzebski all invoke (in slightly different ways) the notion of 'causation.' The story goes something like this: S knows that p just in case S's true belief that p is because of S's exhibition of intellectual virtue. That's a general template.

Now, all of the 'big three' seem to understand the conditions under which the relevant causal claims would be true or false as something that is either (i) intuitive, or (ii) a function of what is salient in a causal explanation. This is so because they quite frequently illustrate cases in which exhibition of intellectual virtue does or does not 'cause' the agent's having a true belief by appealing to example cases, and the example cases are ones in which it is 'intuitive' that what is salient in a causal explanation for the agent's true belief is or is not intellectually virtuous agency (in accord with their examples). For example, Sosa's ballerina example, Zagzebski's example of the judge, and Greco's example of the gambler all are intended to make these sort of 'causal' points. I don't dispute that their examples constitute helpful ways of thinking about how intellectual virtue should be connected with an agent's true belief in cases of knowing. What is problematic, though, is that none of these authors gives us much more to go on over and above the intuitive appeal to example. (Greco is an exception here)

A general worry should be this: if, for any theory, the conditions under which one thing causes another are meant to function importantly within the theory, then the theory should be supplemented with a corresponding theory of causation. In particular, the theory should say just what the conditions are that must hold if one thing causes another.

It is here where our leading VE'rs are somewhat bankrupt.

I'm not sure what Zagzebski's current view is, but Sosa and Greco both rely importantly on the notion of "explanatory salience."
Their idea is, but crudely, that an agent's exhibiting IV causes her true belief in a way that is sufficient for her to know just in case her IV is 'salient' in a causal explanation for her coming to have a true belief.

Greco has a nuanced view about salience--one that cashes out salience as a function of the relevant interests and purposes that frame the context in which the explanation is given. Sosa's view is less nuanced.

Both, however, are taking--by relying on salience--a line that reduces causal relations to causal explanations. Helen Beebee, Donald Davidson and others take objection to this reduction. In particular, they reject that causal explanations entail causal relations. But this point aside, there is I think a more interesting worry: whether it be causal relations or causal explanations that are at issue in deciding whether a knower's IV is appropriately hooked up with her coming to have a true belief, we will be letting some strange causal ducks in the door once we let 'salience' be the adjudicator.

My thought here is this:

Salience clearly attaches to events, but also and perhaps just as frequently, to absences of events. For example, John's giving $5 to a beggar might be salient in explaining why the beggar was able to buy lunch, and similarly, Flora's failure to water her flowers might be salient in explaining why her flower's died (to cite an example from Beebee).

It stands to reason then that both the exhibition of intellectual virtue and the absence of the exhibition of intellectual vice might each be candidates for the role of 'salient' explainers.

Now, a venerable tradition led by Lewis and others holds that events are the sort of things that can stand in causal relations. Suppose that's right. If it is, we get a weird aporia:

1. Whether one knows depends on whether her exhibition of IV caused her to have a true belief. (Sosa and Greco)
2. Whether her exhibition of IV caused her to have a true belief is a matter of whether her IV is salient (Sosa and Greco)
3. Both events and absences of events can be salient in explaining her true belief.
4. Events, but not absences of events, can be causes (Event Theory of Causation).

One way to try to escape the aporia is to deny (4) and say that absences of events can be causes. But Beebee's "Causation and Nothingness" makes a very compelling case against taking this route.

The better routes would be to either reject (1) or (2). Because Greco and Sosa rely importantly on salience in explaining the role of intellectual virtue in cases of knowing, I think they should reject both (1) and (2). They should first deny (2) (for the reasons Beebee gives) and deny that whether an exhibition of IV causes one to have a true belief is a matter of whether her IV is salient. And next, they should reject (1); they should say that whether one knows depends on whether her exhibition of IV is salient in explaining her true belief, rather than on her exhibition of IV 'causing' her to have a true belief.

Rejecting (1) and (2) is needed if salience is to have an important role in explaining the role intellectual virtue has in cases of knowing, and a result of rejecting (1) and (2) is that the notion of 'causation' is made unnecessary.

This would seem to be a bad thing if explanations just are causal explanations. But they're not. There are both causal explanations and non-causal explanations. I'm increasingly inclined to think that the leading VE theorists--insofar as they are wedded to salience--have non-causal explanations in mind.

What is the difference?

Suppose you ask, "Why did the 8 ball drop into the corner pocket?" My striking the cue ball into the 8 ball explains why the 8 ball dropped into the corner pocket. This is a causal explanation.

Suppose you ask, after finding out that I am richer than my neighbor, "Why are you richer than your neighbor?" That I have a million dollars in the bank (I wish) would explain why I am richer than my neighbor, but it didn't cause me to be richer than my neighbor. My having a million dollars would be salient in explaining why I'm richer than my neighbor, but it is not a causal explanation.

Another example of a non-causal explanation: Suppose the Cardinals beat the Cubs by the score of 5-0 against the Cubs' best picther. Without knowing the score, but knowing they beat the Cubs, you ask "how did the Cardinals not get shut out?" I could explain to you why the Cardinals didn't get shut out by pointing out that Albert Pujols hit 5 home runs. But Pujols' hitting five home runs didn't 'cause' the Cardinals to not get shut out, even though it implies that they did. After all, whatever caused the Cardinals to not get shut out caused this to happen before Pujols hit his fifth home run.

What should be gathered, then, is this: insofar as the notion of 'salience' is meant to function importantly within a VE account for the purposes of articulating the conditions under which an agent's exhibiting IV and her coming to have a true belief are to be appropriately (in cases of knowing) connected, talk of causal relations, and perhaps even causal explanations should be dropped in favour of the notion of non-causal explanations.

A discalimer: Perhaps salience itself should be dropped from the picture. I'm open to that possibility. But if it's given an important place, then a consequence should be that the 'causal' language that is so common in these accounts should be excised. If, on the other hand salience is excised instead, then these accounts could continue to use the causal language that they do, so long as the supplemental account of causation bolstering the theory of knowledge isn't either a "reduce causation to salience" theory or a "derive your theory of causation from the intuitiveness of these examples" theory.

2008-06-06T03:57:00.002+01:00

Folks on board with the Value Turn in epistemology hold, as general premise, that the central aims of epistemology have been, at least up until recently, construed too narrowly. After all, the latter half of 20th Century analytic epistemology would permit us to think that the nature and scope of knowledge and justification constitute the core subject matter around which the central aims of epistemology are to be circumscribed. Value Turners reject this picture because, for one reason, it makes it far from clear why discussions of the nature and sources of epistemic value deserve a place within epistemology, properly speaking, and even less clear why they should deserve the central place within which Value Turners take such discussions to be deserving.

In his essay "The Value Turn in Epistemology," Wayne Riggs suggests "that one think of epistemology as a normative domain of inquiry--one that is bounded largely by the values that are fundamental to it." Riggs thinks that when epistemology is thought of in this way, that "Determining these (epistemic) values is itself one of the tasks proper to value-driven epistemology."

I think that Riggs is completely right about this. And in thinking so, I am committed to rejecting a competing picture--a picture which implies that the Riggs' suggestsions are mistaken insofar as they locate the axiology of epistemology within the central subject matter of epistemology, properly speaking.

Who's right? Riggs, me and others sympathetic with the "Value Turn," or those who aren't?

But how does one go about making a cogent argument in favour of a more ecumenical approach to what the subject matter should be around which the central aims of epistemology are circumscribed? One poor way to do this would be to start out with a premise that the 'bad guys' reject--the premise that the nature and sources of epistemic value (among other value-related issues) *really are* just as important as the nature and scope of knowledge and justification. This would be to start out by assuming the falsity of their conclusion.

I think that Value Turners should be able to persuade the old guard by starting with premises the old guard endorse, and that there is a rather compelling way to do it.

Take, as a starting point, the thought that epistemology should be concerned with whatever is epistemically important. Put another way, the subject matter around which the central aims of epistemology should be framed should be whatever is important, from an epistemic point of view.

Next, point out that the practice of inquiry, in addition to particular epistemic standings that inquirers hold, is, from an epistemic point of view, something important. It's epistemically important to determine what sorts of practices constitute good and bad inquiry.

Now, an old guarder might agree here that inquiry is epistemically important, but deny that evaluations of 'good' and 'bad' inquiry should be smuggled within epistemology's central tasks. "Let the value theorists sort out what inquiry is good just as they'll also sort out what people are good, what art is good, and what goodness is. Just because inquiry admits of 'goodness' and 'badness' doesn't mean that that's the sort of thing epistemologists should be studying. Inquiry is important to epistemology insofar as inquiry is the sort of practice whereby agents come to have cognitive contact with their world, and it is those states of cognitive contact that are important to epistemology."

We may rebut the old guarder here by pointing out an idea shared by Christopher Hookway, Michael Lynch, and quite a few others: inquiry is a goal-directed practice. As such, a theory of inquiry is also a theory about whatever valuable goal governs the practice, and further, whatever goal governs the evaluations that are made within the practice. Thus, to evaluate certain standing epistemically--i.e. S knows p, S believes p--we are at the same time acknowledging some goal relative to which epistemic evaluations are to be made, and that will be whatever goal it is that inquiry aims at.

After all, to identify one standing as knowledge and another as justified belief is to at the same time identify the former standing as having certain properties that, from an epistemic point of view, make that standing better. And one standing would be epistemically better than another only if there is some goal or value that governs epistemic practice.

Value Turners argue about what that goal is, and therein lies the lively debate between Epistemic Value Monists and Pluralists.

The old guard can try to block this lively debate outside of 'epistemology' only by denying that the subject matter around which the aims of epistemology are framed should be picked out by what's epistemically important, or by deying that inquiry is epistemically important. But these premises should be much less controversial than the conclusion reached by the Value Turners might appear to those who restrict what they take to be the central aims of epistemology.

What is a Truism?

2008-05-22T16:23:00.002+01:00

For some object O and proposition p, Suppose it is true that:

(1) P is a truism about O.

There are several ways to interpret (1). Here's a really weak way:

[WEAK]: P is true about O.

But this is surely too weak. Lots of propositions might be true about O and aren't such that we would say they are "truisms" about O.

How about something stronger:

[STRONG]: P is true about O, and is true about O in most nearby worlds in which O holds.

Hmm... maybe? This seems plausible, but it's not obvious.

What about something even stronger:

[SUPERSTRONG]: P is constitutive of the concept of O.

For example, that a bachelor is unmarried is constiutive of the concept of a bachelor, and is also surely a 'truism' about bachelors (if anything is a truism about anything.) Does "A bachelor is unmarried" just happen to be both a truism about bachelors and constitutive of the concept of bachelor? This is tricky. It seems as though it 's more than coincidence. However, we should probably be careful before endorsing 'superstrong' as something that follows from the claim that p is a truism about O. Consider that other plausible candidates for 'truisms' don't admit of such strong conceptual inferences. Consider:

(2) "What goes up must come down" is a truism about what goes up. If you think there is such a thing as a truism, you'd be hard pressed to claim that (2) isn't a truism; at least, you'd certainly fly in the face of the folk-approved norms that govern the use of truism.

But if (2) is a truism, then Superstrong is false. That something must come down is not constitutive of the concept of "goes up" or "ascends".

So what the heck is a truism???

Episteme Conference at Northwestern

2008-05-03T15:51:00.002+01:00

Northwestern University is hosting the 2009 Episteme Conference on the Significance of Disagreement. Here's a link which includes the call for papers:

http://epistemejournal.wordpress.com/conference/2009-northwestern/

Openmindedness and doxastic control

2008-05-02T00:55:00.002+01:00

Alston and Michael Lynch put it nicely when they point out that, in the face of our lacking direct control over our beliefs, we nonetheless have in some important sense "indirect control." Lynch says that you can control how you go about pursuing the truth." This also seems right. For example, Sherlock Holmes will choose to go about pursuing the truth of a murder case in a certain way, and when (perhaps) he is at home and can't find a certain pair of socks, he might choose to pursue the truth of the matter (of where the socks are) with less tenacity than he chooses to exhibit on the murder trail.

Intellectual tenacity seems like a trait we can choose to exhibit in pursuit of the truth. But what about the intellectual virtue of openmindedness. Can we choose to be openminded in our pursuit of the truth? I think we should be careful before saying "yes."

Indeed, we talk as though we can choose to be openminded. For example, a juror can promise the judge that, if selected to the jury, she will be sure to go about the testimony openmindedly. Whether she can choose to do this though is another matter.

Here's a reason to think we might not be able to choose to be openminded in pursuing the truth.

Consider first the platitude that doxastic voluntarism is false. We can't choose what we believe. Indeed, this is the same claim Alston and Lynch make when pointing out that we don't have direct control over our beliefs. Why don't we have direct control over our beliefs? Plausibly, this is because our beliefs are "passive" responses to the world and the evidence it gives us. Relatedly, it is argued that beliefs are formed involuntarily. These platitudes seem to be at a tension with the thought that we could choose to be openminded. Presumably, if we could choose to be openminded, then we could choose to respond differently than we otherwise would to the world and the evidence it gives us. But this is precisely what doxastic involuntarism implies that we can't do.

Epistemology Through Thick and Thin (call for papers)

2008-05-01T21:12:00.002+01:00

Philosophical Papers is running a special edition on thick and thin concepts in epistemology. For those interested in VE, this will be an especially hot topic. The call for papers ends in late June; here's some more info.

http://epistemicvaluestirling.blogspot.com/2007/03/ecp-epistemology-through-thick-and-thin.html

Pragmatic Encroachment

2008-04-30T20:10:00.002+01:00

Trent Dougherty has been making the case against pragmatic encroachment, and I must say, I find some of his reasons compelling. It is not entirely clear to me, however, the extent to which the leading VE accounts "on the market" come pragmatically-unencroached. Additionally, I'm curious as to the plausibility of sympathising with Dougherty while at the same time endorsing the view that pragmatic interests can play a *very* small role in determining knowledge ascriptions. Put another way: I wonder the extent to which a hostility to pragmatic encroachment is an all-or-nothing position.

Back from Epistemic Agency conference in Geneva

2008-04-28T20:59:00.002+01:00

Hats off to Pascal Engel, Anne Meylan and Julien Dutant for running an outstanding and instructive conference (Epistemic Agency, Geneva) this past weekend, which was preceded by (in my opinion) an equally stimulating three days of the John Greco Lectures. Greco's new book--Knowledge as True Belief Through Ability--promises to be excellent. And additionally, I think the University of Geneva and its Episteme programme (particularly because of Pascal Engel) is developing into a happening place for epistemic normativity; at least, it would be nuts to draw any other conclusion after this past week. Word of warning, however: the Swiss are very much drawn to eating (cheese) fondu. I was cautioned that if too much is consumed, it will give you a nightmare. Skeptical, I binge-dipped from the fondu pot. The result: I dreamed I was being chased by a murderer for what seemed like eternity. (Don't try this to test it).

New Papers on Virtue Epistemology, Epistemic Luck, Value of Knowledge, etc.

2008-04-21T22:30:00.002+01:00

My apologies for neglecting my blog! If it were a child, someone would have taken it away from me. I need to get back into the habit. In a feeble effort to make up for some lost time, I have gotten around finally to putting my latest work on VE, epistemic luck, and epistemic value (and other areas of epistemology) up online. You can download them from my homepage at http://jadamcarter.googlepages.com

As most of these are works in progress, please cite only by permission. Also, I am of course very happy to have any comments/feedback on any of this. Feedback is welcome both on this blog or by e-mailing me at j.a.carter@ed.ac.uk

In the meantime, I'm stoked to be leaving tomorrow morning for the star-studded Epistemic Agency conference in Geneva...

Cheers, Adam

Exhibitions of Virtue: what are they?

2008-04-09T12:42:00.003+01:00

Suppose I want to figure out whether my true belief was because of my exhibition of intellectual virtue. A prominent recent view claims that I'd need to figure out whether my cognitive abilities are salient in explaining my cognitive success. Now I know what needs explained here-- my getting a true belief--but what exactly would be doing the explaining were it that I was a knower. The physical event that would be whatever I do to 'exhibit' intellectual virtue? Would it be a mental event-- my manifesting virtue? Would it be a combination of both?

Nenad Miscevic's new paper on a Strong VE

2008-02-12T22:01:00.000Z

Can be found here:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/6q602n553x56k38h/

I hope this paper will make some waves; it is creative and draws from a wide variety of recent VE literature.

Implications of Subjectivism about value

2007-11-27T17:07:00.000Z

G.E. Moore thought that claims about intrinsic value cannot be coherently endorsed by 'subjectivists' about value. Subjectivism is, generally speaking, the view that the constitutive grounds of value reside in agents and not in the objects of agents' evaluations. Toni Ronnow-Rassmussen, in his paper "Subjectivism and Objectivism" denies this. His idea is that Moore's suggestion falsely assumes that subjectivists about value must reject the "Invariance thesis," which states: "the final value of an object is invariant over possible worlds" (257). Ronnow-Rassmussen makes a convincing case for thinking that (i) subjectivist positions vary with respect to their pronouncements about constitutive grounds of value, and (ii) at least some versions of subjectivism can accomodate the invariance thesis. If Ronnow-Rasmussen is right about this, then the divide between objectivists and subjectivists is not as clearly demarcated as we would be inclined to think.

An interesting consequence of this idea is that theses about epistemic value which make recourse to claims about the final value of (for example) knowledge or justification, might well be compatible with value subjectivism, at the very least the varieties that are compatible with the invariance thesis. Adopting subjectivism as a formal metaethical thesis, with respect to which we then assess the value of epistemic concepts, might very well open up creative new ways of addressing traditional problems about the value of knowledge--problems that have been previously discussed in a way that implicitly assumes an objectivist view of the constitutive grounds of value. At the least, this is I think an issue worth exploring.

Epistemic Value Pluralism, Aptness and (Perhaps?) A Problem for Intellectual-Virtue Delineation

2007-10-25T03:56:00.000+01:00

When reading Sosa’s paper “Epistemic Normativity” (an essay in his new book), I was prompted to reconsider my previously-held assumptions about the epistemic value monism/value pluralism debate, and in particular, how this debate could be approached by those who endorse (any version of) virtue epistemology.
As I understand it, there are two questions that motivate the epistemic value momism/pluralism (EVM/P) debate, and subsequently, there are two versions of EVM and EVP.

Question 1: “What is the fundamental epistemic goal?”

Note: Those addressing this question for the most part take ‘goal’ to be normative rather than descriptive. That is, the important question is not what goal do inquirers in fact adopt, but rather, what is the correct goal of inquiry (or, what is the fundamental goal inquirers ought to adopt?)

If one says, in response to the question, “Truth and only truth!” then she is an EVMonist. If she says “Truth!” (as well as some other epistemic end), then she is an EVPluralist. Pritchard (“Recent Work on Epistemic Value”) and Riggs (“Insight, Openmindedness and Understanding”) seem to frame the dichotomy this way, focusing on that articulation of the question.

A different articulation of the debate-framing question is:

Question 2: “Does truth exhaust all possible sources of epistemic value?”

As the story goes, if Y, then EVM, if N, then EVP.

How one understands sources of value, on the one hand, and goals of inquiry, on the other, will determine whether she takes these two questions to collapse into the same question.

However, strictly speaking, they need not. (And so, in principle, I think there can be two distinct versions of EVM/EVP, which turn on precisely what question is being answered).

Against that background, it’s interesting to consider how a virtue epistemologist would go about delineating which traits are intellectual virtues.Here’s an (I think rather uncontroversial?) way to go about deciding this:

X is an IV iff X promotes (in some relevant way) whatever good inquiry aims at (i.e. the epistemic ‘good’.

(Note: some VE theorists such as Zagzebksi and Montmarquet will also build in to virtue a motivational component, and require that the trait also be appropriately ‘motivated’ toward (along with promoting) the epistemic end, to count as an IV)—so I mean to use ‘promote’ in a very wide sense here, so as to characterize the IV-delineating method in a way that most VE theorists would be on board with.

A further side-point: Because virtues are usually understood with respect to goals rather than values, the task of virtue-delineating will turn importantly on how Question 1 is answered, rather than Question 2. Or so it seems).

Anyway, if the ‘end’ of inquiry is ‘truth’, then trait X is an IV iff (and to the extent) that it promotes truth. This would be, I take it, the virtue-delineating method for an EVMonist.

Importantly, though, if you are an EVPluralist (I take it of either version), the virtue-delineating method will be different. Suppose that the EVPluralist identifies two distinct epistemic ends: knowledge and understanding. Her virtue-delineating method would have to look something like this:

X is an IV iff X promotes (in some relevant way) EITHER knowledge OR understanding (or both).

EVPluralists, thus, will have an easier way of explaining why paradigmatic IVs that don’t obviously promote truth—such as insight and openmindedness—rightly quality as EVs. They’re IVs because they promote the end of understanding, regardless of whether they promote truth.
The preceding is, as it were, my “happy little picture” of how the EVP/EVM debate and virtue-delineating is supposed to work. I’m sure some of this is controversial… but regardless, it is against that background that I’m now puzzled after thinking about the Sosa paper.
Part of my happy little picture, which I didn’t mention, is that I had a rather narrow conception of what sorts of ends are available for an EVPluralist to adopt in conjunction with the end of truth. Kvanvig and Riggs have argued for understanding and intelligibility (respectively), and I think both of those are plausible options. I’d never had a clear idea what other ends there might be.
Sosa’s paper suggests that apt belief is of fundamental epistemic value. Aptness of belief is, on Sosa’s view, cognitive accuracy because of cognitive adroitness; put another way, the cognitive success of a true belief must be because of cognitive ability. This type of thinking has, as one benefit, a straightforward way of responding to the Meno Problem (i.e. the Value of Knowledge problem) because the view can explain why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief: namely, a belief that is accurate because adroit is more valuable than a belief that is merely accurate.Sosa writes:

One part at least of the solution to the value problem lies in a point central to virtue epistemology: namely, that
the value of apt belief is no less epistemically fundamental than that of true belief.1⁰ For this imports a way in which FN:10
epistemic virtues enter constitutively in the attainment of fundamental value, not just instrumentally. (“Epistemic Normativity” p. 18)

A menacing question emerges: if Sosa is right about this, then presumably, Sosa will be committed to the following virtue-delineating method:

X is an IV iff X promotes (in some relevant way) EITHER truth OR apt belief. The only way he would not be committed to this formula is if he claimed that some end can be fundamentally epistemically valuable, and at the same time, traits that promote this end need not count as epistemic virtues (even though they would count as IVs by virtue of promoting the other fundamentally valuable epistemic end, truth). And that seems arbitrary.

But if he is committed to the formula, then it seems that a strange circularity problem emerges:

Given that aptness is defined in terms of intellectual virtue on the view, we wouldn’t be able to then define intellectual virtue in terms of aptness.

That is, we could not say: X is an intellectual virtue iff X promotes the epistemic end of cognitive success because of intellectual virtue.

Unfortunately for me, I am sympathetic to seemingly everything that leads to this apparent circularity problem, namely:
1.The Sosa/Greco idea that knowledge requires in some important sense success because of intellectual virtue.
2. Sosa’s idea that aptness (cognitive success because of cognitive virtue) is of fundamental epistemic value, no less than truth is. (At least, now that I've thought about it after reading his paper, it seems right).
3. The thought that anything of fundamental epistemic value would be a proper goal of epistemic inquiry.
And..
4. The idea that a trait is an intellectual virtues insofar as the trait promotes fundamental epistemic goal/goals

Hopefully I’ve overlooked something (or several things) that, if spotted, would make this problem disappear.

Perhaps the most salient questions will be: (i) whether aptness is in fact of fundamental epistemic value, and (ii) whether some x can be both fundamentally epistemically valuable and such that, for any trait, were it to qualify as an intellectual virtue, it would not do so for the reason that it promotes that valuable x.) If the answer to (ii) is ‘yes’, then the circularity problem disappears… however to answer (ii) affirmatively, we would have to either widely depart from the standard way of determining which traits are intellectual virtues deny that something of fundamental epistemic value is also a proper goal of epistemic inquiry… and neither of those avenues looks especially inviting.

I'd love to get some insight on either how to escape the dilemma, or what the error in my thinking is that's led me to think the dilemma arises...

All the best, Adam

Last call for abstracts: Knowledge and Understanding Conference at Edinburgh

2007-10-12T11:16:00.000+01:00

Don't forget: 20 October is the last day to send an abstract of 500 words toedinburghgradconference@gmail.com (or to j.a.carter@ed.ac.uk) for the "Knowledge and Understanding" graduate conference in epistemology at Edinburgh. Any questions, just e-mail me. Cheers, Adam

Value Theory and Epistemology

2007-09-13T17:39:00.000+01:00

One thing I've learned from thinking about the value of knowledge is that a background in value theory would be more than just helpful, but probably indespensible to doing good work. Too many epistemologists, I think, pronounce their views on value with only a superficial familiarity of the value-theory terrain. I am certainly guilty as charged on this score. In fact, if I could have done it all over, I would have studied value theory 'first' (along with epistemology) and then worked on the Meno Problem, rather than doing epistemology and then jumping head first into the Meno Problem.

But oh well. At least I think I've caught this oversight at an early stage in my dissertation!

Anyway, toward the goal of correcting this oversight, I've been wanting to read the 'right stuff' in value theory to supplement my interest in epistemic value.

Two papers that have been especially helpful have been Rabinowicz and Ronni-Rasmussen's paper that makes precise the distinction between intrinsic and final value. (This is helpful for those interseted in knowledge-as-achievement views such as Greco's and Sosa's). Also VERY useful toward thinking about the Meno Problem and the Swamping Problem has been Campell Brown's recent paper "Two Kinds of Value Holism."

But that said, I want to also share what I think 'looks' like a nice little goldmine resource for epistemologists who want a better grounding in the foundations of value. I was browsing Rabinowicz's webpage looking for value wisdom and came across a value resource webpage that features some of the recent work taking place at Lund.

http://www.fil.lu.se/research/project.asp?id=23&lang=eng

And so, my guess is that this would be a great reading list for those interested in epistemic value!

Also, PLEASE do share any other value theory articles here that you think would be helpful for those working in the area of epistemic value!!

Cheers, Adam

Virtue, Credit and the Lackey Case

2007-09-05T11:47:00.000+01:00

Firstly, sorry for the abeyance in posting.

One benefit of virtue-theoretic approaches to epistemology is that they have unique resources for explaining what makes knowledge more valuable than mere true belief, or any proper subset of (knowledge's) parts. The unique resource can be understood first by considering that successes through exhibition of virtues are creditable to the agent exhibiting the virtue. If we grant that achievements (successes through abilities) in general are valuable, and that knowledge is a type of cognitive achievement creditable to the agent, then we appear apt to answering the Meno Problem: we say that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief or any proper subset of its parts by virtue of having the 'final value' that accrues to achievements. As Greco points out, if an agent forms a true belief in conjunction with displaying intellectual virtue, it would not necessarily follow that the agent knows. What is also importantly needed is that the success be 'because of' or 'through' the intellectual virtue. And so, on the 'final value' response to the Meno Problem, the 'because of' is especially important.

One of the toughtest parts of defending the 'final value' solution to the Meno Problem is the fact that the 'because of' relation is a particularly messy one to delineate. Greco rolls up his sleves to explain the 'because of'; he provides a carefully thought through account that makes recourse to the requirement that the exhibition of intellectual virtue be explanatorily salient in a causal explanation for why the agent came to form the true belief. Ernie Sosa, on the other hand, (at least, in a recent conversation) takes it that the 'because of' relation is one that, like Greco, should be understood as function of salience, but unlike Greco, Sosa takes it that what is salient should be intuitive, and so does not find it necessary to provide an account of the conditions under which the exhibition of virtue is salient in cases of knowledge.

Any defense of the final value solution worth its salt will have to get the 'because of' relation right. That much is clear.

But there is a separate problem for the final value solution. That problem is as follows: the Meno Problem demands that we locate the property of knowledge by virtue of which it is more valuable than mere true belief or any proper subset of its parts. As Kvanvig has recently pointed out, this assumption about the value of knowledge that we are trying to vindicate is a 'prima facie' claim. It is defeasible, and so consistent with cases in which pragmatic consequences will generate a non-epistemic value that accres to true belief of p that will make it more valuable than knowing p. (He gives for example a case in which the world will end if you know p but not if you merely truly believe p). Thus, these sort of cases should not lead us to abandon our assumption that led us to recognize the Meno Problem as legitimate.

However, a more serious concern would arise if we solve the Meno Problem in such a way that we explain knowledge to have some special value X but then come to find out that X is not present in a wide variety of cases of everyday knowledge. That would suggest that the "X" solution is a bad solution. Jennifer Lackey has recently given a much-talked-about example that characterizes the final value solution as doomed by this sort of problem.

The idea is that, in cases of testimonial knowledge, the knower who simply receives knowledge by listening to what someone else says, is not appropriately creditworthy. (The intution is supposed to be that the other agent who transferred the knowledge to you did the relevant epistemic work and is the one that deserves credit, not you). But, as the argument goes, we can come to have knowledge by testimony, and so because the final value solution requires that knowledge be creditable to the agent, the final value solution will be stuck either giving an account of why knowledge is valuable which can't explain this fact in cases of testimonial knowledge (a bad result) or must flat deny that testimonial knowledge is proper knowledge.

This looks like a real dilemma, and has led some (i.e. Pritchard) to deny that creditworthiness is necessary for knowledge, a denial that would cast serious doubts upon the prospect of the final value solution as a viable one.

I think, though, that Lackey's case doesn't quite do what it's supposed to do. In fact, there is a subtle point in the case that I think is overlooked. Uncovering this point might well lead us to doubt that this is a genuine 'credit counterexample.'

First, suppose we ask the question this way:

There is knowledge of (for example) p. Jared has gone out, gathered evidence and inquired in a way that has led to him coming to know p. Damon asks Jared "Is p true?" Jared says 'Yes." Damon comes to know. Who, between Damon and Jared, deserves credit for p? We would say that Jared does. And then conclude that Damon doesn't.

The dialectic in the previous example expresses the way that I think most persuaded by the Lackey case have gone about thinking about it.

Notice that this way of thining about the problem depends on the thought that there is an item of knowledge, p, and then we make a contrastivist comparison between two agents, a comparison that leads us to pick the 'more creditworthy' knower as deserving as such, and deny credit to the other.

There are a few mistakes though in this line of thinking.

Firstly, we shouldn't think of knowledge in this case as exhausted by one token, against which we then assess which of the two agents, the informer or receiver, best deserves credit relative to that one token.

Because we grant that the receiver can know through testimonial knowledge, there are two tokens:

(1) The informer's knowledge that p.
(2) The receiver's knowledge that p.

The informer is clearly creditworthy for his knowledge of p.

A separate question would be: is the receiver creditworthy for her knowledge of p?

Notice that the 'contrastivist' framework with which the question was set up in the previous example would make a legitimate qustion (i.e. is the receiver creditworthy for her knowledge of p) appear illegitimate, for the reason that we've already awarded the credit to the informer. But once we think of the knowledge as two tokens and abandon the contrastivist framing of the question, it makes perfect sense to ask whether the receiver is creditworthy for p.

Now for a further point, suppose that the content of p is that the capitol building is on Queen street. If the receiver had looked this up in a book, would we be so quick to say that she doesn't deserve credit for knowing? No. It seems that we can get credit for knowing facts we look up in books. And if we get credit for looking them up in books, we would get credit for reading them on signs. And if we get credit for visually reading them on signs, we get credit for auditorily hearing them in the mouths of the informers. Any other conclusion would bias one sense in favor of the other.

If I am right about this, then Lackey's problem shouldn't be so troubling. Learning through testimonial knowledge would gain S credit for p in a way know different than S would receive credit for p if she looked it up in a book. And this fact is not threatened by the fact that the informer would also get credit for her knowledge of p.

Graduate Conference in Epistemology at Edinburgh

2007-08-11T18:17:00.000+01:00

Greetings! I am helping to organize--along with Duncan Pritchard--a graduate conference in epistemology at the University of Edinburgh, scheduled for 13 November, 2007. The title of the conference is "Knowledge and Understanding," and we are excited that Ernest Sosa of Rutgers University will be the keynote speaker, with Duncan as the respondent.

Call for papers: Please send an abstract of approx. 500 words to:

Edinburghgradconference@gmail.com by 20 October.

If you have any questions, please e-mail:

J. Adam Carter: s0787306@sms.ed.ac.uk
Duncan Pritchard: duncan.pritchard@ed.ac.uk

Troubleshoot Your Swamping Solution: Some Test Cases

2007-05-04T16:29:00.000+01:00

It is widely assumed that knowledge is valuable, and additionally, that it is more valuable than any proper subset of its parts. It’s not clear that this fact can be explained in terms of the instrumental value of knowledge, for the reason that knowing p has many (if not all) of the practical benefits of truly believing p. And so, to the extent that we want to preserve our pre-theoretical intuitions about the value of knowledge, we must find some way to explain why knowledge is more valuable than its subparts, and in a way that appeals to the non-instrumental value of knowledge.

Process reliabilism has undergone a barrage of criticism for the reason that it does not appear to have the theoretical apparatus to explain this fact.
According to process reliabilism: S knows p iff (i) S truly believes p, and (ii) S’s belief that p was produced by a reliable belief forming process.
We think that ‘being produced by a reliable belief forming process’ is a valuable property for a belief because it means that the belief is more likely to be true than if it were produced by an unreliable process. So far, so good. The twist is this: If ‘being produced by a reliable process’ is valuable for the reason that ‘being likely to be true’ is valuable, then how can we explain why the property of ‘being likely to be true’ adds any valuable to a true belief?
As Jon Kvanvig (2003) puts it, the property of ‘being likely to be true’ is swamped by the property of ‘being true.’ And, thus, the indictment of reliabilism is that it defines knowledge in such a way that knowledge is equally as valuable as mere true belief—and this contradicts the platitude that knowledge is more valuable than true belief.

The reliabilist appears to have two escape routes:

First escape route: Admit that being produced by a reliable process is valuable for a belief to have for the reason that ‘being likely to be true’ is a valuable property for a belief to have, and then deny that the property of ‘being likely to be true’ is swamped by the value of a true belief. (I don’t know of any who have taken this route).

Second escape route: Deny that being produced by a reliable process is a property for a belief such that is value is exhausted by whatever value ‘being likely to be true’ accrues to a belief. Of course, this second escape route will require that the reliabilist locate what it is about ‘being produced by a reliable process’ that gives it value over and above the value it would confer to a belief by making it likely to be true. Goldman and Olsson (forthcoming) and Kristofer Ahlstrom (forthcoming) have taken this route.

Both Goldman and Olsson and Ahlstrom, in taking the second escape route, try this approach: they say that being produced by a reliable belief forming process makes it more likely that you will have future true beliefs. And so, ‘being produced by a reliable process’ is valuable not only because it makes the belief likely to be true, but also because it raises the conditional probability that future beliefs will be true.

I will not comment here on these projects, but rather, want to mention a different type of reliabilist response, which I think offers a more appealing response.
Consider the difference between:

S’s true belief is a result of a reliable belief forming process.
S’s came to believe p truly because of her reliable belief forming process.

The second of these two articulations has promise where the first does not. This is because the second articulation requires that there be an important connection between the cognitive success and the cognitive process that brought it about, a connection with we shall see can be valuable in a way that a cognitive success merely produced by such a process is not.

To bring what’s valuable in this connection into focus, we begin by amending the locution of ‘belief forming process’ in a such a way that makes possible normative evaluation. We, thus, revise the proposal in (something like) the following way:
…believes p truly because of S’s cognitive ability.

Success because of ability amounts to an achievement. Reaching the truth because of exhibiting cognitive ability is something we take to be more valuable than reaching the truth as (for example) True Temp does. We are inclined to say that success through ability deserves credit, and is as such valuable.
This is the idea being advanced in recent projects by Ernest Sosa (forthcoming), John Greco (forthcoming) and Duncan Pritchard.

But in order to escape the initial dilemma, it must be that the success through ability is such that it is valuable in a way that is not ‘swamped’ by the value of truth. That is, our new condition must confer on a true belief value that is something other and above the value that ‘being likely to be true’ would confer to a belief.

On the ‘success through ability’ proposal, the idea is captured in two theses:

1. Achievements are valuable for their own sake.
2. The supervenience base of achievements lies in their relational (non-intrinsic) properties.

The first thesis is the first step out of the ‘swamp.’ That is, by principle, anything valuable for its own sake is going to be such that it is not going to be ‘swamped’ by the value of something else. Achievements, then, are not merely instrumentally valuable, as ‘being likely to be true’ is instrumentally valuable.
The second thesis is the second step out of the swamp. It is a vindication of (1). I’ll explain how this vindication works by example. Suppose we have two guitars. One was used by Neil Young to record his album Harvest (suppose further that everyone thinks—(quite reasonably)--that this is a great album!). The second guitar has all the same intrinsic properties as the first, but was not used by Neil but rather stored in a warehouse in New Jersey. Suppose that only you know the first was used by Neil and that no one would believe you if you told them. (This is meant to prevent us from thinking that the first is of more instrumental value than the second). We would still find the first more valuable than the second. The explanation for this cannot be that the first is more valuable because of its intrinsic properties, given that both guitars have the same intrinsic properties. We should say, then, that the guitar is valuable for its own sake (not instrumentally), and that is value lies in its relational properties.

This is the idea that the ‘success through ability’ theorist has in mind when explaining the value of knowledge. A true belief that is a result of a cognitive achievement is valuable for its own sake, and because of its relational properties, in a way that a true belief not a result of an achievement is not. This sort of value that achievements have is final value, and if knowledge requires achievement, then knowledge has final value which isn’t shared by mere true beliefs. Thus, the ‘success through ability’ theorist has a coherent and persuasive way to vindicate our assumption that knowledge is distinctively valuable.
Despite the promise this proposal has as a path out of the swamp, there are nonetheless challenges that face the account. I think that there are two central problems that rise to the forefront.

(1) Objection to ‘success through ability’ as a sufficient condition for knowledge: There seem to be cases in which an agent meets this condition but does not know. These cases are (usually) ones in which the achievement occurs in a case in which malignant luck undermines knowledge.

(2) Objection to ‘success through ability’ as a necessary condition for knowledge: There seem to be cases in which an agent knows, but is not such that her believing p truly constitutes an achievement.

Both of these objections, if not properly addressed, threaten the ‘success through ability’ approach as a viable solution to the value problem it is meant to assuage. If the first objection is not met, then what makes knowledge distinctively valuable, on the proposal, would also make states that fall short of knowledge distinctively valuable. Thus, the idea that knowledge is more valuable than that which falls short is threatened.

The second objection, if not met, would cast the stone from the other side: there would be cases of knowledge that, by virtue of not requiring an achievement, would be bereft of an explanation for why they are more valuable than that which falls short.

I’ll turn now to what I think might be some challenging cases for the ‘success through ability’ proposal. Some of these cases will challenge the idea that achievement is necessary for knowledge, others will challenge the idea that achievement is sufficient for knowledge.

Case 1: Flowers for Algernon
Flowers for Algernon is a novel by Daniel Keyes in which the protagonist, Charlie Gordon, is a mentally retarded janitor. He is chosen for a unique experiment, which is to undergo an experimental brain surgery that would raise his IQ. As it turns out, the experiment works (and ultimately, to his demise). Suppose that such a procedure were possible: I think that an initial response would be that an agent who comes to know things he would not have known had it not been for the experiment, is not properly creditworthy, as his cognitive success might be more appropriately attributable to the scientists, than to his agency. This seems to suggest that perhaps creditworthiness is not required for knowledge. But add this twist: Suppose that scientists are able to perform this procedure, but because it is so expensive, only one person will be the lucky recipient. To determine who gets to have the procedure done, the scientists have an intellectual contest to determine who is most worthy. Albert E., who is naturally very clever, prepares tenaciously for the contest and wins. Albert undergoes the experiment, and his IQ is raised to an even higher level. Suppose that Albert comes to learn X, Y and Z in such a way that he would not have had these true beliefs had it not been for the surgery. (Suppose that X, Y, and Z) are facts about theoretical physics too complex for even the greatest geniuses. Albert’s cognitive successes are ‘because of’ his surgery. Interestingly, that he had his surgery is ‘because of’ his cognitive abilities.
(1) Does Albert know X,Y and Z?
(2) Does Albert’s coming to believe X, Y and Z truly constitute a cognitive achievement?

Case 2: Math Exam
Suppose that Peter is a mathematical whiz, who has become bored with school and has elected not to attend class or lecture for weeks. Finally, on threat of expulsion, he shows up for the final exam, unprepared. The teacher passes out a handout that includes five versions of the quadratic formula, four of which are false and one correct. The exam consists of applying the formula to 10 problems. Peter is discouraged because he knows he is clever and that, if given the right formula, he would have no trouble executing its application to a tee. With a sigh, he finally picks one at random (the correct one) and solves all ten problems correctly. Suppose that, had he chosen any different formula, he would have solved them all incorrectly (albeit, in accordance with the false formula). As it turns out, Peter gets the highest grade in the class. Even those who memorized which formula was correct struggled to apply it correctly to the 10 problems—a task which was easy for Peter.
(1) Does Peter know the answers to the 10 problems?
(2) Do Peter’s correct answers to the 10 problems constitute cognitive achievements?

Case 3: Spellbound
Little Susie Speller is obsessed with winning first place in the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee. Her overbearing parents provide her with the latest OED dictionary and hire the finest spelling tutors to assist her in her quest. Susie immerses herself in Latin and Greek word roots, linguistic etiology and after a year and a half, has learned to spell almost every word in the dictionary. A week before the spelling bee, Susie Speller is hit by a drunk driver (or, to avoid a sentimentalist response, suppose she is so stressed that she gets drunk and causes a wreck). In any event, her memory is badly affected, and seems to come in spurts. During the week before the Bee, she finds herself going through intervals where she spells words (even the toughest ones) perfectly for about a half an hour, and then lapses into a subsequent thirty minutes in which she has trouble spelling any of the words. Nonetheless, Susie shows up to the Spelling Bee, and luckily for her, the rotations are such that everytime she is called to spell a word, she is operating in one of her lucid intervals. (And, of course, when she sits down between turns, she goes blank). Susie ends up winning the Spelling Bee. Clearly, she would not have won had it not been for her spelling ability. Had she not studied, then car wreck or not, she would have no chance. However, had she drawn a different rotation number, she would have been given a word during her blank periods and would have lost.

(1) Did Susie know the words she spelled?
(2) Was Susie’s success at the Bee an achievement?

Goldman and Olsson's 'Conditional Probability Solution' to the Swamping Problem

2007-04-30T22:22:00.000+01:00

Goldman and Olsson (forthcoming) in “Reliabilism and the Value of Knowledge” offer several insightful responses to the ‘swamping problem.’ I think that the ‘conditional probability’ solution that they offer is the most interesting; evaluating this solution requires attention to some important, and sometimes unnoticed, aspects of the problem.

The swamping problem has been articulated a variety of ways, and unfortunately, different versions of the problem have been referred to under the same label.

Here’s a general and (hopefully) uncontroversial formulation of the problem, as presented by Goldman and Olsson:

Template Swamping Argument

(S1) Knowledge equals reliably produced true belief (simple reliabilism)
(S2) If a given belief is true, its value will not be raised by the fact that it was reliably produced.
(S3) Hence: knowledge is no more valuable than unreliably produced true belief. (reductio)

(S2) of the argument expresses what has been called the ‘swamping premise.’ Of course, (S3) is counterintuitive, and so the idea is to either reject the swamping premise, or to reject simple reliabilism (S1).

The swamping premise expresses a conditional claim. Those who want to save reliabilism are burdened, as it were, to show how a reliably produced true belief is more valuable than an unreliably produced true belief.

Kvanvig (2003) throws down the gauntlet at this point and suggests that we can, in principle, rule out a rejection of (S2).

His suggestion is that reliability is a valuable property for a belief to have insofar as it is valuable for a belief to be ‘objectively likely to be true.’ He argues that for a reliabilist to suppose that reliability is a valuable property for a belief to have for reasons other than its being likely to be true (i.e. say, because the “normative dimension that accompanies the right kind of objective likelihood of truth introduces a new valuational element distinct from the value of objective likelihood” (Kvanvig 2003b, p. 51) would seem magical, he says, “like pulling a rabbit from a hat” (51).

He argues further that being ‘objectively likely to be true’ isn’t a property that, when added to a true belief, increases its value, and thus, (S2) is true.

Goldman and Olsson take issue with Kvanvig’s reasoning here for a couple of reasons. First is what I’ll call the ‘entailment’ objection. Goldman and Olsson think that Kvanvig overlooks the fact that although being reliabily formed entails being likely to be true, being likely to be true doesn’t entail being reliably formed. They say:

John may have acquired his belief that he will contract lung cancer from reading tea leaves, an unrealiable process, and yet if John is a heavy smoker, his belief may well be likely to be true” (Goldman and Olsson, p. 8)

Goldman and Olsson overstate what they take to be the crime here. This example would damage Kvanvig’s view only if Kvanvig actually defended that the entailment goes both ways, that is, that (as Goldman and Olsson attribute to him) “Being produced by a process that normally produces true belief just means being likely to be true” (Goldman and Olsson 8). Kvanvig says nothing to pin him to such a biconditional. His view is, rather, that the extent to which being produced by a reliable process is a valuable property for a belief to have is exhausted by the extent to which being likely to be true is a valuable property for a belief to have. And so, an objection to Kvanvig’s claim here should take the form, rather, of pointing out some feature of being produced by a reliable belief forming process that is valuable for a belief to have in a way that is not reducible to the value that a belief would have qua being objectively likely to be true.
This is, indeed, the route they go in their ‘conditional probability’ repsonse. They argue that being produced by a reliable belief forming process can be valuable for a belief in a way that merely being objectively likely to be true isn’t valuable, and further, that its value is such that when combined with a true belief, yields a collectively more valuable whole. They write:

“Knowing that p is more valuable than truly believing that p. What is this extra valuable property that distinguishes knowledge from true belief? It is the property of making it likely that one’s future beliefs of a similar kind will also be true. More precisely, under reliabilism, the probability of having more true belief (of a similar kind) in the future is greater conditional on S’s knowing that p than conditional on S’s merely truly believing that p. (p. 16)

This claim, if correct, would amount to a counterexample to the swamping premise, which recall, says:

(S2) If a given belief is true, its value will not be raised by the fact that it was reliably produced.

Goldman and Olsson, thus, think that a true belief will be more valuable if produced by a reliable process because, as such, it contributes to the diachronic goal of having more true beliefs (of a similar kind) in the future. I want to turn to an example that helps illustrate their idea; it is the espresso example Zagzebski uses to support the swamping premise. Goldman and Olsson write:

If a good cup of espresso is produced by a reliable espresso machine, and this machine remains at one’s disposal, then the probability that one’s next cup of espresso will be good is greater than the probability that the next cup of espresso will be good given that the first good cup was just luckily produced by an unrealiable machine. If a reliable coffee machine produces good espresso for you today, and it remains at your disposal, it can normally produce a good espresso for you tomorrow. The reliable production of one good cup of espresso may or may not stand in the singular-causation relation to any subsequent good cup of espresso. But the reliable production of a good cup of espresso does raise or enhance the probability of a subsequent good cup of espresso. This probability enhancement is a valuable property to have (p. 16)

This attempted assault on the espresso analogy scores a victory at the expense of betraying a deeper, and perhaps untractable, defect in the ‘conditional probability’ response. The victory, in short, is that it gives an explanation for why two equally good cups of espresso might be such that one is more valuable than the other; this explanation rejects an assumption that Zagzebski seemed to make in the analogy, which is that ‘taste is all that matters’ for espresso (as she thought, ‘being true’ is what matters for a belief).
This sword cuts two ways, though. Consider that True Temp is a reliable belief former, and so the conditional probability of his future beliefs (of a similar kind) being true is greater given that they are formed from a reliable process (i.e. a reliable thermometer, perhaps purchased at the same store as you’d find a reliable espresso maker), than it would be had his beliefs been merely true, but unreliably produced. But, we should object, True Temp is not a knower, and so whatever makes his state valuable should not be as valuable as it would be if he were a knower. However, the conditional probability view has no way to explain this. In sum, the conditional probability response to the swamping argument works only if True Temp knows. But he doesn’t. So it doesn’t work. (Or so my objection goes…)

Here’s a second objection:

Suppose I have cancer and am in the hospital, and my 12 year old boy (I don’t really have one) is playing baseball in the little league world series. He has been practicing every day from sun up till sun down in hopes of making it to the world series and hitting a homerun. It is the ninth inning of the game, and my son (little Johnny) is up to bat. I am watching the television screen with intensity as he shouts (this one is for you, Dad!). The pitch is on the way, and then……

(Option A): The television suddenly blacks out. Knowing I might die any minute, I decide that Johnny has practiced hard and probably hit a home run, and so I believe that he did, although sadly, I realize I will never know. (And then I die, my last thoughts being ones of curiosity).

(Option B): The television does not black out, and I get to see Johnny hit the home run on TV. In fact, (for even more evidence) my hospital is close to the baseball field, and the ball comes through the window and lands on my bed. I know that Johnny hit the home run, and then I die (in peace).

On the conditional probability view, my true belief in Option B (in which I form my belief from reliable processes, i.e. watching a previously non-deceptive TV broadcast, which doesn’t display phantom images) is more valuable state than my true belief in Option A in so far as the true belief in B was produced by a reliable process, and as such, raises the probability that future beliefs (of a similar kind) will be true. However, as I know I am dying, I have no interest in future beliefs, as I am aware I am in my last throes. (And, in fact, I don’t form any more future beliefs of a similar kind). The conditional probability approach, then, seems committed to claiming that my true belief in B is no more valuable than my true belief in A. But surely that’s not true!

Okay, those are my worries. I’d love to hear any thoughts!

Challenging the Swamping Premise

2007-04-24T15:22:00.000+01:00

The ‘swamping’ argument against reliabilism has been advanced on several occasions (i.e. Kvanvig 2003, Swinburne 1999, Zagzebski 2004, W. Jones 1997, and others), and is, at least prima facie, quite persuasive.

The crucial premise in the argument is, as Kristoffer Ahlstrom (whose formalization I am using) calls it, the swamping premise.

(1) V (SB R,T that p) = V (SBT that p).

The swamping premise has been defended a variety of ways. Zagzebski (2004), for example, defends (1) with her ‘espresso analogy.’ She argues that good espresso from an unreliable espresso machine is just as valuable as good espresso from a reliable espresso machine. Analogously, she thinks, for beliefs. Being produced from a reliable process doesn’t add value to a true belief. And, thus, (1).

Kvanvig (2003) defends the premise with his ‘two lists’ argument; if you want to know where you can get chocolate, and you are given a list telling you where chocolate is sold, and another list telling you where chocolate is ‘likely’ to be sold, then a conjunction of the two lists is no more valuable than the first list. The value of the second list is ‘swamped’ by the value of the first. So to, he thinks, for beliefs. If a reliably produced belief is valuable because it is ‘likely to be true’, then adding this property to a belief already stipulated as true does not increase its value.

The next premise is:

(2) V (SK that p) > V(SBT that P)

But because reliabilists just define knowledge as (SB R,T that p), we derive:

(3) V (SK that p) > V (SB R,T that p). Therefore:

(4) SK that p  df. SB R,T that p

(Note: the move from (3) to (4) relies on an implicit premise that: a difference in value between x and y entails that x  y. This assumption, as a side note, lurks in the background as Meno is reasoning to his conclusion that knowledge just is true belief).

If the ‘swamping premise’ (i.e. P1) can be adequately defended, it is not difficult to show how further premises will lead to a conclusion that process reliabilism is a false theory of knowledge.

There exist some recent attempts to vitiate the swamping argument. I am interested to know whether any succeeds.

First attempt: Kristoffer Ahlstrom and the diachronic goal.

Ahlstrom argues that the swamping premise is true only if our cognitive coal is conceived of synchronically; that is, only if the value relative to which other epistemic states are valuable by virtue of promoting that value, is having true beliefs now. He argues in favour of a reconstrual of our cognitive goal as diachronic—as having true beliefs not only now, but also later. Under such a framework, he thinks, a reliably formed belief is more valuable than a mere true belief. Here’s Ahlstrom:

To be (or have been) reliably formed is such a component since being (or having been) reliably formed implies something about the etiology of the belief in question—an etiology that, if repeatedly instantiated, will promote our diachronic goal to attain and maintain true beliefs through tracking the truth. To believe truly, however, is no such diachronic component since it carries no promise to the effect that the belief was formed in response to the way the world is rather than as a result of mere luck. This is why the presence of truth cannot make the epistemic value of believing reliably otiose”. (Ahlstrom, “An Argument Concerning Swamping”)

I agree with Ahlstrom that a ‘synchronic’ conception of our cognitive goal is unhelpfully narrow, however I am not convinced that stipulating a ‘diachronic’ goal gets us the result he wants. My worry is this: the property of a belief that best promotes a diachronic goal is ‘permanence’ of a belief (i.e. see Williamson’s cross-temporal explanation of the value of knowledge in his 2000b), however, permanence attaches to a belief not by virtue of its etiology, but by virtue of the extent to which we hold conviction with regard to the belief. Maybe I’m missing something here.

Second try: Goldman and Olsson No. 1

Goldman and Olsson in “Reliabilism and the Value of Knowledge” bring up an interesting case which, they admit, is not at the crux of their argument, but is nonetheless worth mentioning here. They suggest that in at least some deployments of the word ‘know’, we mean nothing other than ‘truly believes.’ Therefore, in at least some cases, it is no more valuable to know than to truly believe. The example they cite is one from Hawthorne (2004) who imagines that a classroom is asked ‘Who knows the capital of Austria?” The idea here is that: whomever says ‘Vienna’ is credited as knowing, and ipso facto, knowledge in such cases just is true belief.
Two problems here. Firstly, I think that it is more likely that in the classroom case, we just ‘misuse’ the word know (in the same way that we might use ‘deny’ sloppily rather than ‘refute’). But that aside, even if the case were legitimate, and we infer from that that some cases of knowing aren’t more valuable than their true-belief counterparts, it wouldn’t establish anything that we haven’t already learned from Sosa’s sand on the beach case. There are some propositions such that knowing them isn’t more valuable than truly believing them.

Second try: Goldman and Olsson No. 2

This case is the interesting case. It is an attack of Kvanvig’s two lists’ argument. Goldman and Olsson think that Kvanvig’s two lists argument relies on allegedly spurious thesis of ‘property parasitism’:

Property Parasitism: If the value of property P* is parasitic on the value of property P, then the value of P and P* together does not exceed the value of P. (Goldman and Olsson, p. 10)

Goldman and Olsson think property parasitism is false by way of counterexample: Suppose, they argue, that you have a ticket worth $1000 and another ticket that has a 10% chance of winning $1000. Clearly you would want both the $1000 and the ticket more than you would want merely the $1000. But, they think, if property parasitism is true, then the $1000 ‘swamps’ the value of the ticket, and thus, you should not prefer the conjunction of the two over the $1000.

This is quite clever. I’m afraid, though, that there is a subtle disanalogy between what Kvanvig is trying to do with the two lists argument (about wanting chocolate) and with the money case. In Kvanvig’s case, you goal is a true belief. You can’t get ‘truer than true’ and so once you have a true belief, then adding the property that it is ‘likely to be true’ doesn’t add to the value. On the Goldman/Olson case, though, it remains possible that your conjunction (i.e. of the $1000 and the ticket) could amount to something ‘more valuable than $1000), and for that reason, it seems to be relevantly disanalogous to what takes place when we adopt truth as a goal.

There are other ways to go about saving reliabilism form the swamp (i.e. Pritchard’s ‘final value’ discussion of reliable processes, as well as Greco’s ‘intrinsic value of success through ability’ defense of virtue reliabilism), but I’ll stop the discussion here and see if anyone thinks that any of the first three examples are legitimate reasons to deny the swamping premise.

The Value Turn in Epistemology

2007-03-05T22:59:00.000Z

In his very interesting paper "The Value Turn in Epistemology," Wayne Riggs uses this locution (Value Turn) to characterize a relatively recent trend in epistemology. The 'Value Turn', as he puts it, has consisted in both a widening of the scope of epistemically interesting concepts as well as a methodological change of guard. Both the widening in scope and change in epistemic method reflect an increasing interest in normative features of epistemic inquiry.

I think it is safe to say that the 'Value Turn' has been, in no small way, kick-started by the rise of virtue-theoretic approaches to epistemic evaluation that have emerged in the latter half of the past century. As Zagzebski has put it: the virtue-theoretic approach seeks to define epistemic concepts by examining properties of persons, rather than properties of beliefs.

The virtue-theoretic project encompasses both the shifts in scope and methodology that Riggs mentions. Consider, first, methodology: When attempting to determine whether S's belief that p is justified, the virtue-theoretic approach prescribes that we must first ask whether the agent came to form the belief in the right kind of way. Rather, then, to ask questions such as: "Is the belief appropriately causally connected to the fact that p" or "was the belief produced in a reliable manner"-- the virtue-epistemologist asks questions such as, "Was the agent epistemically responsible in forming the belief p", "Did her belief arise out of acts of intellectual virtue", etc.

This change in methodological evaluation results in a widened scope of epistemically interesting concepts.

For example: One way to answer whether an agent's belief has resulted from intellectually virtuous believing will be to first stipulate some epistemic value that constitutes 'epistemic flourishing' and then to identify what traits constitute intellectual virtues by considering the extent to which they promote this value.

Some VE theorists identify 'true belief' as the end value, and define the virtues as those traits that are truth-conducive. (Note: also interesting to some VE theorists is not just whether the agent's trait leads her to reliably produce true beliefs, but also, whether the agent is appropriately motivated to reach this end).

Other VE theorists, such as Riggs, do not limit 'true belief' as the epistemic end relative to which virtues are definable, but rather, allow other non-alethic epistemic values (such as intelligibility) to count as epistemic goals.

One thing that can be learned from these varying approaches within VE is that the virtue-theoretic method of epistemic evaluation opens the door to normative features of inquiry that had in the past been, by and large, considered out of the scope of what is crucial to evaluate central epistemic concepts such as justification and knowledge.

Aside from the method and scope sea change, there are two other auguries that (I shall propose) characterize the 'Value Turn.'

The first feature has to do with luck. The VE project in its infancy arose as a new strategy for dealing with Gettier problems. The idea is that Gettier problems feature cases in which knowledge is undermined (in some relevant way) by luck; combine this fact with the idea that success through luck appears at odds with success through ability, and you get the makings for an anti-luck strategy that doesn't focus solely on properties of beliefs--a strategy that post-Gettier literature shows has failed.

The history of the Gettier problem is a testament to its importance, and the Value Turn has provided us with promising strategies for meeting the problem that were previously overlooked. (Greco's credit-based response to the Gettier problem is an example of this type of anti-luck approach).

Thirdly, I don't think we can do justice to the idea of a Value Turn in epistemology without granting that it is characterized, in part, by a resurgance of interest in the Meno problem--which have been given much attention recently thanks to Jon Kvanvig's (2003) book on the value of knowledge. Apart from the case he makes for the value of 'understanding' as importantly distinct from the value of knowledge, he offers some convincing arguments for the idea that an adequate account of the nature of knowledge must be amenable to a corresponding account of the value of knowledge. Put another way, if an account can't explain why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief, then this account is a failure even if it is a counterexample-free account of the nature of knowledge.

To sum up what I've suggested: VE has been an impetus to the 'Value Turn' in epistemology (in part, at least) for the reason that it takes normative evaluation to be indespensible to the task of defining central epistemic concepts; Ability-based responses to the Gettier problem motivate the idea that an adequate anti-luck account of the nature of knowledge cannot ignore the idea the importance of normative features of inquiry such as ability and creditworthiness; the resurgance of the Meno problem instigated by Kvanvig's book (and the responses to it) motiates not only interest in epistemic axiology, but also the idea that an account of the nature of knowledge, independent of a corresponding account of the value of knowledge, is incomplete.

Now comes a plea for addition:

I'm curious as to what other facets of the 'Value Turn' I am leaving out. It is quite clear that normative epistemology is getting a great deal more attention than it used to... I'm very interested as to how others would go about characterizing this movement.

Additionally, an interesting question would be: What books and journal articles best represent the 'Value Turn'?

Please do share any thoughts!

History of Epistemic Value

2007-02-26T20:45:00.000Z

I am working on scrounging together some resources on the history of epistemic value, and have my hat in my hand for suggestions.

As most know, Plato's Meno is the paragon starting point for discussion of quesitons related to the value of knowledge. I am hoping to locate other important detours in the history of philosophy in which this sort of discussion takes place.

Important quesitons include (for example): in virtue of what is knowledge valuable? Why is having knowledge better than having than mere true opinion?

As an aside:

I've put up links to drafts of some of my papers on VE and EV on my website; as always, comments are welcome!

http://staff.stir.ac.uk/adam.carter

Cheers,

Adam

Social Epistemology Conference at Stirling

2007-02-15T14:13:00.000Z

For those not aware, I wanted to post this:

There is a major international conference on Social Epistemology here at Stirling August 31 - September 2, 2007. The speakers and commentators comprise quite the redoubtable list of names, indeed!

Here is a link:

http://www.philosophy.stir.ac.uk/postgraduate/SocialEpistemologyConference.php

Also, for more information on this check out Stirling's Epistemic Value Blog:

http://epistemicvaluestirling.blogspot.com

There is also info on the value blog regarding two other upcoming epistemology conferences at Stirling: one on Action and Knowledge, and the other on John McDowell, both taking place later this year.

New Draft: Luck and Credit in the Space of Reasons

2007-02-14T18:04:00.000Z

Greetings: Below is a link to a rough draft of a paper I've recently written on McDowell's epistemology; the paper charges his account with failing two anti-luck desiderata.

Warning: I am not entirely satisfied with this paper; thanks to some recent suggestions, I am aware that my section on perceptual-recognitional abilities needs amended. (Also, I need to re-think some other claims I make). I've decided to post it nonetheless, in case others wish to consider the nascent arguments and/or or provide any comments.

Here is the abstract, and below is a link to the paper:

ABSTRACT: This essay will advance the view that the McDowellian theory of knowledge fails to satisfy the requirements of an adequate anti-luck epistemology. Section 1 presents two twin anti-luck desiderata that, I shall argue, an account must accomodate: (i) If S knows p, then S could not have easily been wrong that p; (ii) If S knows p, then S is credit-worthy for her true belief that p. In Section 2, I outline the salient differences between McDowell’s iconoclastic anti-luck strategy and traditional strategies. Section 3 offers reasons for thinking that McDowell fails to satisfy what I have presented as the first anti-luck desideratum; section 4 offers reasons for thinking that McDowell fails the second desideratum.

http://staff.stir.ac.uk/adam.carter/documents/luckandcreditWednesdayevening14feb.pdf

Perceptual-Recognitional Abilities, Barn Facades and the problem of Individuating Environments

2007-02-06T18:48:00.000Z

One line of thought in the literature on perceptual knowledge makes important use of the idea of perceptual-recognitional abilities. Such an ability would be, for example, the ability to recognize by looking whether or not it is an azalea that sits on a hill in front of you. (If you couldn't tell an azalea from a daffodill, or if the hill is salted with silk-made fraud azaleas, then you wouldn't have such an ability).

In his forthcoming paper "Perceptual Recognitional Abilities and Perceptual Knowledge", Alan Millar advances the idea that the exercising of perceptual-recogntional abilities is required for perceptual knowledge. Given that, even to the most seasoned horticulturalist, a hill of fake (and perceptually indistinguishable from real) azaleas would create a situation in which our horticultiralist no longer has the ability to recognize an azalea, Millar points out that 'whether' one has such an ability will depend, in part, on facts about the environment within which one is inquiring.

I confess that I don't have a clear idea how ‘environments’ are supposed to be individuated. Suppose, for example, that we take on one hand Goldman’s valley salted with barn facades and determine that that valley constitutes an environment. Suppose, further, that you are lost while driving in the general area. You come to a fork in the road; one road leads down Goldman’s barn façade valley, the other road leads down a valley of all genuine barns. You flip a coin and happen to take the road that leads down the road with all genuine barns. It is unclear to me whether this road constitutes a ‘good’ environment simply by virtue of the fact that there are no barn facades in the valley to potentially deceive you. Or, should we say that it is part of a ‘bad’ environment (i.e. one in which you do not have barn-recognizing perceptual recognitional abilities) by virtue of the fact that you so easily could have driven down Goldman lane. Alan Millar, in conversation, has suggested to me that—at least on his view—it will be inevitable that there will be some indeterminate cases in which the issue of whether one has exercised perceptual-recognitional abilities in a certain environment will not be clear given that the delineation of the environment relative to which one would have such abilities is obfuscated.

Some quesitons for discussion:

1. Is the project of indexing perceptual-recognitional abilities to environments undermined by the fact that some cases will be indeterminate?
2. Is the project doomed to concede that, within its framework, we can never 'know' that we know? It seems to me that this would have to be conceded because, even in cases in which the environments are such that, if we were to learn all the facts about them, they would be 'clear cut' cases, it's not the case that during the time in which we make perceptual judgments we have all the facts about the particular environments in which we make these judgments. Put another way, to know that we know, we must know that we are in an environment apposite to our exercising our perceptual-recognitional abilities--a tough antecedent order, indeed! Thoughts/comments welcome.

McDowell, Credit and Confirmation Intervals

2007-01-29T21:49:00.000Z

One of the most interesting points McDowell makes in his discussion of testimonial knowledge in “Knowledge by Hearsay” pertains to confirmation intervals—particularly—how it is that we can have knowledge of some proposition p at some time t occurring between confirmation intervals for p.

To borrow McDowell’s example, let p represent the proposition “George W. Bush is president.” Suppose further that you are a loyal watcher of the 6:00 p.m. news. Last night, when watching the news, you see that Bush is giving a speech in Minnesota. You don’t leave the house all day, and it is now 3:00 p.m., three hours before you will watch the news again (and, thus, have the opportunity to reaffirm your belief that Bush is President.)

Do you know, at 3:00, that Bush is president?

McDowell, recognizing that it would be counterintuitive to think that your knowledge that Bush is president “disappears” as the television screen turns black, thinks allows that you can know, at 3:00, that Bush is president.

Of course, if Bush had suddenly died in the time interval between the previous newscast and your forming the belief that he is president at 3:00, then you would not know that he is president. But, so long as he still is president, you do know.

McDowell thinks that, for a proposition such as “Bush is President”, belief in this proposition at some time within (for example) a day of the previous confirmation interval that it is so meets whatever criterion of doxastic responsibility on behalf of the agent that is needed for the agent’s factive state of remembering that Bush is president to constitute knowledge.

What McDowell doesn’t explain carefully enough, however, is how one would go about answering the following amended versions of the previous example:

Scenario 1: Amend the Bush-TV scenario so that the agent has no confirmation interval that Bush is president for 15 days, and then utters: “Bush is president”.

Scenario 2: Amend the Bush-TV scenario so that the agent has no confirmation interval that Bush is president for six months, and then utters: “Bush is president.”

What McDowell does say is that, at some point, your belief that “Bush is president” will require another confirmation interval (even if your reason for believing that he is president is that you ‘remember that’ he is president) if you are to continue to know that Bush is president. He likens this idea to the analogy of a plant, needing water every so often. What McDowell doesn’t say is (in his parlance) how often the plant needs watered, and perhaps more importantly, how we can come to know how we must water it.

Appealing to base intuition, I’d suspect that the agent does not know in Scenario 2, and ‘maybe’ knows in Scenario 1.

I have no intuition, though, as to how to go about assessing at what point your initial knowledge that Bush is president ‘runs out of water.’ This is because, as I see it, it’s not clear if it is relevant (for example) whether between your initial confirmation interval and (say) Scenario 1, there are death threats placed on Bush of which the agent is unaware. Would this affect the extent to which adequate doxastic responsibility would require a confirmation interval? If there are (suppose) bullets flying haphazardly through the air at Bush five minutes after I turn the TV off after watching him give an address, and none of the bullets hits Bush, can I still know that Bush is president (five minutes later?)

It’s just not clear how McDowell would go about addressing these sorts of questions.

At this point, I am drawing two conclusions:

1. McDowell has no good way of explaining how an agent can ever know that she knows any given proposition at some time t between confirmation intervals. This is because, to know that one knows such propositions, one must first know that one has been adequately doxastically responsible in attending to the needed confirmations. It’s not clear how, on McDowell’s view, knowledge of the latter would be within the reaches of one’s rational powers.
2. McDowell has no good way of explaining how an agent can ever be credit-worthy for knowing some proposition at a time t in between confirmation intervals. This is because, for the agent to be creditworthy for knowing some proposition p, the agent (and not brute luck) must be relevenatly instrumental in an explanation for why the agent knows p. On McDowell’s account, though, it seems that whether or not one has met the requirements of doxastic responsibility might well be a matter of luck.

I shall elaborate this last idea.

Suppose I bury a silver coin underneath a tree in my back yard. I see that the coin is there, and suppose further, that the next day, I remember that the coin is there. Suppose I never again check under the rock to see if it is there.

On McDowell’s view, there is some point in time tn which I no longer know that the coin is there, even if the coin is still there. Suppose that, seconds before tn I form the belief “the coin is there.” Seconds later, and infinitesimally after tn, I form the belief “the coin is there.” McDowell seems to rule that I know in the first case, but not in the second. If McDowell is to preserve the intuitive idea that knowers are credit worthy, then he must allow that my belief seconds before tn constitutes a creditworthy achievement, but not the belief I form seconds after tn. This consequence seems rather hard to swallow.

For a final thought: I’m not sure whether I am right to think the following or not, but here it goes: one might be able to argue that the McDowell doesn’t adequately satisfy the safety principle. The case that (might) work to illustrate this would be an amendment of the silver coin case.

Imagine that, five minutes after you plant the coin, it spontaneously (due to some quantum fluke) catches fire and burns to ash. Four minutes after you planted the coin, you form the belief that the coin is under the tree. You are (probably) doxastically responsible, and you remember that the coin was under the tree, however you could have easily been wrong. Why could you have easily been wrong? Because you could have just as easily formed your belief about the coin’s being there five or six minutes after planting it as you could have four minutes after planting it.

I’d be interested to get some feedback as to how a McDowellian could address some (or all) of these concerns.

2007-01-26T21:26:00.000Z

Reading McDowell is a great way to enter a trance-like state for hours. Rather than to feel enlightenment, however, I sometimes feel despair.

Hiatus nearly over

2007-01-26T20:51:00.000Z

VE readers--thanks for hanging in over the past month. I've been on Winter break, fighting a nasty flu, and slacking in the realm of blogospheredom. I head back across the pond to start the new semester next week, and intend to:

1) Get rid of the annoying 'fake' comments that have adulterated discussion on this blog. (ps. Does anyone know if it is possible to make VE somehow 'immune' to receiving such comments.) If you don't know what I mean by 'fake' comments, just read the recent thread on McDowell and enjoy the advertisements for Viagra, chatlines, etc... all of which stand quite far removed from the 'space of reasons' under any interpretation....

2) I intend to post some more stuff about McDowell and epistemic luck in the near future. I'm currently working on a paper entitled: "Luck and Credit in the Space of Reasons."

Other things....

* For some interesting discussion about McDowell, check out Avery Archer's "The Space of Reasons" blog, which is going to be featured in an upcoming edition of Philosopher's Carnival

* Also to be featured at PC is an excellent student-run philosophy blog from my old haunt, the University of Missouri, entitled "Show-Me the Argument"... Justin McBrayer is doing a great job with this blog, and it is definitely worth checking out

* Thanks to Adrian Haddock and Avery Archer for engendering a good discussion on McDowell in my sickness-induced absence

* Final point: I've recently settled on a dissertation topic, which will be (tentatively) a defense of epistmic value pluralism. Expect to see quite a bit of discussion on this score in the months (and... yes... years, hopefully not too many) ahead

Cheers, Adam

McDowell, knowledge and credit

2006-12-06T14:29:00.000Z

I'm interested in getting clear about two features, specifically, of John McDowell's theory of knowledge. (1) How does his account answer any of the three value problems; (2) How does his account explain why knowers are credit-worthy?

I haven't yet come across literature that can explain the first of these questions, but after thinking about 'Knowledge and the Internal' I am somewhat confused as to how a satisfactory answer to (2) would go.

McDowell, in criticizing the 'hybrid' account, claims that what is epistemically significant between a knower and a non-knower (take the context of the New Evil Genius setting) should not fall outside the knower's standing in the space of reasons. And so, because the hybrid account posits that the 'favor from the world' is something external to the knower's standing in the SOR, McDowell rejects the view.

However, by preserving the Sellarsian idea of knowledge as a satisfactory standing in the space of reasons, McDowell abolishes the hybrid idea by Trojan Horsing in what was external in the hybrid account so that it falls within the knower's standing in the space of reasons. He does this by requiring that facts be reasons, and also be such that they shape the space of reasons in which agent finds herself.

What is troubling to me is this: McDowell, by making this move, thinks that facts are reflectively accessible. However, this just seems dubious to me when we think about an agent and his envatted counterpart forming the belief that p. What seems to be reflectively accessible to both is the content of some belief, which they take as a reason. For the lucky non-envatted agent, the content reflectively assessible to her is a fact. However, crucially, it is not reflectively accessible to the non-envatted agent that what she takes as a reason is a fact. And so, what is 'epistemically significant' between the knower and non-knower is something which, as in the case of the hybrid view, is not obiviously creditable to the agent. And so, I can't see how his account is going to explain why knowers are any more creditworthy than non-knowers.

The above is my 'naive' concern, and perhaps this will be assuaged after I get clearer on his view.

That aside, I'd be interested in either reasons for or against endorsing my concern and also any literature recommedations that would be useful to getting clear on what McDowell's view would say (on either of the initial questions)

A Happy Triumvirate: Virtue Epistemology, Contextualism and the Safety Principle (Draft)

2006-11-27T17:08:00.000Z

I'm currently at work on a paper defending a virtue responsibilist account of knowledge designed to accomodate two anti-luck concerns: (i) if S knows some contingent proposition p, then S couldn't have easily been wrong about p; (ii) S's knowing some contingent proposition p amounts to an achievement for S such that S is creditworthy for knowing p.

I call (i) and (ii) "anti-luck" concerns because, if a belief is true in some relevant way because of (veritic) luck, neither (i) nor (ii) will be met.

My proposal incorporates a safety condition to meet (i), and outlines a way to preserve (ii) by requiring that creditworthiness depend in part on whether an agent’s exhibition of intellectual virtue is an explanatorily salient feature of her forming a safe belief, a matter that will itself depend on features of context in particular cases of inquiry.

Below is a link:

http://staff.stir.ac.uk/adam.carter/documents/HAPPYTRIUMVIRATEdraft.pdf

Please note: I'm wide open for advice (as this paper is currently only a rough manuscript); I'd prefer you don't quote unless checking with me, given that its current state is far from polished.

Feel free to send comments, criticisms, rants of ad hominem vitriol, etc. to: j.a.carter@stir.ac.uk

Cheers--Adam

VE and contextualism

2006-11-12T15:26:00.000Z

I've been wondering whether a virtue-epistemologist can be a contextualist. Greco thinks so, and gives a case for this. His view, though, falls within the "virtue reliabilist" camp; I wonder what the prospects would be for a virtue responsibilist (specifically) to embrace contextualist semantics for "know." In his Stanford Encyclopedia entry on VE, Greco suggests that a virtue responsibilist account (namely, Zagzebski's) might be amenable to contextualist semantics by supposing that the "because" in her definition (i.e. the agent has to reach the end of the intellectually virtuous motive "because" of features of the act of virtue) could be understood as requiring stronger conditions in different contexts.

I'm not sure what to make of this claim; does anyone know of particularly good articles (aside from Greco's entry in 'Knowledge, Belief and Character) that shine light on the prospects of a virtue-responsibilist account being amenable to contextualist semantics?

Swamp Exemption Status

2006-10-16T21:46:00.000+01:00

I’ve been thinking about swamping. Specifically, I’m wondering what is swampable. And even more specifically, under what conditions a theory of knowledge is doomed to the swamping problem. A theory of knowledge is doomed to the swamping problem if and only if___________?

My suspicion is that answering this question would require that it first be made clear which value problem for knowledge we are talking about. I’m distinguishing value problems in the way Duncan Pritchard has in a recent paper:

The primary value problem is the problem of explaining how knowledge is more valuable than true belief.
The secondary value problem is the problem of explaining how knowledge is more valuable than any proper subset of its parts.
The tertiary value problem is the problem of explaining how knowledge is of distinctive value than any/all of its subparts: i.e. a value of a different kind.

Although a successful account of the nature of knowledge would (probably) be required to answer all three of the value problems, as I take it, the swamping problem is one that arises when trying to answer the primary value problem only. Specifically, it arises when a theory of knowledge defines knowledge as true belief plus some other quality such that the value of the other quality is parasitic on the value of truth. If a theory of knowledge falls to the swamping problem, then it can’t answer successfully the primary value problem.

I think it’s pretty clear how the generic version of reliabilism is subject to the swamping problem. This is because a belief produced by a reliable process would be most obviously valuable because such a belief is likely to be true. But adding “likely to be true” to a true belief doesn’t get you anything more valuable than a true belief. Kvanvig makes this point clear in his book “The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding.”

What becomes confusing, though, is what “kinds” of values are swampable. Are any swamp-exempt? Instrumental, extrinsic and intrinsic value all appear to me at least, in principle, capable of being swamped by the value of truth in a theory of knowledge. More clearly, a theory of knowledge trying to resolve the primary value problem might try to explain the value of knowledge over truth by invoking a justificatory component that is valuable for any of these reasons (extrinsic, instrumental and intrinsic) and still be such that the justificatory component’s value is in some important way parasitic on the value of truth.What about final value, though? Something has final value if it is valuable for its own sake. This need not entail that it is valuable because of its intrinsic properties, although (as I understand) some things can be both intrinsically and finally valuable.

What’s not clear to me is whether final value is the sort of value that can be parasitc on truth to the extent that (for example) a justificatory component in a theory of knowledge that is finally valuable could nonetheless be swamped. Thoughts on swamping?

Timothy Williamson's 'Neo-Tethering' Solution to the Meno problem

2006-10-09T19:50:00.000+01:00

The Meno challenges us to figure out what makes knowledge more valuable than mere true belief. This challenge becomes particularly difficult if we are on board with Socrates in thinking that knowledge and true belief are equally practically useful.

Jon Kvanvig (2003) in “The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding” has pointed out the flaws of quite a few attempts to solve the problem. This book is rich and instructive.

One account that he rejects, however, appears more promising than others. This is the account given by Timothy Williamson (2000), which claims that knowledge is more valuable than true belief because of its relative cross-temporal permanence to true belief. That is, Williamson takes it that knowledge is less likely to be undermined by future evidence than is true belief.

Williamson’s account is a probabilistic account, and it appears to hold true in our world, even though (as Kvanvig points out) not all cases of knowledge in our world are more permanent than mere true beliefs. This is because of facts about belief fixation. Some of our beliefs are fixed pragmatically—for example—they are instinctive, and not fixed evidentially. When such beliefs are true but not known, then we have mere true belief that would appear particularly resistant to being undermined, more resistant it is likely than some of our knowledge.

From this, Kvanvig supposes that in some worlds, unlike ours, the majority of beliefs will be fixed pragmatically and non-evidentially; thus, in some worlds, knowledge is less permanent than true belief.

Does such a view undermine Williamson’s claim?

Kvanvig thinks that it does, and he reasons as follows: Because some possible worlds with a preponderance of pragmatic belief fixation would be such that knowledge would be less permanent than mere true belief, then Williamson’s claim is merely a contingent truth, which will hold only in some worlds in which knowledge is more permanent than true belief.

This is bad, he thinks, because “It is simply false that knowledge loses its value in worlds where the environment is less cooperative and where pragmatics play a more significant role in belief fixation.” (2003b p. 17)

I agree with Kvanvig that knowledge doesn’t appear, at least prima facie, like the sort of thing that would lose its value in some worlds. But are we entitled to draw the conclusion that knowledge would lose its value in some worlds from the fact that Williamson’s account would be false in some worlds? I’m not sure we are. It seems like all we can conclude is that, in such worlds (where pragmatics play a significant role in belief fixation), the value of knowledge over true belief in such worlds would not be its permanence. Of course, this would still leave open the possibility that knowledge could be valuable (and more valuable than true belief) for different reasons in such worlds. And so, it doesn't seem like we must reach the conclusion that knowledge must lose its value in such worlds (which Kvanvig seems to take as a reductio to the view).
One would, of course, dismiss my suggestion if they took it that the value conferring property of knowledge must hold across all possible worlds, but I don’t see what that would be so. (For example, in some worlds, winter coats might be eaten for sustenance and be valuable for that reason; in our world, we wear them). Is it obvious that knowledge is so relevantly dissimilar that a world-relative account of value is plausible in the former case and implausible in the latter?
One problem though, I think, for defending Williamson’s view as an response to the Meno problem is that it appears to be making a universal claim, and as Kvanvig shows (through some counterexamples), there are particular examples that undermine a universal claim about knowledge’s permanence.
If Williamson’s goal, though, is to explain why knowledge is more valuable than true belief for us, perhaps he should weaken his view and claim that “knowledge is significantly more likely to be more permanent than is true belief.” Embedding this probability claim within probability claim muddies the notion, but perhaps it is a move in the right direction. I’ll stop rambling now; I’m open for suggestions on this (if you couldn’t already tell)

More on Driver, the Virtue Conflation Problem and Epistemic Egoism

2006-10-04T12:02:00.000+01:00

I’ve been thinking about the distinction between intellectual and moral virtues at the level of value-conferring property. Julia Driver has argued in her paper “The Conflation of Moral and Epistemic Virtue” that what distinguishes moral and intellectual virtues is a matter of what good are produced by these respective virtues, as opposed to (for example) the ends toward which the respected virtues are motivated. And so, Driver employs a consequentialist account in an effort to distinguish between the virtues. On the surface of it, I don’t see anything implausible about employing a consequentialist account here. Driver makes a thorough case for a consequentialist account of virtue, in general, in her 2001 monograph “Uneasy Virtue”. What I am concerned about, though, is whether her consequentialist distinction between moral and intellectual virtues at the level of value-conferring property is one that should posit that intellectual virtues are valuable for the reason that they produce epistemic good (i.e. knowledge, truth) for the agent. This is problematic, I think, because it allows for someone who cares only about gaining truth for himself (and not maximizing epistemic value in general) to qualify as intellectually virtuous. Hence, Driver’s account of what makes an intellectual virtue valuable is one that condones unbridled epistemic egoism. I offer the following example to illustrate this:

1. THE CASE OF THE FACT-SCROOGE
Unlike his brother Ebeneezer, who values monetary goods and misers them, Ludwig Scrooge values doxastic goods. Ludwig believes that knowledge and true belief are valuable. Also, because not everyone has access to all facts, and because some individuals have faulty cognitive equipment, not everyone enjoys a surfeit of these goods. Ludwig is aware of this fact, and determines that if he can acquire more of this good than others, then he will be better off. Ludwig, following this reasoning, embraces the view of epistemic egoism: (as David Gauthier puts it) Ludwig is “…a person who on every occasion and in every respect acts to bring about as much as possible of what he values .” He realizes that there are two ways for maximize what he values: he can maximize knowledge and truth simpliciter, or he can maximize them for himself only. As it stands, Ludwig has no desire to see anyone else but himself attain doxastic goods. And, in fact, he reasons: “If there is some stranger who could, at some time t, acquire some truth N such that I would never gain from it, then I would prefer that that stranger did not acquire N, but rather, some falsehood instead. This would make me better off.”
Just as Ludwig’s brother Ebeneezer became adept with the skills of profiting as a result of desiring his personal monetary gain, Ludwig has cultivated the skills of profiting as a result of desiring what is epistemically valuable for himself. For example, he is intellectually tenacious in forming his beliefs, he is shrewd in his calculation of evidence, he is conscious to recognize his own biases that might affect his belief-forming processes, etc. In addition to possessing these characteristics, Ludwig also has developed a habit of keeping quiet when others want to know information that he knows. He concludes that his goal of maximizing personal epistemic value is better achieved by his deceiving others into thinking he lacks knowledge of some fact, rather than sharing this fact. “I don’t know” Ludwig will say, for example, when someone who wishes to know the way to town questions him, and he knows. (Note: this strategy is shared in the monetary domain by Ebeneezer, who deceives others into thinking he has no money when they ask to borrow it, and whilst he has plenty in his pocket). Ebeneezer becomes the wealthiest man in town through his tactics, and Ludwig becomes the most knowledgeable. Ebeneezer, though wealthy, surely is not morally virtuous. Is Ludwig, though knowledgeable, intellectually virtuous?

I think the answer we should reach is “no.” (I’m at work on a paper in which I’m arguing this).
I’m interested get some intuitions on this…

Nelson Goodman on Induction

2006-09-18T14:10:00.000+01:00

Suppose I am entertaining the following hypothesis: “All swans are white.” So long as I see no non-white swans, each instance of a white swan I see serves to confirm this hypothesis. Suppose that I also am entertaining a different hypothesis: “All people with black shirts have three brothers.” So long as I haven’t encountered a black-shirted individual without three brothers, does a particular instance of a black-shirted person with three brothers serve to confirm this hypothesis?
Nelson Goodman, in his paper “The New Riddle of Induction” thinks that there is something quite different going on in the first case than in the second. The swan hypothesis appears to be “lawlike”, whilst the second hypothesis appears to be merely “accidental.” Goodman’s challenge in the paper is to determine some clear demarcating features that distinguish law-like hypothesis from he takes to be accidental hypothesis. The upshot of such a project, he thinks, is for us to get clear as to which hypotheses are such that they can be confirmed by particular cases, in such a way that could ultimately lead us to be justified in accepting these hypotheses.
The new “riddle” of induction amounts to the challenging of determining such demarcating features. Goodman makes it clear in his paper that this is not a simple challenge. I am interested to know this: (1) what is the best answer to Goodman’s riddle? (2) What answer have most people accepted to this riddle?
I think that an adequate answer to Goodman on this score is of comparable importance to the epistemic project as is an adequate answer to Chisholm’s problem of the criterion; this is because both challenges threaten (in different ways) the possibility of knowledge. In the case of Goodman’s riddle, what is up for grabs is decisively inductive knowledge, on which much of what we take to be our scientific knowledge rests.

Moral Virtue and Greek Tragedy: Sophocles' Antigone

2006-09-05T20:17:00.000+01:00

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle denotes a mysterious class of folk which, he thinks, is more perfected than even those which he is prepared to label “virtuous.” This class is reserved for individuals who manifest what he labels “divine virtue”—for example, some of the great Homeric heroes.
Because on Aristotle’s view, an act is morally justified if it is what a virtuous person would (probably) do in the circumstances, a question that has interested me is: Who might Aristotle have in mind as a beacon of moral virtue? Achilles? Hector? Odysseus?
One candidate that comes to mind is Sophocles’ character Antigone. Interestingly, in Aristotle’s Poetics, he mentions Antigone only once, as an example of a second-rate tragedy. Patricia Lines, in her critical essay “Antigone’s Flaw” (Humanitas, 1999), suggests that Aristotle probably just missed the point here. Aristotle, who outlined what he took to be the recipe for good tragedy in his discussion of character and catharsis in the Poetics, found Antigone to be lacking in that Haemon’s “plot to kill his father” never came to fruition. Lines offers that, first, it’s not clear that such a plot was ever conspired; secondly, the tragically relevant aspect of the play surrounds the dilemma of Antigone, rather than Haeman.
Perhaps, if Aristotle had directed his attention more to Antigone than to Haeman, he would have come to the same conclusion that many critics of the play have reached: namely, that Antigone is one of the greatest paragons of moral virtue to be found in classic literature.
And, at the very least, Antigone is of a character more virtuous (and almost polarly opposite to) that of Creon, who orders her death. This is a popular view in contemporary interpretation.
I must admit, however, that I see no moral significance between either character that justifies praising one over the other.
This leaves me in closer alignment with Hegel’s interpretation of Antigone, which Walter Kaufmann describes as follows:
“He [Hegel] realized that at the center of the greatest tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles we find not a tragic hero but a tragic collision, and that the conflict is not between good and evil but between one-sided positions, each of which embodies some good” (Tragedy and Philosophy 201-202).
I think Hegel’s insight into Antigone’s character is more accurate because he identifies the “one-sided” positions, which each take, and I think importantly, for the same reason. By this I mean: Antigone’s motivation to offer burial rights to her brother Polynices is out of the motivation to do the will of the gods. She appears to take the normative force of divine law dogmatically, to such an extent that it would not be surprising if she obeyed any arbitrary divine law with similar resolve. Her clinging to a principle (namely, do the will of the gods, whatever it may be) mirrors Creon’s own position, which is to—with similar resolve—obey the force of the civic law, which forbade such a burial.
What I think is particularly interesting is that “burial” practices are great examples of customs that carry with them no moral import. This is a lesson learned when exploring the moral position of cultural relativism. The lesson is that, while mere customs’ being permissible (which side of the toast is buttered, whether the dead are buried or burned, etc.) is unproblematically left up to the dictates of a culture, conduct with moral import ought not be. And so, oddly, had either Antigone or Creon been appealing to principles that would guide their conduct as to how to proceed in an action that has obvious moral import (i.e. whether to rape a child), we would be in a better position to evaluate them from a moral standpoint. But given that burial rites are prima facie vapid of moral significance, we are left with simply:
Two characters, each embracing dogmatically principles that dictate incompatible conclusions about how to proceed with a matter (burial custom) that, it itself, is without moral significance.
To discern between who deserves merit between them, then, perhaps we should go a step deeper and consider reasons that each adheres to their respective dogmatic principles. (Perhaps, for example, one might adhere to a princple because she thought the principle was just; another might adhere to a principle because she thought doing so would be profitable, etc.) But even at this level (as I hinted to earlier) we again reach a stalemate. Neither Antigone nor Creon invoke “justice” or anything in the neighbor hood as a reason for following their respective maxims. Antigone, rather, offers plainly that it would be better to violate human law than divine law. Creon, on the other hand, offers simply that it is impermissible to violate human (his own) law, and does not voice a position as to whether, in fact, divine law is incompatible with the law he demands be followed.
It is not inconsistent with what the reasons Antigone gives that her motivation for burying Polynices is a self-interested one: she finds the expected consequences of violating Creon’s law (death) to be in her better long-term interest than would be the expected consequences of violating what she believed to be the divine law. I’m not suggesting that Sophocles ever intended this interpretation of her motivation, nor that it ought to be accepted; rather, I’m just offering that it’s a consistent explanation of her motivation. Prima facie, I think it’s a bad thing if such a motivation could even be consistent with that of a character whose course of action should lead us to identify her as a paragon of moral virtue.
Why, then, do folks so frequently apotheosize Antigone as a moral exemplar, and in the same breath, despise Creon when (as I’ve suggested) there is no morally relevant distinction between the principles to which they adhere or the reasons they have for adhereing to them? And additionally, why did I myself feel the sort of pity and fear for Antigone that characterizes Greek tragedy, and not feel this to a comparable extent for Creon?
I suspect the answer lies in something of the following: We use something like the “Principle of equitable evaluation” when coming to the conclusion about whether Antigone and Creon are moral equals. This principle suggests something like: We can justify a difference in moral evaluation between agents A and B only if there is some morally relevant factual difference between A and B that justifies such a difference in evaluation.

Because we cannot identify clearly any morally relevant factual difference, the conclusion seems to be that neither seems to be praised over the other as a moral superior. However, our willingness to embrace a principle like this is at odds with another tendency we have, which is to shun an analogous principle “The Principle of Equitable Treatment” when family members or loved ones are at issue. The “Principle of Equitable Treatment” goes something like: We can justify a difference in treatment of A and B only if there is a morally relevant factual difference between A and B that justifies a difference in treatment.

Clearly, there is no morally relevant difference between Polylnices and, for example, any other traitor who Antigone did not bury, that justifies her treating Polynices differently. And yet, we (the Antigone-praising, Creon loathing folk) are prepared to glorify Antigone for this difference in treatment, even though it violates the Principle of Equitable Treatment. Oddly, though, (and quite importantly) I see no reason why one who appeals to the principle of equitable evaluation when judging Antigone as morally superior to Creon should not also be bound by the principle of Equitable treatment (a principle which would importantly not reach the conclusion that Antigone’s treatment of Polynices is justified). What justifies an embracing of one principle and a rejection of the other?

At the end of the day, the result seems to be that most contemporary evaluations, which laud Antigone as virtuous and Creon as vicious, are mistaken for the reason of embracing a double standard: they evaluate Antigone as morally better than Creon because they take it that there is a moral difference between the two that justifies a difference in evaluation. However, what they take to be the moral difference is that Antigone behaves in a particularly morally justified way. However, at the end of the day, this way that Antigone behaves (namely, burying Polynices) is not itself justified unless Antigone would bury other traitors in the same fashion, an act she would not have engaged in given that her appeal is to a divine law that demands that decisively family members be buried.

And so, the mass of Antigone apotheosizers probably ought to praise her for reasons other than anything suggests she has any moral superiority over Creon. These reasons could include: praise her loyalty to family, or her adherence to what she believes the gods command—loyalties to which many of us feel sympathies, and perhaps, these feelings are what resonated in us and left us so empathetic with Antigone in the first place. We must be careful, though, not to conflate that to which we are empathetic to that which is morally good.

Simon Blackburn, conceptual priority, and the problem of explaining knowledge and truth

2006-08-17T20:51:00.000+01:00

In his paper “Reason, Virtue and Knowledge” (2001), Simon Blackburn sets the bar high for what he takes to be required for a virtue-theoretic account of knowledge, truth and justification to amount to more than a mere “fig leaf for reliabilism.” On Blackburn’s view, for an account of VE to be properly VE, then epistemic virtue must have explanatory priority within the account; this is to say, the central epistemic concepts of knowledge, justification and truth must be explained in terms of intellectual virtue, and not the other way around.
The task of upholding the priority of virtue would require a “right-to-left” reading of the following equivalencies, the “right-to-left” upholding of which are in “ascending order of ambitiousness. ”

(1) A proposition is probable (justified) in a circumstance C if and only if an epistemically virtuous agent in C would have confidence in it.

(2) A true proposition is known to be true by an agent S in circumstance C if and only if S in C exhibits epistemic virtues in accepting it.

(3) A proposition is true if and only if an epistemically virtuous agent would accept it, if he exercised the virtues appropriately.

Blackburn suggests these equivalencies as candidates for comprising a proper epistemic model analogous to the manner in which central ethical concepts (right action, justified action, etc.) are cashed out in virtue ethics.
For example:
1. An action produces (or tends to produce, or is such to produce) the greatest balance of benefit over harm or any alternative if and only if it is the action that would be performed by a virtuous agent.
2. An action is the right action to perform in the circumstances if and only if a virtuous agent would perform it in the circumstances.

While it is tempting to read the former equivalencies in such a way that we find ourselves learning a bit about what virtue requires given antecedent conceptions of knowledge, probability and truth, this is exactly what must not be done, Blackburn thinks, for any virtue theory worthy of calling itself such.

I think that Blackburn’s suggestion has quite a few problems. For starters, it is not clear to me what the motivation would be for pursuing this project (within virtue epistemology) other than for the sake of pursuing a project that analogously models virtue ethics. I think that, as a general rule, such a project should raise a cautionary flag: pursuing a theoretical project in epistemology should never have a goal which might be incompatible with the project of discovering what is really the case. Blackburn thinks that a virtue-theoretic account of epistemic concepts must have a particular structure of conceptual priority to be “worthy of calling itself such.” Blackburn appears to not even consider the possibility that an epistemic theory could be successful whilst employing the use of intellectual virtues, and whilst not defending their conceptual priority within an account. I see no good reason to rule out, prima facie, that such an account could successfully come to grips with the nature of epistemic concepts, even if it isn’t “worthy” of being called a virtue theory (by virtue of modeling virtue ethics in such a way that conceptual priority is given to the virtues within the account).

This aside, I want to raise a problem that I think is probably irresoluble if Blackburn’s strategy is used. The problem has to do specifically with how he thinks that knowledge and truth are to be explained within his account. Recall Blackburn’s equivalencies:

(2) A true proposition is known to be true by an agent S in circumstance C if and only if S in C exhibits epistemic virtues in accepting it.

(3) A proposition is true if and only if an epistemically virtuous agent would accept it, if he exercised the virtues appropriately.

Whilst there is much to be said about Blackburn’s own solution for how these priorities can be defended by incorporating a deflationist account of truth (in conjunction with a “use” theory of meaning), what I think stands out as particularly crucial is a problem Blackburn brings up in his analysis of (2) and (3). Blackburn says: “The difficulty is that if truth is described in terms of what a virtuous agent would accept, knowledge cannot be similarly defined on pain of eliminating the distinction between the two. ” Certainly, collapsing knowledge into truth is a move that must be avoided. Blackburn surmises that there is some space between what a virtuous person does accept, and what a virtuous person would accept, and that this distinction might be able to adequately capture the difference between what truth is and what knowledge is. Blackburn writes: “[This distinction would] deliver the idea that truth is what you would get to by investigating virtuously, whereas knowledge is what you have got when you have investigated virtuously. ” I will address this claim shortly. But first, it should be noted that Blackburn thinks that, although this proposed definitional distinction is disputable, there is a positive upshot in it, in that it “does at least reflect the idea that there is normally no gap between aiming at knowledge and aiming at truth. ”
Three important questions emerge here: (1) Is it plausible to think that a virtue account could define knowledge and truth in such a way that they differ only in the respect that one “has been” and the other “would be” accepted by an intellectually virtuous agent? (2) Is Blackburn correct to think that this distinction reflects the idea that there’s normally no gap between aiming at knowledge and truth? (3) Is it the case that there is normally no difference between aiming at knowledge and aiming at truth?
Blackburn seems to answer each of these questions with a “yes”, and my inclination is to respond to each with a “no.” For the sake of keeping this post short(er) than it would be otherwise, I’ll address the first:

Is it plausible to think that a virtue account could define knowledge and truth in such a way that they differ only in the respect that one “has been” and the other “would be” accepted by an intellectually virtuous agent?

One way to pursue this line of inquiry would be to consider an inverting the terms and seeing how it looks. If an inversion of the terms with the definitions looks at all plausible, then this would amount to, prima facie, a strike against thinking that the relevant respect by which knowledge and truth differ is captured by the distinction Blackburn suggests. And so, let us ask whether (invertedly) knowledge could be what you would get to by investigating virtuously, and that conversely, truth is what you have got when you have investigated virtuously. It’s not false that you would be said to have knowledge if you would have investigated virtuously, even though (it would follow) you’d also have truth; similarly, it wouldn’t be false that once you have investigated thoroughly, you would have truth, even though you what you’d also have would be knowledge. Additionally, it’s not the case even that most cases of what you would get by investigating virtuously would preclude knowledge, nor that most cases (or any!) of what you do have when investigating virtuously would preclude truth.
What could be motivating Blackburn’s distinction here, then? The reasonable way to interpret his motivation, I think, is to suppose that Blackburn thinks that something “happens” once one has virtuously inquired, such that the truth that he only would have attained (in the counterfactual case) now becomes knowledge, by virtue of being the output of virtuous investigation. I’m guessing this to be the motivation because, surely, it isn’t rooted in his thinking that truth isn’t what you’d get when you have investigated virtuously (given that knowledge implies truth). And so, for Blackburn to be recognizing these terms as interestingly different, he must be thinking that there is something awry about claiming knowledge to be what you would get if you investigated virtuously (given that this is how he defines truth and presents it as differing in definition from knowledge).
At the end of the day, I think the prospects of adequately explaining what is relevantly different between truth and knowledge can’t be done if the conceptual priority of virtue is to be defended as Blackburn wants to do. And so, maybe we should conclude that a virtue account “worthy of calling itself such” should be, perhaps, abandoned for a virtue theory that’s not as worthy in that respect (but which can clearly discern how knowledge differs from truth.)

Intuition Check: Is There Room for Wisdom in the Demon World?

2006-08-17T04:47:00.000+01:00

I’ve been thinking lately about epistemic value pluralism (as Riggs defends it), and particularly, what the prospects are for defending some non-alethic epistemic values relative to which some disposition could qualify as an epistemic virtue by promoting that value. The recognition of a non-alethic epistemic value has at least one obvious advantage: it allows us to avoid the dilemma of either: (i) denying an intuitive platitude, namely, that (not-clearly) alethic dispositions such as insight and openmindedness qualify as intellectual virtues; or (ii) maintaining that they are, but being burdened with the task of showing how these dispositions qualify as virtues relative to an alethic epistemic value (or values). Because it is not at all clear that insight and openmindedness aim at, or reliably produce, any alethic end (such as knowledge or truth), the dilemma of selecting between (i) or (ii) seems rather unpromising. To be clear, (i) entails denying the intuitive, and (ii) requires a defense of a position that is wide open to counterexample.

Epistemic value pluralism, then, appears to be a promising alternative given that the identification of some non-alethic epistemic value (of course, along side some alethic epistemic values) relative to which a disposition could qualify as an epistemic virtue circumvents the problem of having to select between (i) and (ii). Riggs thinks that “intelligibility” is a proper epistemic value, and so, his position allows for not-clearly-alethic dispositions to qualify as epistemic virtues.

I am quite sympathetic to Riggs’ position. This is because I am more prepared to abandon the idea that all epistemic values must be alethic than I am to reject that (for example) insight and openmindedness are intellectual virtues. And, to add, I see no way that either could qualify as an intellectual virtue so long as the epistemic value relative to which they would qualify is alethic.

I don’t, however, think that Riggs’ succeeds in defending (at least) insight as an intellectual virtue by linking it to the epistemic value of intelligibility. (I’m currently working on a paper that argues just this). My sympathy, though, to the prospect of recognizing a non-alethic epistemic value has led me to wonder what might qualify.

Against this background, I want to (tentatively) toss wisdom into the hat of examination. Wisdom certainly falls hand-in-hand with whatever we should call the epistemic good life, and as such, appears to be a candidate epistemic values relative to which dispositions could be said to be epistemic virtues for their promotion of it.

Intuition check: is wisdom alethic? Put more broadly, is there a necessary relation between promoting wisdom, and promoting “a coming to grips” with how things are?

I had always just granted this without much consideration; upon reflection, though, I think that I might have been too hasty.

One thought experiment (actually, a litmus test) I thought of in trying to determine whether an epistemic value is alethic is to ask: could it be reliably promoted in the demon world? (i.e. a radical demon world, in which we deceived in such a way that all our beliefs are false).

Alethic epistemic values such as knowledge and truth and understanding are such that no disposition could promote them in the demon world. Non-alethic values (such as intelligibility) could be promoted in the demon world.

What about wisdom, then? Before rushing to an answer, consider this clarification. I am not asking whether one could be wise in the demon world (although this is a fascinating question in its own right! I’ll return to this.) That’s not the question, though, because such a question would pertain to wisdom as a disposition and not an epistemic value. Because I’m interested in the prospects of wisdom as an epistemic value, the question must pertain to whether it could be reliably promoted by some disposition or dispositions in such a world.

At this point, I am going to crawl so far out on a limb that I can feel it breaking.

I propose (obviously tentatively) the following:

If there is an x such that x is both a disposition and an epistemic value, then if the disposition x can be achieved in the demon world, then the epistemic value x can be promoted in the demon world.

The above conditional seems at least somewhat plausible to me. Of course, it relies on the somewhat controversial assumption that there must be some reliability condition associated with the possession of a disposition. Montmarquet (and I think Fairweather) reject reliability conditions and so would reject my conditional.

If we suppose, for the heck of it, that it holds, then the next interesting question is to ask: can one attain wisdom in the demon world? If the answer to that question is yes, then granting my conditional, the epistemic value of wisdom could be promoted in the demon world. If it could be promoted in the demon world, then (if my litmus test is right) it is a non-alethic epistemic value.

And so, to the question: can wisdom be achieved in the demon world?

There are several ways to think about this. One way is to ask: Can Bob hold all false beliefs and be wise? To this, most would probably say “no.” But the question can be put another way: “If Jonas is wise in our world, then isn’t his demon-world counterpart wise?” I think we might be a bit hesitant to say “no.” Perhaps this is because we think of wisdom as something for which one is responsible. And as such, it might strike us odd to strip this from Jonas’ counterpart for something for which he is not responsible (i.e. that he is, unluckily, being systematically deceived). If we tread this (probably dangerous) road much farther, we can see what comes next: the stripping of a reliability condition from the disposition of wisdom, the stripping of which would run counter to our initial intuition that “Bob can’t hold all false beliefs and be wise.”
I’m not sure where to go from here, as both sides look about the same when you’re sitting on the fence. Suggestions welcome!

A Recipe for Counterexamples to Slote's "Sentimentalist Virtue and Moral Judgment"

2006-08-09T06:00:00.000+01:00

In his 2001 book “Morals From Motives,” Michael Slote undertook a project to defend a virtue-based ethics of caring within the domain of decisively normative ethics; since then, and particularly in his essay “Sentimentalist Virtue and Moral Judgment”, he has attempted a broader project, which is to defend ethical sentimentalism (with an emphasis on the role of empathy) within a metaethical--and not solely a normative--domain.

In this essay, Slote highlights what I think are some accurate and insightful facts about human empathy as it is manifest in moral evaluation. (See, for example, his comments on temporal immediacy and causal immediacy of potential sentiment-invoking states of affairs, and their relationships to our empathic responses to such states of affairs with these properties of immediacy; his points on this score seems to me correct and, descriptively, helpful). This aside, I want to focus on a concern I have with Slote’s project, which pertains to an amendment Slote makes to Adam Smith’s response to Humean sentimentalism. Hume had, rather famously, maintained the descriptive claim that we tend to approve of traits in proportion to the beneficial effects (we believe) that they produce. Hume holds, as Slote puts it, that we have “empathetic pleasure or displeasure at those (likely) effects.” (Epistemic and Moral Virtues, Pritchard and Brady, p. 123).

Adam Smith had criticized this position by arguing that it cannot account for the fact that we do not approve or disapprove of inanimate objects “for their predictable effects on human happiness” (123). Smith, in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” offers an agent-based, rather than an effect-based, alternative:

“We approve of someone’s motives if, when we put ourselves in their position, we find that we would have the same sort of motivation” (123, Slote’s précis of Smith’s position).

Smith’s descriptive position is failure, and Slote rightly points this out. This is because it cannot account for our approval of the motives of agents who act supererogatorily. Slote writes: “After all, I might view someone else as, say, more forgiving than I would be about some matter, yet this need not prevent me from approving of the person whom I view as different from myself (and perhaps as more admirable than myself” (123).

Slote thinks that Smith is correct focusing on properties of agents rather than of potential effects as being that which engenders moral approval or disapproval, and offers a variation of Smith’s position that (Slote) thinks is immune from counterexamples like the one he mentions. Slote (importantly) writes:

“Approval and disapproval of actions and their agents, I want to say, involve (the sentiment and mechanism of) empathy, but to put the matter somewhat too baldly, the empathy involved here is empathy with the agent’s empathy or lack of it.” (124).”

Slote explicates this suggestion more carefully in the subsequent paragraph:

“When I, as judge or non-agent observer, empathetically feel the warmth of an agent as displayed in a given action, then the derivative or reflecting warmth that I feel is a (morally non-judging) feeling of approval toward the action or its agent qua doer of that action; and, similarly, when the agent’s actions display an absence of warmth/tenderness, my observer empathy will register or reflect with the contrast with agentive warmth as a cold feeling or (as we say) “chill” of disapproval (124).

Slote’s own position is, I think, subject to just as serious problems as is the view he rejected of Smith’s. I’ll propose a counterexample to Slote:

What form would such a counterexample take?

Consider that Slote holds the following two conditionals:

(i) If an observing agent empathetically feels the warmth of (another) agent as displayed in an action A, then the felt warmth is a feeling of approval toward the action or its agent qua doer of that action.
(ii) When the (observed) agent’s action A displays an absence of warmth/tenderness, my observer empathy will register or reflect a cold feeling or “chill” of disapproval.

A counterexample case to the first conditional would be one in which the antecedent is granted, and neither of the disjuncts in the consequent hold. And so, a counterexample would be one in which an observing agent empathetically feels the warmth of another agent as displayed in an action A, and yet, that felt warmth is neither a feeling of approval toward the action or its agent qua doer of that action.

A counterexample case to the second conditional would be one in which the antecedent is granted (i.e. the observed agent’s action A displays an absence of warmth/tenderness), and yet, it is not the case that (as the consequent claims), my observer empathy will register or reflect a cold feeling or “chill” of disapproval.

For the sake of clarity, I will offer a counterexample first to the second of Slote’s two conditionals. I’ll then use a similar strategy to (more briefly) offer a counterexample to the first conditional. I then offer what I think is a general “cookbook” recipe for generating counterexamples to the conditionals Slote is defending.

And so, first, a counterexample to Slote’s second conditional.

Stabber Hans and the Closing Elevator

Hans, upon careful reflection, determines the following: “I shall attempt, with my knife, to stab the face of an innocent human being.” He determines, also, that he will attempt this plan only once, and that regardless of the result of his attempt, he will never attempt to execute it again.

Hans informs you of his plan, and when you decry it as “heinous and shameful,” he ties you up and stuffs you into a janitorial closet at a nearby University. He says he will not kill you, and that he will release you in three days.

Unbeknownst to Hans, there is a peephole in the closet, which provides you with a view of a portion of a the hallway, and an elevator. Hours later, you see a particularly virtuous classmate, Sissy, walk into the elevator. Sissy, out of routine, presses a button and continues to read a book she is holding. You notice, in horror, that Sissy’s reading her book has left her unaware of an approaching Hans, who is sneaking toward her with a butcher’s knife. He swipes at her, but the elevator door closes just in time to deflect his knife. “Oh well,” Hans says, tossing his knife in a nearby garbage can. “Like I said, that was my one attempt; I’ll never try that again.”

This would be a case, I suspect, in which the observed agent’s action involves a “lack of warmth/tenderness” and yet, it’s not the case that this lack of warmth/tenderness leaves you (the observer) with cold feelings of disapproval. Your sentimental response is not chilled, but rather, a blissful relief. And in fact, Hans’ action (the swiping and missing of Sissy), leaves you delighted to see that (for example) an injustice was not done, and that the goal of his malicious plan did not come to fruition. No matter how greatly an agent’s actions might lack warmth/tenderness, conclusions about an how an observer will respond sentimentally to an that agent’s action cannot be generated without consideration of the effects the observer accepts to be a result of the observed agent’s action.

We can generate a parallel counterexample to the first of Slote’s two conditionals:

Just suppose that Hans, who has undergone counseling and dedicated his life to altruism, decides that he wishes to make amends for his evil-intentioned, unsuccessful attempt on Sissy’s life. Hans decides to give Sissy a bottle of wine and a note of apology. Hans purchases the wine from a man name Franz, who (believing it will be consumed by Hans, whom he loathes) has poisoned it. Franz, tipsy from unpoisoned wine, tells you that he sold Hans poisoned wine. You then learn of Hans’ plans innocent plans to give the wine to Sissy. Franz, worried that you might foil his plan, ties you up and puts you back in the closet with the peep-hole. From it you witness yet another elevator scene: From your peeping view, you witness Hans handing Sissy that bottle of wine and an apology note. Sissy accepts the gift and disappears behind the closing elevator doors.

This revised case, I think, serves as a counterexample to the first of Slote’s conditionals for the reason that the observing agent (you) empathetically feels the warmth of another agent (Hans) as displayed in an action A (for certainly, you are empathetic to what you take to be his empathetic motives), and yet, that felt warmth is neither a feeling of approval toward the action or its agent qua doer of that action. Your approval, rather, is approval of agent qua the agent’s empathic motives in his action, and not approval of the agent qua doer of the action. (And hence, the antecedent in the conditional is granted, and neither disjunct of the consequent holds). To be clear, the only approval felt here is approval of poor Hans’ empathetic intentions in his gift to Sissy; you do not approve, however, of either the act of giving an innocent girl poison wine, nor Hans qua his giving an innocent girl poison wine.

What do these two counterexamples have in common? Both examples are ones in which what has a hand in generating in an observer a feeling of approval or disapproval is, at least partly, outside the domain of control of the observed agent.

In the first counterexample, that Hans missed Sissy with the knife was outside the control of Hans and his non-empathetically warm motive. In the second counterexample, that the wine was poison was beyond the control of Hans and his empathetically warm motive.

Sometimes, the empathy of our motives is not reflected in the outcome of the actions of these motives. We, as observers, are susceptible to approving or disapproving of others empathetic sentiments, and we are also susceptible to approving or disapproving of the results of others’ empathetic (or non-empathetic) sentiments. Some actions (like those in the counterexamples) incorporate mismatchings of agent’s empathetic motive (which invoke approval in an observer) in action coupled with effects that tend to invoke disapproval. Other actions, conversely, incorporate mismatchings of agent’s non-empathetic motives (which invoke disapproval in an observer) in action coupled with effects that tend to invoke approval. In such mismatchings, we have our recipe for counterexample to the position Slote avers.

One thing, I think, that can be learned from this is that no sentimentalist ethic should, when making descriptive claims about human psychology, fail to realize that properties of agents (such as whether we identify them as empathetic) as well as properties of actions (i.e. whether they produce effects of which we approve) are capable of invoking sentiments of approval or disapproval in an observer. Excluding either, I think, is a mistake.

Virtue, Knowledge and Wickedness: Ronald Milo on McDowell's internalist moral realism

2006-07-28T00:54:00.000+01:00

“Is it possible for a person to understand that what he proposes to do is morally wrong and yet prefer to do it nonetheless?”

Ronald D. Milo opens his 1998 paper “Virtue, Knowledge and Wickedness” with this question, to which a diversity of answers appeal to a similarly diverse slew of (in several cases, incompatible) intuitions about moral phenomenology.

John McDowell’s internalist moral realist commitments—which are at the brunt of most of Milo’s critical attention—lead him (McDowell) to answer the question in the negative. Milo thinks that this response is mistaken and suggests that a flaw in McDowell’s thinking lies, in part, in McDowell’s obfuscation of moral convictions being intrinsically motivating and necessarily motivating.

First, though, I think it is important to try to get clear on what the premises are on which John McDowell relies in reaching this conclusion. Milo characterizes McDowell’s position as subscribing to the following claims (the first two representing the internalist realist framework within which he addresses the question posed at the outset):

McDowell’s internalist realist assumptions:
• The motivational force of beliefs is internal to them
• Moral properties are real, as opposed to merely “projected”

(1) A morally virtuous person exhibits two important capacities:
a. For all situations that call for a response of feeling or action on the part of the agent, the agent is able to recognize what is morally called for in that situation (Virtue and Vice, ed. Paul, Miller, Paul, p. 197).
b. The recognition in (a) provides the agent, in and of itself, with motivation sufficient to ensure that she acts accordingly (197) [(It follows from 3b that) no corresponding desire is required to motivate action; such desires might exist as upshots of the agent’s “acknowledging that her recognition that a certain act is morally called for is sufficient to motivate her”(198) whilst themselves not being necessary to motivate action.
(2) If a person is not morally virtuous, then a person cannot recognize what is morally called for in a given situation. (From 1)
(3) Those who are morally wicked cannot recognize what is morally called for in a given situation. (From 1 and 2)

The particularly strong claim in McDowell’s argument is 1b, which maintains that a virtuous person, upon recognizing some act θ to be morally required, is guaranteed to θ; this is, McDowell thinks, because this recognition will silence any competing desires. McDowell is, then, more in line with Aristotle than Kant in the sense that McDowell precludes the possibility of a morally virtuous meeting morality’s demands whilst desiring to do otherwise (while Kant finds such actions to merit the highest of praise). The recognition by a virtuous person that an action is morally required, by virtue of silencing competing desires, becomes what McDowell brands “intrinsically” motivating. This sort of move must be made for cognitivists like McDowell who must explain moral motivation without recourse to desires.

Milo, though attracted to some features of McDowell’s account, finds it unconvincing. Specifically, Milo’s problem is that McDowell (he thinks) gives no good reason to think that a conclusion about the recognition of a fact being intrinsically motivating for all people would follow from the recognition of a moral requirement’s being intrinsically motivating for a decisively virtuous person. (Indeed, McDowell does think that, for all agents, if a given agent recognizes that an action is morally required, then she is guaranteed to act accordingly. Wicked individuals, ipso facto, must have not really recognized what is morally required as such--otherwise, McDowell would offer, they would have met morality’s demands)

Milo rebuts McDowell’s reasoning with a counterexample of the following form: it depicts the recognition of something’s being the case as intrinsically motivating for a subject S, given antecedent facts about S, but not intrinsically motivating for Z, given antecedent facts about Z. Milo writes:

“Thus, one might explain a person’s desire for sweets as consisting simply int eh fact that, for this person, the conception of, e.g., candy as sweet is sufficient to motivate him to eat it. If this is so, then we can explain the difference between someone who likes the taste of bananas and someone who does not as follows: for the former, the thought that the object being offered to him is a banana is sufficient to motivate him to eat it, other things being equal, whereas for the latter this same thought fails to be motivating. For the person who likes the taste of bananas, the thought of eating one is intrinsically motivating. We need not conclude from this, however, that this thought is also necessarily motivating, in the sense that anyone who has the same thought must be motivated by it. Why not explain the difference between the virtuous person and the wicked person in the same way?” (201)

And so, Milo’s argument seems to be:

1. If the conclusion that bananas are necessarily motivating cannot be drawn from the fact that, for those who desire bananas, the thought of bananas is intrinsically motivating, then the conclusion that the recognition of an action as being morally required is necessarily motivating cannot be drawn from the fact that, for those who desire to act morally, the recognition of an act’s being morally required is intrinsically motivation.
2. The conclusion that bananas are necessarily motivating cannot be drawn from the fact that, for those who desire bananas, the thought of bananas is intrinsically motivating,
3. Therefore, the conclusion that the recognition of an action as being morally required is necessarily motivating cannot be drawn from the fact that, for those who desire to act morally, the recognition of an act’s being morally required is intrinsically motivating.

If Milo’s argument is sound, then 1b of McDowell’s argument must be rejected. Milo anticipates some responses that McDowell could give to the conclusion reached in the “banana argument.” He mentions a response by David McNaughton, who defends a breed of McDowellian internalist realism, which proffers the question: “there is something odd in the idea that an agent might recognize that he is morally required to do something and yet not believe that he has good reason to do it…for in what sense could he be said to recognize it as a requirement” (202). If the oddness of that supposition is “sufficiently odd”, then we are perhaps on our way to isolating some relevant difference about recognition of moral requirements and recognition about (say) what a banana smells like that justifies claiming that the former recognition is necessarily motivating and the latter not. Milo, however, isn’t swayed by the force of McNaughton’s appeal to oddness. “I must confess that I myself find nothing odd about this. Why should we think it odd if a wholly self-centered person sees no reason at all not to do something the he recognizes to be unjust but to his advantage?” (202)

Milo proceeds to address quite a few interesting features of McDowell’s position, all the while stressing that we have no good reason to think that a morally wicked individual could not recognize an action as morally required whilst preferring not to do it.

Milo finally won me over, but not until he pulled out the “depression” card. Milo “sneaks this card” into the deck not all at once, but by first discussing a form of temporary depression that Jonathan Dancy has called “accidie.” Dancy writes: “People who suffer from accidie are those who just don’t’ care for a while about things which would normally seem to them to be perfectly good reasons for action.” (210). Dancy adds there might, in cases of accidie, effect a loss of the normal motivational force of one’s beliefs; these are cases in which “the depressive is not deprived of the relevant beliefs by his depression, they just leave him indifferent” (210).

Milo (I think appropriately) pushes Dancy’s accidie a step further and suggests that any position is dogmatically unfounded if it rules out, a priori, the possibility of accidie being permanent. The permanency of accidie would land such a person an “amoralist” in the sense of being capable of recognizing conduct to be morally required but not caring (or at least, not caring enough to act accordingly).

Let us return now to the initial question:

“Is it possible for a person to understand that what he proposes to do is morally wrong and yet prefer to do it nonetheless?”

If there exist individuals in the state of permanent accidie (a state which, as I understand, would be a consequence of most sorts of clinical depression), then the answer to the question should be “yes.” And in answering the question “yes,” it follows that recognition of an action as being morally required is not intrinsically motivating for all. And so, in conclusion, we wouldn’t have a good reason to think that a wicked person is incapable of recognizing an action as being morally required.

Michael J. Zimmerman and the Puzzle of Moral Luck and Responsibility

2006-07-27T15:29:00.000+01:00

In his 1987 article “Moral Luck and Responsibility,” Michael J. Zimmerman tries his hands at what he calls a “puzzle” that has, in varied forms, been tackled by Joel Feinstein, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams. The puzzle (labeled such by virtue of the fact that the premises appear true and the conclusion which follows from them false):

Moral Luck Puzzle:

P1. A person P is morally responsible for an event e’s occurring only if e’s occurring was not a matter of luck.
P2. No event is such that its occurring is not a matter of luck.
∴ No event is such that P is morally responsible for its occurring.

Zimmerman mentions exegetically that Feinberg provisionally accepts the conclusion; Williams accepts P2 while rejecting P1; Nagel (according to Z), in determining the puzzle to be a genuine paradox, “seems prepared to accept both premises while denying the conclusion” (Ethics, Vol. 97, No. 2 (Jan., 1987) pp. 374.

Zimmerman’s own strategy employs a preliminary breaking down of the puzzle by distinguishing two types of luck and two types of control. His luck types are:

1. Situational Luck: “Luck with respect to the situations one faces, including the nature of one’s character (inclinations, capacities and so on) as so far formed.
2. Resultant Luck: “Luck with respect to what results from one’s decisions, actions and omissions” (376).

In articulating what luck is, Zimmerman says: “Something which occurs as a matter of luck is something which occurs beyond anyone’s control”; (and, in a footnote to this definition) “More restrictively: something which occurs as a matter of luck with respect to someone P is something which occurs beyond P’s control” (fn. 376).

Zimmerman then breaks down the concept of “control” which is operative in his definitions of both situational and resultant luck. His types are:

1. Restricted control: “One may be said to enjoy restricted control with respect to some event just in case one can bring about its occurrence and can also prevent its occurrence.
2. Unrestricted control: “One may be said to enjoy unrestricted control with respect to some event just in case one enjoys or enjoyed restricted control with respect both to it and to all those events on which its occurrence is contingent. (376)

I will not go into the details of Zimmerman’s entire proposed solution to the Moral Luck Puzzle in light of these distinctions, but rather, want to focus on a particular feature of his argument. But before doing this, I will give an example that I think will capture the move he wants to make.
Suppose Susie is drowning in a pond in the dark and shouting for help. Nathan and Zeb are both standing on opposite banks, equidistant to Susie, and unaware (because of the darkness) of each other. Both jump into the pond at the same time and begin swimming toward Susie. When they are both halfway to Susie (respectively), Zeb snags his foot on an underwater branch (which he had no way of knowing was there), and by the time he frees himself, Nathan has already corralled Susie back to the bank.

If we grant what Zimmerman takes to be an undeniable premise—that an agent is not praiseworthy or blameworthy for an action unless that agent is responsible for the action—then the troublesome feature of the moral luck puzzle emerges, namely, that the responsibility for saving Susie that is a necessary condition for praise or blame for the action is perhaps threatened by the uncontrollability of getting one’s foot trapped on an underwater branch en route to the rescue.

Those who accept an unqualified reading P1 of the Moral Luck Puzzle and grant that Nathan was lucky not to have snagged his foot as Zeb did, will find themselves disinclined to praise Nathan for his action (the conclusion that would follow). Others might embrace a consequentialist account of praise or blame and thus reject P1 and praise Nathan whilst not praising Zeb. Zimmerman’s position takes the line of praising both equally. His doing so is a function of his distinction between the sort of lack of control that is relevant to precluding responsibility and the sort of lack of control that is not. And so, in essence, Zimmerman dodges the counterintuitive conclusion of the Moral Luck Puzzle by rejecting an unqualified reading of “luck” in P1.

Given this background, I want to focus on a particular aspect of Zimmerman’s position, which pertains to a principle he accepts with regard to decisively “situational” luck. Zimmerman claims that:

SL: If (i) P made decision d in what he believed to be situation s,
(ii) P* would have made d if he had been in a situation that he believed to be s, and
(iii) P*’s being in a situation that he believed to be s was not in his restricted control, then:
whatever moral credit or discredit accrues to P for making d accrues also to P*. (381)

Applying this principle to the Nathan and Zeb case I gave (which, by Zimmerman’s definition, would be an instance of “situational luck”) appears to generate Zimmerman’s position that both are equally praiseworthy.

While I am sympathetic to Zimmerman’s response to this case, I think that his principle SL runs into some troubles. This is because the conclusion that whatever moral credit or discredit accrues to P for making d accrues also to P* depends on whether the counterfactual in (ii) of SL holds true. And so, whether Zeb deserves equal praise as Nathan would depend on whether Zeb, if he believed he were in Nathan’s position (on the other side of the bank), would have decided to do what Nathan did.

In the effort of making things clear by first making them messy, I want to add a few more details to our story. Suppose the following is true about Nathan and Zeb: The bank from which Nathan jumped was the East bank. The bank from which Zeb jumped was the West bank. Prior to jumping in for Susie, Nathan believed that there were dangerous underwater stumps on the West side, but not on the East side. Additionally, if Nathan had been on the West side (where he believed that there were underwater stumps), he would not have jumped in to save Susie. Zeb, on the other hand, believed that there were dangerous underwater stumps on the East side, but not on the West side; if Zeb had been on the East side (where Nathan was), he would not have jumped in to save Susie.

The problem for Zimmerman’s view on situational luck is that, given our expanded story, he is prevented from ruling Zeb’s action as equally praiseworthy as Nathan’s because (ii) in SL is not met; (ii) in SL fails to be met because if Zeb believed he was in situation s (Nathan’s situation, on the East side of the bank), he would not have decided to do what Nathan decided to do, namely, to jump in for Susie.

Surely, though, Zimmerman would not want to accept the conclusion that Nathan is more praiseworthy than Zeb. For one thing, Both Nathan and Zeb would be prepared to jump in to save Susie from the bank that each thought was safe, and neither would have jumped in from the side each thought was unsafe; additionally, it was outside of Zeb’s restricted control that the underwater logs weren’t on the side of the pond he believed them to be.

I think that any account of moral credit that does not weigh whether Susie is in fact saved in assessing credit (as Zimmerman’s and some other deontic accounts would do) had better not rule Nathan’s action more morally praiseworthy than Zeb’s. To do so would be to disregard exactly what it is about things beyond our control that lead us to render them outside the realm of our responsibility.

Julia Driver's Egoistic Solution to the Virtue Conflation Problem

2006-07-25T04:40:00.000+01:00

Julia Driver’s “The Conflation of Moral and Epistemic Virtues” attempts a solution to a task that, I think, begs for thorough treatment: that task is to develop a principled distinction between moral and intellectual virtues. Hume (and others) have thought that identifying demarcating features of moral and intellectual virtues—to the extent that a principled distinction could be developed—is of exaggerated importance. However, nowadays, the bulk of literature in both virtue ethics and virtue epistemology grants the supposition that there is some relevant distinction between these virtue types; thus, we are left in a position in which downplaying the task of discerning demarcating features between moral and epistemic virtues (or shirking the correlative task of determining if, in fact, a relevant distinction exists) would prevent us from coming to grips with the bulk of literature on virtue theory (ethical and epistemological) which employs these terminological distinctions as central to the arguments advanced.
Driver, in her essay, defends a view that I’ll summarize as follows:

(Initial Assumption: there does exist a distinction between moral and epistemic virtues, and a clarification of this distinction is worth pursuing.)

1. If an account that discerns moral virtues from intellectual virtues is to be adequate, then it must pick out what is distinctively valuable about the traits in question (i.e. it must pick out the respective value-conferring properties of these virtue types.)
2. “Characteristic Motivation” accounts cannot adequately meet the project in (1)
3. The only account available to successfully meet the project in (1) is an account that distinguishes moral from intellectual virtues on the basis of what goods are produced by the respective virtues.
4. Thus, the only available account is a consequentialist account.

In her defense of (2), Driver offers up, and subsequently criticizes, several characteristic-motivation accounts. There is quite a bit to be said about her treatment of these motivation accounts, however, I think what is more interesting is the way she sketches her own account in an attempt to defend (3). In doing so, Driver offers:

“The intuition I would like to explore is that intellectual virtues have—as their source of primary value—truth or, more weakly, justified belief for the person possessing the quality in question, and this is what ‘getting it right’ means for the intellectual virtues, whereas for the moral virtues the source of value is the benefit to others, the well-being of others, and for the moral virtues this is what ‘getting it right’ means. Further, no appeal to motive is needed to make the distinction at the level of value-conferring property. It is not the motive that makes the trait a given type of virtue.” (Brady and Pritchard 107).

Later in her paper, Driver clarifies her claim about the relationship between moral virtues and others, and intellectual virtues, and oneself.

“Moral virtues produce benefits to others—in particular, they promote the well-being of others—while the intellectual virtues produce epistemic good for the agent” (114).

Driver anticipates an obvious objection to this view, which is that moral virtues also produce benefits to oneself, and epistemic virtues can promote the well-being of others. Her response is that something can lead to valuable x, while its value-conferring property is nevertheless y (114). And so, it isn’t damaging to her position that some moral virtues benefit the agent, and some epistemic virtues benefit others. What would damage her view, though, is if some paragon moral virtue happens to not benefit others, or correlatively, if some paragon epistemic virtue failed to promote epistemic good for the agent. I think it’s safe to say that Driver is aware that such cases would be troublesome. This is evidenced in the final lines of her essay, when she writes:

“But note that on the account I offer, if it turns out that [for example, in the moral case] honesty does not have the good effects we think it has, then it may well be that it is not a moral virtue. This seems highly unlikely, but it is possible. Some may find this result problematic for a consequentialist account. However, it should be noted that this problem occurs for any account that weighs consequences at all” (116).

I think we should first take note that her last line here is mistaken. It doesn’t follow that the honesty-reductio that could in principle be problematic for her view would follow from an account that merely, as she puts it, “weighs consequences”; but rather, such a result would arise only if the consequences of virtues are weighed to the extent that traits are classified as virtues wholly by appeal to these weighed consequences. Not all consequence-weighting virtue accounts give such significance to consequences, and so not all consequence-weighing virtue accounts would be faced with the not-labeling-honesty-a-virtue bullet that her view could potentially swallow.

I wish to set this point aside, though, and address what I think might be most problematic about Driver’s proposal, and that is that it seems to embrace a sort of “epistemic egoism.” I say this because part of the distinction she offers between moral and epistemic virtues turns on the agency to whom the good produced by the virtue benefits. Recall that she claims:

“Moral virtues produce benefits to others—in particular, they promote the well-being of others—while the intellectual virtues produce epistemic good for the agent” (114).

The snake in the closet seems to be that her view commits her to accepting that a trait is not an intellectual virtue if it does not produce epistemic good for the agent. This is dangerously analogous to generic ethical egoism’s maxim: an act is not obligatory unless it produces good for the agent.

Rather than to criticize her view via appeal to models of criticism of egoism (i.e. by asking such questions as what is the relevant factual distinction between an agent and others that justifies a defense of the claim that an intellectual virtue’s value is agent-relative rather than relative to others outside one’s agency, etc.) I’ll try the old-fashioned style of counterexamples, which will take the form of presenting two archetypal epistemic virtues. The first, I’ll show, does not produce epistemic good for the agent that possesses it. The second intellectual virtue I’ll consider generates epistemic good for others, but not for the possessor. Either fits the model of a counterexample to her view (as both are instances of IVs that don’t produce epistemic good for the possessor of the virtue).

First case: Openmindedness: Heather Battaly on Montmarquet and the Intellectual Giants

I’m proposing openmindedness as an example of a paragon intellectual virtue that need not produce the epistemic good (which Driver offers as “truth”) for the agent that possesses it. Heather Battaly in her paper “Must the Intellectual Virtues Be Reliable” gives quite a bit of attention to openmindedness and concludes that it (perhaps among some others) requires no reliability condition. Specifically, it need not reliably lead to truth over falsehood. In her defense of this claim, she references James Montmarquet’s work in “Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility” and highlights Montmarquet’s four most significant arguments against the claim that intellectual virtues require a reliability condition. Battaly thinks that Montmarquet has three arguments that fail and one that succeeds; she appeals to the latter as a basis for arguing that a reliability condition is unnecessary for an agent to possess the IV of openmindedness.

First, a clarifictory point: When presenting his arguments against the reliability of intellectual virtues, Montmarquet is (Battaly thinks) biting off more than he can chew in the sense that Montmarquet thinks that reliability as a necessary condition can be stripped from all intellectual virtues; it is, rather than reliability, a motivation condition that characterizes all intellectual virtues. Battally thinks this is flawed for several reasons, especially given that some IVs such as “the ability to recognize salient facts” require (obviously) some condition of reliability.

What Battaly wants to highlight, though, is that the “Intellectual Giant argument” that Montmarquet gives in his attempt to strip a reliability condition from all IVs would be successful in demonstrating a weaker but important claim, namely, that at least one intellectual virtue requires no reliability condition, and that is openmindedness.

Battaly’s amendment of Montmarquets intellectual giants argument could be stated something like this:

P1: Aristotle and Einstein both possessed the intellectual virtue of openmindedness in pursuing their respective projects in physics.
P2: Aristotle’s work turned out to be (generally) false, and Einstein’s work turned out to be (generally) true.
P3: If an agent’s possessing the intellectual virtue required that an agent be reliable in reaching the truth because of the virtue, then Aristotle would not possess the intellectual virtue of openmindedness.
∴ A reliability condition that the agent be reliable in reaching truth because of exhibiting openmindedness is not necessary for that individual to possess the intellectual virtue of openmindedness. (From 1, 2 and 3)

If this argument is sound, then Driver’s position is in trouble because we would have a case of an intellectual virtue that needn’t produce the epistemic good (which she labels as truth) for the agent. But surely we want to say that openmindedness is nonetheless an epistemic virtue.

Second case: Blabby and the virtue of “Epistemic Altruism”

I am not aware of much discussion of what I’m to propose as an epistemic virtue—the “virtue” of epistemic altruism, but I’ll try anyway to make a case for it, or at least, a case for the claim that Driver’s view would have to recognize it as an intellectual virtue (and, additionally, that it could in principle fail to produce epistemic good for the agent that possesses it.)

Suppose that there are two erudite scientists, Stingy and Blabby. Each has in his respective mental storehouse millions of useful facts about physics and chemistry. Stingy, who is arrogant and self-interestedly prudential, enjoys sponging into his memory any facts that he can gobble up, but is quite reluctant to share information with others. Stingy, although in possession of quite a few intellectual virtues which allow his own wealth of scientific knowledge to burgeon, has no desire to share his wealth of facts with others, even if such sharing would maximize net useful facts known in the world significantly. Blabby, on the other hand, is comparably as knowledgeable as Stingy, however, he is motivated to spread scientific truth as widely as possible; he is equally concerned with truths that would benefit himself (i.e. that he, and not someone else, be the first to solve some profitable equation) and truths that would benefit others. This said, he is aware about a certain fact: he happens to be in possession of more scientific facts than most others; in recognizing this, he finds that sharing information better satisfies his goal of overall truth maximizing than if he were to place value on maximizing truths that benefit himself over truths that would benefit others.

Shall we say that Blabby’s disposition to be generous with his excessive wealth of scientific facts is an intellectual virtue?

It was once written by Emerson that “the greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.” At the very least, it seems that the disposition to share truths it is a more praiseworthy disposition than Stingy’s sponging and misering of facts. Additionally, Blabby’s disposition contributes to what should be seen as an epistemic goal: maximizing truths in the world relevant to people’s lives, given that folks are more likely to better themselves with knowledge of the physical world than if bereft of them.

If we are prepared to grant that Blabby’s epistemic altruism is a virtue, then we have another problem for Driver’s position that a virtue is not an intellectual virtue if it does not produce the epistemic good for the agent. In Blabby’s case, it’s not clear at all that he procures more epistemic good (again, truths, on Driver’s acocunt) for himself by being epistemically altruistic; most likely, Blabby, because of his overall truth maximizing altruism, misses opportunities to silently sponge truths as Stingy does, and hence, maximize his own hoard of epistemic good.

If either of these examples correctly identifies an intellectual virtue that does not tend to produce the epistemic good for the possessor, then Driver’s project doesn’t work, and some other avenue of demarcation should be pursued.

Despite all this, I want to reiterate for the reasons I mentioned at the outset that Driver’s project is an important one. Ignoring this distinction or downplaying the importance of making it is costly to those who intend to understand contemporary arguments that cannot be adequately grasped outside the language of such distinctions. I’d like to end this post by pointing to what I think is a direction that is both potentially promising, and potentially dangerous to the prospects of VE. This proposal is one that Battaly offers in her own paper, and which has bittersweet consequences. She summarizes her conclusion in a provoking paragraph:

“Ultimately, I think that both Zagzebksi and Montmarquet have been too rigid in their analyses of intellectual virtue. Zagzebski has tried to make all of the traits that we intuitively classify as intellectual virtues fit a single mold. While, Montmarquet seems to have restricted his list of intellectual virtues to those that fit the mold he has chosen. In my view, virtues like open-mindedness require motivations for truth, but do not require reliability. In contrast, virtues like the disposition to recognize salient facts require reliability, but do not require motivations for truth. If I am correct, the virtues are a diverse lot. Consequently, there will be no single simple formula for defining knowledge or justification in terms of the virtues” (Must the Intellectual Virtues Be Reliable, 2004 INPC Session).

What is, at this point, provoking is whether accepting her “diversity thesis” (i.e. that some IV require reliability but not motivation, and others motivation but not reliability) does in fact generate the ominous prospects for VE that she thinks it does. Answering this, as I see it, would be a project of its own.

The Intellectual Virtue of Originality and the New Evil Demon Problem

2006-07-22T04:55:00.000+01:00

I just recently read a post of Jon Kvanvig’s over at Certain Doubts which, I think, highlights a thus-far under-addressed aspect of VE, which is how to reconcile our intuitions that some virtues are proper intellectual virtues, whilst admitting that these virtues are not likely to lead possessors to a propensity of true beliefs over false ones. Kvanvig addresses a particular virtue of this sort (note: I admit I can’t think of many others), “originality,” and stipulates at the outset that it is an important intellectual virtue; however, he notes, it is not the case that a belief is more likely to be true if it has arisen out of originality than if it did not arise from originality. Kvanvig gives some suggestions for how we might be able to reconcile apparently conflicting intuitions that (1) the non-truth-conducive “virtue” of originality is an intellectual virtue, while (2) virtues are intellectual virtues only if a relationship holds between possessing the virtue and (at least to some extent) raising the probability that beliefs arising out of that virtue are more likely to be true than if they did not arise out of that virtue. Kvanvig concludes that there is a dearth of literature on (specifically) originality as an intellectual virtue, and I agree. I think a good place to begin such a project would be to try to isolate just what properties one has when one has the character trait of “originality” that leads us to want to say it falls within the domain of intellectual virtue, a domain we reserve for character traits that (unlike originality) do lead possessors to engender a higher propensity of true beliefs to false ones (than would be the case if the virtue weren’t possessed).
Rather than to attempt to address that (a question well worth addressing, I think) in this post, I want to offer some other thoughts I’ve been having about originality as an intellectual virtue—some thoughts related to aspects of originality that have nothing to do with whether the virtue is truth-conducive, but rather, whether beliefs arising out of that particular trait must, in fact, be original.
These thoughts arose while I was reading Sosa’s 1991 paper “Reliabilism and Intellectual Virtue” (reprinted in Axtell “Knowledge, Belief and Character” 2000). Sosa begins that paper with what he takes to be the three most significant problems faced by generic reliabilism, which he defines as: “S’s belief that p at t is justified if it is the outcome of a process of belief acquisition or retention that is reliable, or leads to a sufficiently high preponderance of true beliefs over false beliefs” (19).
The three problems he mentions are: (1) the generality problem, (2) the new evil-demon problem, (3) the meta-incoherence problem.
What I think has some interesting consequences for the issue of accepting originality as an intellectual virtue pertains specifically to what Sosa mentions about the New Evil Demon problem. He explicates the problem as follows:

“The evil-demon problem for reliabilism is not Descartes’ problem, of course, but it is a relative. What if twins of ours in another possible world were given mental lives just like ours down to the most minute detail of experience or thought, etc., though they were also totally in error about the nature of their surroundings, and their perceptual and inferential processes of belief acquisition accomplished very little except to sink them more and more deeply and systematically into error? Shall we say that we are justified in our beliefs and our twins are not? They are quite wrong in their beliefs, of course, but it seems somehow very implausible to suppose that they are unjustified” (20).
The thought here which drives Sosa’s (I think correct) assessment that it’s not the case that our twins aren’t justified even though they’re in the same mental state as we are whilst being justified, suggests that Sosa accepts something (I offer) like the following, on which the force of the New Evil Demon problem rests:

If A and B have lead identical mental lives, then it cannot be the case that at any time t, A is justified in a belief P at t whilst B (holding the same belief p) is unjustified at t.

The extent to which the above maxim is forceful is the extent to which it threatens reliabilism, which bestows justification on a belief by virtue of external conditions (i.e. is the belief in fact reliable) which depend on features of the world (i.e. does the world fit the belief) that can be outside the control of the epistemic agent. And in the New Evil Demon case, it is precisely because there are features outside of our twin’s control (i.e. they are, whilst mentally identical to us, being deceived while we aren’t) that lead some reliabilists to say that the twins’ beliefs aren’t justified. While there have been attempts to circumvent this problem—such as Goldman’s historical reliabilism--there are others, such as Fairweather, who find reliabilism abject for the reason that it has no good way of accounting for our intuitions that our twin is justified.

Rather than to address here different ways reliabilists have tried to answer the New Evil Demon Problem, I want to (finally!) draw what I think is a key analogy between New Evil Problem for reliabilism, and a parallel problem that crops up when we begin to consider “originality” as a candidate for intellectual virtue. The parallel is not perfectly isomorphic, but it illuminates an important feature of originality that might pose problems (not necessarily just for reliabilist minded VE theorists) for its candidacy as a proper intellectual virtue.

Consider, again, what it was that drives us to say, in the New Evil Demon case that the twins’ beliefs, though false, are nonetheless justified:

Maxim A: If A and B have lead identical mental lives, then it cannot be the case that at any time t, A is justified in a belief P at t whilst B (holding the same belief p) is unjustified at t.

Those who accept the New Evil Demon problem as problematic for reliaibilism, and do so because they accept something like Maxim A, will probably be receptive to a slightly different maxim, which has as its focus not justificatory conditions, per se, but conditions of being in a particular state of virtue:

Maxim B: If A and B have lead identical mental lives and identical dispositions of character, then it cannot be the case that at any time t, A possesses an intellectual virtue V at t whilst B (whilst possessing an identical mental life of a as well as identical dispositions of character as A possesses) does not possess intellectual virtue V at t.

A conundrum arises, though, for anyone who wants to accept Maxim B and grant that originality is an intellectual virtue. Consider the following example.
The Case of the Jailed Novelists

Jack and Phil are novelists, who are locked in separate jail cells. Each has a typewriter, a collection of the same books (for inspiration), and similarly motivated to write original novels, and each understands originality as world-relative. Jack lives on Earth, where there are only a couple million serious novelists. Phil, however, lives on planet Malthus, which hosts exactly 8 trillion google serious novelists, each which is, like Phil and Jack, motivated to write original novels. Jack knows of no other worlds but Earth, and Phil knows of no other worlds than Malthus. Additionally, the following counterfactual holds true for Jack and Phil: if Jack and Phil were writing on Earth (with the same motivation and opportunity to write original novels), each would write exactly 10 original novels.
As things unfold, Jack, on Earth, does in fact produce 10 original novels whilst in his jail cell. Phil, who writes the same amount as Jack (and exactly what he (Phil) would have written if his jail cell were on Earth), gets unlucky. The population of Malthus is so great that none of what Phil has written turns out to be original; for each book that Phil wrote, someone else on Malthus had already written a book similar to the extent relevant to preclude it from being original.
If we grant pace Aristotle (and Zagzebski) that virtues have a motivation and a reliable success condition, then we’ll be inclined to say that for both Jack and Phil, the motivation condition is met (each passionately wishes to write original novels), however Jack meets the success condition and Phil fails it. And so, the verdict would seem to be that Jack possesses the intellectual virtue of originality while Phil fails it.

This conclusion, though, is incompatible with Maxim B, which (recall) states:

Maxim B: If A and B have lead identical mental lives and identical dispositions of character, then it cannot be the case that at any time t, A possesses an intellectual virtue V at t whilst B (whilst possessing an identical mental life of a as well as identical dispositions of character as A possesses) does not possess intellectual virtue V at t.

And if we find Maxim B plausible (which, I think, we will if we find Maxim A plausible, as both are similarly motivated), we find ourselves in a stalemate of intuitions quite similar to the stalemate of intuitions that crops up when considering the dilemma of reconciling the unreliability of our twins (who we want to say are justified in their beliefs) in the demon world and Maxim A, which drives the New Evil Demon problem.

What can be learned from these stalemates? Perhaps, a close examination of reliabilist attempts to solve the New Evil Demon problem could shed some light on ways to reconcile Maxim B with the inclination to say that Phil is every bit as original as Jack. Another avenue I think might be profitable to pursue would be to note a certain property that is shared by both originality and reliability: each has an external success condition such that, for agents A and B who have identical mental and dispositional lives, A could meet the success condition (for either originality or reliability) and B could fail to do so.

Also, interestingly, the fact that the “B” analogues in our cases (i.e. our twins in the first case, and Phil in the second) fail the success condition of their respective property (reliability for the twins, originality for Phil) is out of the control of these agents. Put another way: our twins can’t help (or even know) that they are being deceived by an evil demon. And analogously, Phil can’t help (or even know) that the planet in which he desires to write original novels happens to have an astronomical number of aspirant novelists scribing away outside of his jail cell.

Now that we see the resemblance between what is going on in the New Evil Demon case and in the Jack-and-Phil originality case, we seem to be left with some lines in the sand which beg us to pick a side. On one side of the line might be those who are prepared to embrace something like the following:

1. Either both Jack and Phil have the intellectual virtue of originality, or originality isn’t an intellectual virtue.
2. Originality is an intellectual virtue.
3. Therefore, Jack and Phil both have the virtue of originality.
4. If Jack and Phil both have the virtue of originality, then whether one has the virtue of originality does not depend on externalist criteria that could hold outside the agent(s) control or awareness.
5. Therefore, whether one has the virtue of originality does not depend on externalist criteria that could hold outside the agent(s) control or awareness.

On the other side of the line, though, we might encounter the following antithetical argument:

1. If reliability and originality are intellectual virtues, then whether one possesses (either of) them will depend on whether one is, at least generally, reliable or original.
2. Whether one is reliable or original depends, at least in part, on features of the world that could be beyond the agent’s awareness of control.
3. Reliability and originality are intellectual virtues.
4. Therefore, some intellectual virtues (at least reliability and originality) are such that whether one possesses them depends in part on unknown/uncontrollable features of the world.
5. If whether one possesses a virtue depends to any extent on features of the world beyond one’s cognizance/control, then Maxim A and Maxim B are false.
6. Maxim A and Maxim B are false.
7. We have reason to doubt that (in the New Evil Demon case) we are justified and our twins aren’t and in the originality case, that Jack has the virtue of originality and Phil isn’t, only if Maxim A and B (respectively) are true.
8. Therefore, we have no reason to doubt (in the New Evil Demon case) that we are justified and our twins aren’t and in the originality case that Jack has the virtue of originality and Phil doesn’t.

Unfortunately, at this point, I have one leg on both sides of the line.

On McGinn's response to Hookway's "Affective States and Epistemic Immediacy"

2006-07-19T06:58:00.000+01:00

I’d like to advance a certain take on the essay debate between Christopher Hookway and Marie McGinn (who commented on Hookway’s “Affective States and Epistemic Immediacy” printed in “Moral and Epistemic Virtues,” eds. Brady and Pritchard, 2002), which is as follows: McGinn’s charge that Hookway is begging the question against the skeptic in his attempted refutation of skepticism makes sense only if Hookway claimed to refute the skeptic, which he did not (I’ll attempt to show).

Hookway’s Argument (in “Affective States and Epistemic Immediacy”) proceeds something like this:

Initial presuppositions:

1. Ethics and epistemology share a common concern with evaluation, an enterprise with underlying issues whose similarity is such that an evaluative epistemic project could gain from attending to its evaluative ethical parallels.
2. Such gains (for evaluative projects in epistemology) include: (a) attaching (as most ethical theories do) importance to affective states (i.e. emotions); (b) Emphasizing the role of virtue in epistemology beyond the scope of self-proclaimed “virtue” theories.

Hookway’s Argument: (Which is an attempt to defend and clarify the second of these initial presuppositions) goes “loosely” like this:

P1. (Something like) Quine’s theory of induction is plausible/correct. This position characterizes the phenomenon of inference (which leads to our acceptance of propositions) as possessing a kind of “immediacy”; on this view, the evidential relations on which we depend aren’t available to reflection, but the “goodness” of the inferences (which lead us to accept propositions) are “felt”, and hence, “the vehicle in our confidence of inference is affective.”
P2. The best way to accommodate the “immediacy” of our evaluations is by appeal to character traits (i.e. virtues, such as “being observant”), which are simply stable patterns of identifying what is emotionally salient relative to the goal of inquiry (i.e. asking the right questions, etc.)
P3: Making such a move has the feature of paralleling the evaluative project of ethics, which pays (what Hookway appears to consider) appropriate consideration to affective states and virtues, attention lacking in contemporary epistemology’s evaluative endeavor.

It is not my understanding that a central endeavor of Hookway’s is to refute skepticism, even though Hookway does mention some implications the acceptance of his premises would have toward placing his project distinct from anti-skeptical endeavors that are (as Hookway thinks) “over-intellectualized”—by their feature of requiring reflective justification ad infinitum. Hookway’s Quinean appeal distances himself from the over-intellectualized justificatory positions, and he makes this clear on pp. 84 and 85 when pointing out how his position avoids two “troublesome regresses” (the “regress of reasons” and the “regress of justification”) that have led other positions to be hard-pressed to refute the skeptic. That Hookway’s view has this virtue, though, is better understood as a peripheral (and positive, if successful) upshot of adopting his premises, and not at all integral to the conclusion for which I take him to be arguing.
It is for this reason that I am surprised that Marie McGinn’s entire rebuttal to Hookway focused (and self-proclaimedly focused) on that one particular facet of Hookway’s position. No doubt, McGinn’s position is, in a nutshell, the claim that Hookway tries to rebut the skeptic and fails. Not only is rebutting the skeptic not a central focus of Hookway’s argument, but I think that, even the extent to which skepticism is addressed peripherally (on pp. 84 and 85) we find no solid affirmation that Hookway thinks that his position literally “defuses” the skeptic, as McGinn claims him to be positing.

My claim here needs some defense, and so, I will site verbatim the three times that Hookway explicitly mentions skepticism in his article:

(1) “And even fewer would insist that taking the role of emotions, or affective states, seriously is necessary if we are to deal in a satisfactory way with what we can think of as the central problems of epistemology—for example, the defusing of skepticism or the study of how internalist and externalist demands in the theory of justification can be integrated.” (pp. 75-76).

(2) “…it is important that education and training equip us to avoid questions that should not be addressed. In other cases (“might I be a brain in a vat?”) the explanation of why it is good not to address such questions may be different again.” (p. 84)

(3) “To answer skepticism, it seems, we need to combine these perspectives: we must be properly confident (subjective) that we are reliable (objective). The worry we now face is that we can only be properly confident that our emotional evaluations are conditionally reliable.” (86)

Fourthly, Hookway (p. 84 and 85) mentions the two “troublesome regresses” that his view can circumvent, and while these regresses are known to lead some to skepticism, Hookway never offers that his circumvention of these regresses is sufficient for defusing skepticism (rather, the much weaker claim, that he has simply dodged these particular regresses).

A careful reading of these sections will not find Hookway proposing that his position is sufficient for defusing skepticism. (1) could be read weakly as mentioning the defusing of skepticism as among the central problems of epistemology. A stronger reading of (1) would be that, few would think that an analysis of emotion would help to resolve central problems in epistemology; any substantive claim that Hookway’s position is supposed to do that job is not made explicit here. (2) merely presents the skeptical question as a “type” of question that perhaps ought not be addressed. He brings up the skeptical question (and mentions subsequently that it might be only epistemically relevant to goals of inquiry within the philosophy class) as a demonstrative analogue to another sort of question (on which he focuses) which should not be asked, namely, questions which are irrelevant to inquiry (i.e. how many grains of sand were on the beach in 1952) and which an intellectually virtuous person would not find emotionally salient. No where in (2) is any substantive claim that Hookway thinks he has refuted the skeptic; all we could make of this is, perhaps, the skeptical question ought not be asked (but not even necessarily for the same reason that the non-salient questions Hookway is discussing ought not be asked!)

(3) would be the best candidate McGinn could site in her attempt to claim that Hookway thinks he has rebutted skepticism. However, even (3) proposes only this: X is a necessary condition for rebutting skepticism. We shall see how my view meets X”. And that’s just what Hookway does; he tries to show how his position meets what he thinks are those necessary conditions; this is not a case of Hookway claiming to have met sufficient conditions.

And, as I mentioned, his discussion of the “worrisome regresses” on pp. 84-85 could lead us no further than to accept that Hookway thinks that his views have circumvented two particular regresses that tend to skepticism—a different claim than the claim that skepticism simpliciter is rebutted by his view.

Here is a bit of what McGinn has made of Hookway:

“The question I want to focus on here is whether the understanding of the nature of our epistemic practices that Hookway develops in the light of ideas that he draws from ethics provides an effective means of “defusing…skepticism” (75)

“…there is something prima facie perverse in trying to answer the philosophical sceptic by appeal to the essential role of emotional responses in our epistemic evaluations, insofar as we do not normally regard the emotions as having any special or privileged connection with veridicality.” (96).

“Moreover, given that Hookway’s account of our ordinary practice acknowledges that the relation between the emotional evaluations on which it rests and objective truth is contingent, it is hard to see how the work of resisting skepticism in a philosophical context is to be achieved.” (99).

“But [a consequence of Hookway’s view] means that I can take my current emotional evaluations as a proper ground for rejecting the sceptic’s questions only by assuming the very thing that the skeptical voice in me doubts—that is, by arguing in a circle.” (100).

There are quite a few other comments on this line because, alas, the paper McGinn’s written has skepticism as its focus.

I don’t intend to be a rabblerouser here and suggest that McGinn’s reply is in any way scandalous or malevolent. Quite the contrary! McGinn has raised a philosophically interesting question, which is what the implications of Hookway’s position would be if the mission were to rebut skepticism. Is Hookway’s position capable of rebutting skepticism? This is entirely a project worth pursuing. My intention to go to some length here was only to indicate what I think was a misattribution; rebutting skepticism was not Hookway’s goal, and so, the question of whether Hookway’s position is capable of providing a response to skepticism is a question different than whether Hookway was successful in his attempt to do so. No such attempt fell within his project, and McGinn’s response didn’t appear to recognize this.

The "Conrad the Conformist" and "Robotic Robert" cases in Fairweather's "Epistemic Motivation"

2006-07-12T04:17:00.000+01:00

In “Epistemic Motivation,” (taken from ‘Virtue Epistemology’ eds. Zagzebski and Fairweather, 2001), Abrol Fairweather advances an argument that goes (something) like this:

1. To be able to adequately characterize what an intellectual virtue is, we must first have some understanding of what virtue (in general) is.
2. To meet the project in (1), there are three main options: Aristotle’s account of virtue as an excellence of character, Plato (Gorgias and Republic)’s account of virtue as a skill (techne); thirdly, there is Aquinas’ teleological account of virtue as the “power to bring about a certain end” (65)
3. If epistemic motivation is a necessary condition for knowledge, then the only account of virtue capable of subsuming epistemic motivation within the domain of intellectual virtues is the Aristotelian account.
4. Epistemic motivation is a necessary condition for knowledge.
5. Therefore, the only appropriate account of virtue to which VE theorist ought to give recourse in understanding the nature of intellectual virtue is the Aristotelian account.

Fairweather’s defense for P4:

1. There are (basically) three types of epistemically motivated beliefs: (a) belief with improper motivation; (b) non-motivated belief; (c) belief with good epistemic motivation.
2. If an agent is epistemically deficient in (a) and (b), then (c) is a necessary condition for knowledge (given that knowledge is incompatible with epistemic deficience on any VE account).
3. An agent is epistemically deficient in (a) and (b).
4. Therefore, epistemic motivation is necessary for knowledge.

It is now (3) in Fairweather’s defense for P4 that requires a defense. Fairweather outlines his defense just as one would expect: he argues via reductio in cases (a) and (b) to emphasize the epistemic deficiency associated with being motivated to some non-alethic (i.e. improper) end, or to have no motivation; in each instance, Fairweather hints that what is needed for the beliefs (associated with these two types of deficient motivations) to be candidates for knowledge is that the proper, alethic-ended motivation should be present. His cases are both quite clever, and do well to illustrate his point. I do want to point out a few spots in these examples, though, which appeared problematic to me, and which I think invite a bit of revision.

First off, consider Fairweather’s “Conrad, the Doxastic Conformist” case, a case intended to delineate an individual with non-alethic epistemic motivation (i.e. improper motivation), and allow the reader to see the ‘absurdity’ of deeming Conrad’s beliefs as knowledge in light of the epistemic motivation that engendered them. In short: Conrad wants to believe whatever Mr. Cool believes; his desire is significant to the extent that Conrad desires to bring his “whole belief system in to conformity of Mr. Cool’s”, and is, by virtue of this obsession, not concerned with the truth or falsity of his beliefs, per se, but simply whether they are isomorphic with Mr. Cool's. Given this, suppose that Mr. Cool believes that X will win the election in November; automatically, Conrad wishes to believe this, and would believe it independent of whether Cool offers evidence for it. Now, suppose that Cool does, in fact, articulate his evidence for believing X will win the election (i.e that the opponent Y is lagging in the poles and is involved in scandal, etc.). Conrad, in this revised situation, holds a belief we would think to be justifying evidence (i.e. that Y is lagging in the polls, etc.), but Fairweather’s contention is that Conrad is not justified; this is because the grounds Cool gave him for believing that X would win “play no role as evidence in exploaining Conrad’s acquisition of the belief…. Being supported by good evidence is a purely accidental feature of his belief since Conrad would be just as inclined to believe that X will win without possessing any evidence at all, so long as “X will win in November” is believed by Mr. Cool” (74). And so, Fairweather wishes to show, possession of good evidence for a belief is insufficient for achieving justification; the missing element is epistemic motivation. Fairweather defines the sort of epistemic motivation, necessary for justification, and lacking in the Conrad case, as follows:

EM*: A person has an epistemic motivation if and only if they have a desire (or kindred emotive state) for truth or for states whose value is derived from truth, and this desire effectively directs and controls the person’s belief formation and revision.

One point at which I take issue is Fairweather’s reasoning for why it is that Conrad lacks justification in the revised case in which Conrad is given by Mr. Cool Mr. Cool’s grounds for believing that X will win. Even in light of Conrad’s improper motivation, and even in light of the fact that he believes the grounds for the belief (i.e. that Y is lagging in the polls) decisively because Cool believes it, it seems reasonable to conclude that Conrad (insofar as he is rational, which Fairweather has given us no reason to doubt) would (importantly) “recognize” that “X will win” follows inferentially from “Y is lagging in the polls” (combined with Conrad’s assumed background knowledge that X is competing against Y). It seems to me, at least intuitively, that Conrad’s recognition of the evidential relation between the grounds of the belief (that x will win), and the belief that x will win would be sufficient (combined with Conrad’s believing the grounds of the belief, and the belief) for Conrad’s being justified in his belief that X will win in November. Now, if Fairweather had explicitly said that Conrad, due to some strange irrationality (perhaps he is inductively challenged) believed both the grounds for X will win in November, and the proposition that X will win in November, but nonetheless did not recognize that the grounds serve as evidence for the belief, then I’d agree with Fairweather that Conrad is not justified. But until Fairweather makes explicit that the recognizition of this relation I mentioned is not present in the Conrad case, then even given Conrad’s improper epistemic motivation, I’d be inclined to think he is justified (at least insofar as the evidential recognition condition I mention holds.)

Fairweather’s next step in the argument is to offer the reductio against (b) [in P3 of his defense of p4 in the initial argument]. Simply: Fairweather must show that an individual with no epistemic motivation is epistemically deficieint to the extent that beliefs arising out of this lack of epistemic motivation are not justified. Enter Robotic Robert, Fairweather’s protagonist to this end, who holds and abides by the following rule “Adopt an attitude of acceptance toward a proposition P iff I have evidence that strongly indivates that P is true.” Fairweather thinks here that Robotic Robert, who he stipulates is unable to explain why he forms beliefs according to that particular rule, rather than some other rule, is unjustified in his beliefs. Robotic Robert, Fairweather thinks, by virtue of his inability to provide a reason for adhering to his rule, has no sense that truth is the appropriate aim of belief, and hence, should not be said to be justified.
Here is my problem with this case: Fairweather indicates (p. 76) that, if Robert could have given a reason for why he formed beliefs according to that rule, then his beliefs would be epistemically motivated to the extent that they would (probably) satisfy EM* and be justified. But this is a dubious step to make. Consider this: suppose we grant Fairweather’s wish and program into Robotic Robert a response to the question Fairweather didn’t have him answer… suppose his response to the question of why he forms beliefs according to the rules to which he appeals is this: “Because I am motivated to believe what is true.” This robotic response would seem, based on what Fairweather says, to satisfy him. But what if we were to then ask, “Why do you want to believe what is true?” Robotic Robert would have no answer. And, to add here a concern at a practice al level, many epistemic agents would be left scratching their heads when asked to explain, decisively, why they wish to believe what is true.
One response Fairweather could give to my criticism here is that the chain of necessary explanation ends at the question of “why” one forms beliefs according to rules. Giving this response would help Fairweather to avoid the pragmatic problem of committing to the position that all those epistemic agents who can’t explain why they are motivated to truth (i.e. many agents we want to say are justified in a majority of their beliefs) aren’t justified; however, this response saves the practical problem at the expense of allowing Robotic Robert to be properly epistemically motivated merely because he is programmed to give an explanation for why he forms beliefs according to particular rules—a counterintuitive suggestion.
What I’ve mentioned are the two major concerns I had with Fairweather’s Conrad and Robert examples (and I’d be interested to get any opinion on these). However, I do wish to point out one more area of difficulty in the paper. In Section V, Fairweather concedes that the bold proposal of holding epistemic motivation as a necessary condition for knowledge requires an investigation into the question of: “Does a motivational requirement apply to all types of knowledge?” I’m inclined to think certainly not. (i.e. Suppose I want to believe everything Mr. Cool believes… Mr. Cool tells me that bachelors are unmarried women, however my recognition of the truth of bacherlor’s being unmarried men as analytic leads me to believe it is true, even though my epistemic motivation is merely to match my belief set with Mr. Cool’s. Shouldn’t we say I’m nonetheless justified in my belief?” And so, for a starting point, we’d probably want to say that analytic, or a priori truths, are probably exempt from any motivational requirement. All for now…

Andrew McGonigal on Eflin's "Epistemic Presuppositions and their Consequences": the question of heirarchy

2006-07-05T00:48:00.000+01:00

I am glad I’m not paid to keep score in the essay-debate between Juli Eflin and Andrew McGonigal found in Moral and Epistemic Virtues (2003). I would give up somewhere around the point where Andrew McGonigal (in his criticism of Eflin’s essay “Epistemic Presuppositions and Their Consequences”) offers the following brief and biting criticism of Eflin’s project:

“…given that Eflin seems to hold that a combination of rules and procedures and virtue theory can provide the relevant explanations, it is difficult to see why her own theory is not both hierarchian and complete, contrary to advertisement—it looks to me as if she just takes a broader range of conceptually basic elements as necessary to provide complete explanations of problems within the epistemological domain.” (73)

Some background, after which McGonigal’s claim will become more clear…

Eflin’s position, begins with a criticism of “traditional epistemology” (her characterization of which is doubted by McGonigal) along several lines, which include that TE is “heirarchial” and “complete.” What do these terms mean? Eflin defines them as follows:

“For a theory to be heirarchial, some set of notions is taken as basic and other dlements in the theory are derived from or reduced to these basic elements” (p. 50). Also, Eflin claims that, if a theory posits self-justifying elements which explain other elements, then the theory is heirarchial. (50).

Completeness: “For a theory to be complete, everything in a theory’s domain is accounted for in terms of the basic concepts.”

Some examples of theories that are “heirarchial and complete”, according to Eflin, include Coherentism (i.e. BonJourian), as well as virtue theories such as Zagzebski’s, the latter of which, Eflin claims, posits the virtues as basic concepts from which other concepts are derivable (hence “heirarchial”) and committed to virtue as a “success term” (hence, Eflin thinks, complete).

An aside: I am skeptical of her characterization of Zagzebski’s position as heirarchial and complete. It is more clear that foundationalism and Coherentism would be candidates, though.

Anyhow—Eflin, after demarcating “traditional epistemology” as branded by being heirarchial and complete (among other criticisms, such as requiring the supposition of ideal knowers, etc.), she presents her own account—which has the virtues as well as rules as primary (central, ,but not such that other concepts can be derivable from them), but not basic—and which she thinks is not heirarchial and complete, and which has added benefits of not being “context-stripping” or stipulating ideal knowers. She describes her account as a pluralistic virtue-centered epistemology. She uses the term “virtue centered” rather than “virtue theory” because, on her view, the latter description would imply that virtue is taken as basic within the theory. Eflin’s account avoids taking virtue as basic by using what she calls a teleological position, in which understanding is identified as the end of human life (or, an end). However, says Eflin:

“We can say ‘understanding’ in the abstract, and we can discuss the various virtues on which an inquirer needs to draw to produce it, but ‘understanding’ simpliciter cannot be given an account, nor can an inquirer have it. I can only achieve particular understanding from where I am, that is, from my context. It has to be an understanding needed by an individual, achievable from her present understanding and through her epistemic virtues, or from ones she can develop.”

The problem that I saw, and which I think McGonigal (in the quote I presented initially) finds problematic here is that Eflin seems to be trading one basic concept for another. Rather than to have a basic concept of virtue from which all other concepts are derivable, she has understanding as such a concept. It seems to me that, although she doesn’t say this clearly, she thinks that because understanding simpliciter remains vacuous on her account (so that she can avoid “context-stripping”), that therefore, understanding is disqualified from being a basic concept from which other concepts are being derived, and a fortiori, she has not committed the sin of hierarchy. This seems to me a dubious inference. As McGonigal suspects of her, “it looks to me as if she just takes a broader range of conceptually basic elements as necessary to provide complete explanations of problems within the epistemological domain.”

Is that what she’s doing?

There are at least a couple questions which at this point need to be answered if we are to attempt to “deobfuscate” the issue of whether her theory avoids the charge of being heirarchial (which, to reiterate, she insists it is not).

(1) From what premises does Eflin get to the conclusion that her theory is not heirarchial, given the definition she presents for a theory’s being heirarchial.
(2) How are we to go about determining whether “understanding” fits the bill of a basic concept in her view. Additionally, what is the relationship between a concept’s being un-analyzable simpliciter and that concept’s qualifying as basic within a theory?

Without answers to these (and perhaps some more) questions, I’m inclined to think that McGonigal’s criticism is on target. Her pluralistic virtue-centered epistemology is simply invoking a broader range of concepts, and using a concept (understanding, relativized to a particular knower, in her own context) as basic.

Some clairvoyance and (perhaps?) regress problems with Goldman's "Epistemic Folkways"

2006-07-05T00:40:00.000+01:00

In his paper “Epistemic Folkways and Scientific Epistemology” (reprinted in Axtell’s Knowledge, Belief and Character and originally published in Goldman’s own Liasons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences), Goldman undertakes the project of delineating and defending both a descriptive and a normative form of what he calls “scientific epistemology.” His term “scientific epistemology” is warranted, Goldman thinks, due to what he takes to be crucial dependences on the cognitive sciences in meeting the “two missions of epistemology” (to describe our folk concepts, and to evaluate and improve upon them).
What I found particularly interesting occurs in the first section of Goldman’s paper, in which he attempts to provide a Sosa-amended reliabilist account of justification, which he then defends against a few classic counterexamples which have plagued reliabilist positions in the past.
I take his position to claim something of the following:

S’s belief that p is justified iff S’s belief is a result of processes all of which are on the epistemic evaluator’s list of intellectual virtues. If S’s belief is a result of processes, any of which are on the epistemic evaluator’s list of intellectual vices, the belief is unjustified. If the processes which engender S’s belief are on neither list, the belief is non-justified.

How does a virtue or vice get on the epistemic evaluator’s list? At this point, (obviously) there is an appeal to reliability—processes that are deemed to produce a sufficiently high ratio of true beliefs will make the evaluator’s list of intellectual virtues.
Importantly for Goldman, because we are giving at this point a “descriptive” account of the epistemic concept of justification, we should not (he claims) stray from what the folk would agree upon. And hence, a good test question for determining whether a candidate virtue makes the evaluator’s list is to suppose we ask the folk, “How does S know that p?” Answers, Goldman thinks, would include such processes as: “Because he saw it, because he heard it, because he remembered it,” etc. These are the sort of processes Goldman has in mind.

A problem I think his account doesn’t resolve, though, is why we should not include clairvoyance on the list of intellectual virtues given his criteria for what should arrive on the evaluator’s list. I don’t say this because I think clairvoyance is, in fact, a virtue, per se, but because there seems to me no clear reason why Goldman should, given his reliability criterion, be in a position to weed it from his evaluator’s list. A good clairvoyance case, which he mentions, is the case of “Norman” (borrowed from BonJour), who has the reliable faculty of clairvoyance, but who doesn’t have any evidence for or against having this faculty. Goldman thinks that the folk intuition here is that Norman’s clairvoyance-based beliefs are not justified, and so, because Goldman seems to allow folk-approved reliable processes a place on the evaluator’s list of virtues, he has some explaining to do if he is to preserve the folk intuition that such beliefs aren’t justified.
His explanation, I think, is unsatisfying. He makes an appeal to what he takes to be the folk trait of “categorical conservatism”: the folk, he think, display a preference for “entrenched” categories; “they do not lightly supplement or revise their categorical schemes.” And so, Goldman thinks, clairvoyance wouldn’t make the list because the folk are hesitant to add it, even though the ones they do add are added for the same reason that clairvoyance would be added—namely—because it is a sufficiently reliable process.
One question we should ask here is: is Goldman right that the folk would, in fact, be inclined to take clairvoyance off the list of virtues (in light of the fact that other virtues are on their for having the process of reliability that clairvoyance possesses). I’m worried that, if he is right about this, then prospects appear dim for Goldman’s appeal to reliability as a basic concept within his theory, which is how he seems intent to present it. If justification is explained in terms of intellectual virtues, and they are explained in terms of reliability (as Goldman seems to want), then reliability must be basic. But no longer is it basic if it is not capable of explaining the justificational status of beliefs arising out of a process of clairvoyance. Such beliefs should be able to be identified by recourse to reliability (for his theory to preserve the heirarchial structure he appears to want). And so, dropping clairvoyance from the list is at the expense of the clean heirarchial structure he wants in his theory.
Another problem I’d like to explore with Goldman’s position in this paper is that it plays, I think, the dangerous game of falling into regress. My concern here might be quite misguided, to warn. It is as follows: If a criterion Goldman uses to determine whether a belief is justified is whether the folk would deem it reliable (i.e. the criterion he uses to deem clairvoyance non-evaluator-list-worthy), then it seems as though he is positing this criterion as at least a necessary condition for a candidate virtue’s making the list. I wonder, though, how broadly this criterion can be applied. If Goldman weeds virtues from the evaluator’s list by virtue of the fact that the folk’s “categorical conservativism” would not allow it, then why should we not think that folk acceptance should also be applied as a criterion at the level of “theory” acceptance, as well as process acceptance. He doesn’t give a reason to think that there is a relevant factual difference between processes and theories that would justify folk acceptance as a criterion for one but not the other. But as soon as we apply folk acceptance to the level of theory acceptance, then it seems dubious to suspect that the “folk” are going to be inclined to understand justification in terms of such technical machinery as “evaluator’s lists” and “truth ratios” and (in cases like clairvoyance) even reflection on their own categorical conservatism as needed for reference within a theory of justification. And hence, the regress is: if folk intuitions can be stipulated as criteria for ruling out processes that would make evaluator’s lists, they would also most likely rule Goldman’s own theory of justification which makes references to enough machinery to be non-folk-approved at the theory level as clairvoyance would be non-folk-approved at the process level. Of course, Goldman has a way out if he can demonstrate the relevant factual difference between processes and theories that justify folk approval as a criterion for one but not the other; however, I’m not sure what such a factual difference could be.

Summary/Analysis of "Epistemic Luck" Chapters 1 and 2

2006-06-20T17:35:00.000+01:00

(Note: What follows in this post is mostly my own summary of "Epistemic Luck" (Chs. 1 and 2), although I've added some critical analysis at some points; mostly, though, my attempt was to get clear on what the main claims were. I am open to suggestions as to whether I have some points misconstrued. --AC)

Chapter 1: Scepticism in Contemporary Debate

The task of this chapter seems to be twofold; first, to explain what will be a key term in Part two: the epistemic luck platitude (i.e. the pervasive supposition that knowledge excludes luck) and pose as a question (which will not be addressed until Part II) how it is that the epistemic luck platitude is a motivation for skepticism; secondly, Pritchard presents two separate motivations for skepticism that drive the contemporary debate, the infallibilism-based radical skeptical argument, and the closure-based radical skeptical argument.
His argument is that the closure-based argument is logically weaker, and because it is also capable of generating the radical skeptical conclusion generated by the infallibilsm-based argument, it is the most appropriate for the antiskeptic to address. A correlative point Pritchard makes is that, because the closure-based argument is what should be dealt with by the antiskeptic (and not the logically stronger infallibilism-based skeptical argument), we can conclude something important about the relationship between skepticism and epistemic luck, namely, that we are prevented from “identifying the skeptical challenge as simply arising out of an unduly demanding—indeed, an unqualified—reading of the claim that knowledge excludes luck. We would only do this if tackling the skeptic amounted merely to tackling the infallibilism-based argument. However, because the task is more difficult (i.e. to combat the closure-based argument), we can see that the skeptical challenge arises out of a “qualified” reading of the epistemic luck platitude. However, it does not follow from the fact that skepticism is motivated by a qualified reading of the epistemic luck platitude that that qualification requires adopting fallibilism. Closure provides an alternative to fallibilism, and among motivators for skepticism, appears to be the strongest contender.
Two principles are introduced in this chapter, which serve for the basis of the two arguments he presents that motivate skepticism.

(1) Infallibility Principle: For all agents, ϕ, if an agent knows a proposition ϕ, then that agent knows that all error-possibilities associated with ϕ are false.

(2) Closure Principle for Knowledge: For all agents, ϕ, ψ, if an agent knows that ϕ, and knows that ϕ entails ψ, then that agent knows that ψ.

Let’s see why closure is “logically weaker”: to do this we must identify that both principles can be used to generate the radical skeptical conclusion, and secondly, that between two arguments which generate the same conclusion, the logically weaker (i.e. closure) is the “stronger” argument to rebut. Here are the two arguments which are formed from these respective principles.

The infallibilism-based skeptical argument
1. If one is to have knowledge of a wide range of everyday propositions, then one must know the denials of all error-possibilities that are associated with these propositions, including radical skeptical hypothesis.
2. One cannot know the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses.
3. Therefore, one cannot have knowledge of a wide range of everyday propositions.

The closure-based radical skeptical argument
1. If one is to have knowledge of a wide range of everyday propositions, then one must know the denials of all radical skeptical hypotheses that one knows to be incompatible with the relevant everyday propositions.
2. One cannot know the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses.
3. Therefore, one cannot have knowledge of a wide ranger of everyday propositions.

∀x [(Ks(Ixt ) → EAxt]

(For all x, if x is incompatible with a target proposition and s knows this, then x is an error-possibility associated with that target proposition).

However,

~∀x [EAxt → Ks(Ixt)]

This is because not all error-possibilities associated with a proposition are known by the agent to be incompatible with that proposition. The entailment which takes place in the closure principle involves only those propositions that the agent knows are incompatible with the target proposition. And so, the set of those error-possibilities that must be ruled out according the infallibility principle could be, in principle, larger than the set that the agent knows to be incompatible with the target proposition, however, the inverse could not be the case. And hence, the closure-based argument requires that we rule out (in principle) less error-possibilities than the infallibility-based argument requires. Because the closure-based argument can reach the same conclusion (radical skepticism) as the infallibility-based argument, and with a smaller set of error-possibilities we must rule out, it is a more dangerous threat for the anti-skeptic.

Ch. 2: Closure and Context

By the beginning of Ch. 2, “Closure and Context”, Pritchard hopes to have already have taken us aboard in adopting a template closure-based skeptical argument over the logically stronger infallibility-based template skeptical argument; secondly, he hopes that, in making this move, we will come to reject the idea that the skeptical problem merely arises from a robust reading of the claim that knowledge excludes luck.
How can the skeptic, viz. motivating skepticism with the closure-based skeptical argument be rebutted? This purpose of Chapter two is to offer two attempts, which ultimately fail. These attempts are (1) to deny the closure principle, a move made most notably by Fred Dretske, and (2) to embrace the position of attributer contextualism. Pritchard shows how each of these two strategies attempts to counter the skeptic with the closure-based argument in mind; he argues, though, that each fails, and for a common reason. Both denying closure and embracing attributer contextualism are examples of externalist positions which are, as he says, “at certain key junctures, implicitly motivated by internalist epistemological intuitions. ” Ultimately, Pritchard’s goal here isn’t so much as to prop up two straw men, as to instructively show why particular responses can’t work in the face the closure-based motivation for skepticism, and only given such instruction, does it become as blatantly clear (as Pritchard seems to want it) why a third response, Neo-Mooreanism, is the most desirable strategy. Merely arguing for neo-Mooreanism would not have been so persuasive if it were not made obvious why other attempts run into dead ends.

Denying Closure: Dretske

Dretske proposes that we can know a given proposition Φ while at the same time lacking knowledge of the known entailment Ψ, because “the truth of Ψ is already presupposed in the agent’s knowledge of Φ.” What is significant here is that, when a knowledge operator is applied to Φ, it doesn’t “penetrate the (known) entailment Ψ because, qua being a presupposition of the agent’s knowing Φ, it is not part of what is being operated on when the knowledge operator is applied to the known proposition.

Pritchard captures the force of what Dretske’s up to here in saying that: “most knowledge quite legitimately presupposes the truth of certain propositions that one does not know. ” Denying closure allows us to preserve a motivation for fallibilism that was advanced by J.L. Austin’s “relevant alternatives” proposal: the proposal that to know an everyday proposition, one need only rule out error-possibilities that one has a reason to take into account. We must be careful, though, not to conflate the two. What is preserved of the this fallibist motivation by the closure-principle is the possibility that one can have knowledge of an everyday proposition without knowing the denial of skeptical hypotheses (which would be incompatible with knowledge of that proposition). It is in this sense that the closure principle can preserve a fallibilist motive. However, there is more to denying closure than merely rejecting the knowledge operator entailment. Dretske also advocates a sensitivity-based theory of knowledge, which is externalist (i.e. it rejects that facts needed to justify a proposition must be reflectively accessible), and which preserves his anti-closure position previously mentioned. The sensitivity principle Dretske advocates is as follows:

Sensitivity Principle: For all agents, Φ, if an agent knows a contingent proposition Φ, then the agent does not believe that Φ in the nearest possible world or worlds in which ~Φ.

Interestingly, accepting this principle (as Dretske does) as essentially the necessary and sufficient condition for knowing a proposition, leads us to the fallibilist-intuition-preserving-friendly result that we can know everyday propositions (which do meet the sensitivity condition) whilst not knowing the denial of skeptical hypotheses which we know to be entailed by the everyday propositions we know, because the denial of skeptical hypotheses will fail to meet the sensitivity condition. They will fail for the reason that, even if we believe the denial of a skeptical hypothesis and it is true, we would still believe it was true in the nearest possible world in which the denial was false (i.e. in worlds in which we really are BIVs).
One problem of denying closure Dretske-style is that there emerges an asymmetry between the relevant-alternatives motive for fallibilism, and Dretske’s position. The asymmetry can be presented as follows: on the relevant-alternatives view, we need not know the denials of skeptical error-possibilities because (given that they are presumed to be in such far-worlds) they are not relevant to our knowledge of everyday propositions. However, what is interesting is that in our discussion of the denials of skeptical hypotheses, the denial of the skeptical hypotheses is relevant to knowledge. And so, in principle, it seems that the core relevant-alternatives thesis would allow that we would need to know the denial of skeptical hypotheses in at least some contexts; however, because Dretske’s position would never allow us to know such a denial (given that knowledge of it fails to meet the sensitivity condition), we should, Pritchard claims, “be wary of any view which proclaims itself to be the true heir to the relevant alternatives tradition.” I suspect Pritchard means this both in the sense that the relevant alternatives tradition is problematic in that it is somewhat ambiguous (in that it has a double standard, arguably) and in the sense that Dretske’s view claims itself to be an heir to a position from which it appears to relevantly stray.
It seems, though, that Pritchard’s central problem with Dretske’s closure-denying-sensitivity approach lies not in its relation to the relevant-alternatives thesis from which it is a supposed heir, but rather, with a problem which involves an ambivalence in motivation. The problem is that: Dretske’s position endorses an externalist theory of knowledge. Given this, Dretske’s view must be committed to not requiring internalist justification as necessary for knowledge. Pritchard thinks, though, that internalist intuitions are just what Dretske his in mind when explaining how it is that we lack knowledge of the denials of skeptical hypotheses. The passage of Dretske’s which Pritchard quotes to support this claim is:

If you are tempted to say [that the agent does know (Q)…[, think for a moment about the reasons that you have, what evedence you can produce in favour of this claim. The evidence you had for thinking them zebras has been effectively neutralized, since it does not count toward their not being mules disguised. Have you checked with the zoo authorities? Did you examine? Did you examine the animals closely enough to detect such a fraud? (Dretske 1970: 1016)

Pritchard claims here that, if we substitute a radical skeptical hypothesis in for the local one in this passage, then Dretske would be claiming that what prevents an agent from knowing the denial of a skeptical hypothesis “is that she is unable to adduce good empirical evidence in favour of thinking that this position is true. Since there is, intuitively at least, a close connection between the evidence that one is able to explicitly adduce and the evidence that is reflectively available to one, it follows that a natural way of reading this passage is as saying that agents are unable to know the denials of skeptical hypotheses because they lack internalist justification for their beliefs in these propositions.” (53) Pritchard’s problem with this is that, if Dretske’s position, qua being externalist, denies the necessity of internalist justification for knowledge, then it is a problem that he motivates the denial of closure (which I take it is what he was up to in his passage regarding the local hypotheses) with what appears to be an explanation for a lack of knowledge resulting from a lack of internalist justification.
I’d like to comment on this problem briefly before moving on to the second anti-skeptical strategy, which is attributer contextualism. I think that Pritchard’s motivation-based criticism of Dretske’s position is intuitively right-on. Although some more reflection led me asking questions down this avenue:
Is his position properly externalist? If it is, then that doesn’t seem completely evident by the definition given of the sensitivity principle. Recall that the sensitivity principle is claiming that:

Sensitivity Principle: For all agents, Φ, if an agent knows a contingent proposition Φ, then the agent does not believe that Φ in the nearest possible world or worlds in which ~Φ.

The consequent is something that could hold independent of an agent’s reflective accessibility to it (i.e. one might have no idea whether something holds in nearest possible worlds), and so the consequent represents an externalist condition. Also, the sensitivity principle presents the externalist condition as a necessary condition. Epistemological internalism with regard to knowledge has, itself, one necessary condition: i.e. that the belief must be internally justified (i.e. all facts needed to justify the proposition must be reflectively accessible). I’m probably going wrong somewhere here, but it seems to me that: a position can require that all facts needed to justify a proposition must be reflectively accessible (i.e. internalist with regard to knowledge) and stipulate that, for a proposition to be known, not only must this internalist justificatory condition be met, but also, an externalist (non-justifying) condition must be met (i.e. the consequent in the sensitivity principle). Notice that the consequent in the sensitivity principle need not be understood as a justificatory condition (maybe I’m wrong here). And so it seems as though an externalist with regard to knowledge, in so far as she stipulates an externalist condition for knowing (i.e. as Dretske has done in his consequent of the sensitivity principle), and still require internalist justification for a belief. (For how is requiring internalist justification for knowledge incompatible with requiring an externalist condition for knowing?)
I think there are two points that are at the source of what is probably just confusion on my part. First off, my point hangs on whether the consequent of the sensitivity principle is to be read as a justificatory condition. Secondly, I don’t think I am fully clear as to the extent to which the sensitivity principle is externalist by virtue of its requiring an externalist condition for knowing. If Dretske’s position is externalist for this reason (i.e. that it requires an externalist condition for knowing), then I’m not clear as to why this externalist-making feature of the sensitivity principle would require a rejection of internalism with regard to knowledge (which is what Dretske’s position must do if it is properly externalist).
The next anti-skeptic alternative presented is attributer contextualism, a position that combats skepticism with the added benefit of remaining true to the intuitive closure principle. Attributer contextualism amounts to the position that, for a given proposition, its truth value will be in part determined by the conversational context of the proposition circumscribed by the attributer of that proposition. This is the position advanced most notably by DeRose (2005), Lewis (1996) and Cohen (2000). A consequence of attributer contextualism is that a given proposition, “S knows that p” can be uttered in one circumstance and be true, and in another circumstance and be false. Obviously, a motivation for adopting such a view would be to preserve that we can have quite a bit of the knowledge we think we have. Why? Because, given that (we grant that) skeptical hypotheses (and the task of ruling them out) are not relevant to most everyday circumstances in which we think we have knowledge, it is not necessary to rule them out in order to say that we know (for example) that it is raining today. Ruling out the denials of skeptical hypotheses is relevant only in the context of decisively skeptical conversations. Attributer contextualism seems on the surface to be capable of preserving two generally incompatible intuitions: (1) The infallibilist intuition that skeptical conversational contexts lead us to discover that we lack knowledge of the denial of them, and a fortiori, we lack most of the knowledge we have; (2) In everyday contexts, we “know” a great deal (p. 55) of what we think we know.
An instinctive reaction would be to think that, surely, these apparently contradictory claims cannot be reconciled without denying closure, and so how can attributer contextualism preserve closure (whilst in any sense remaining true to these antithetical intuitions?) The solution for attributer contextualism is to claim that closure is preserved only within the same conversational context. And so, John’s knowing that the bottle is on the table whilst not knowing that he is not a BIV doesn’t deny closure because his lack of knowledge of the latter is appropriate only within a skeptical conversational context in which he wouldn’t have even known the bottle was on the table.
Pritchard gives two objections to attributer contextualism. The first is somewhat comical; he says, “The most obvious difficulty with attributer contextualism is its commitment to the counter-intuitive thesis that ‘knowledge’ is a context-sensitive term sin the manner described, with the epistemic standards relevant to whether or not knowledge can be truly ascribed to an agent being determined by conversational factors” (58). This is another way of saying, “One problem for attributer contextualism is that its thesis amounts to a reductio against it.” And, indeed, it seems that way. If we grant the platitude that knowledge entails truth, and also grant (as A.C. wishes to) that knowledge is context sensitive, then truth is context sensitive; further, if truth is understood (loosely) as having something to do with how things are, then how things are would be relative to presuppositions that are held within discourse. How odd that would be.
The other problem that is presented is in tune with the second problem presented to Dretske’s anti-skeptical strategy of denying closure: and the shared problem here is a problem with motivation—specifically, the problem of offering externalist positions which are motivated in part by internalist commitments. The way the argument goes (contra attributer contextualism) here seems to be this: A.C. commits itself to the claim that we can know the denial of skeptical hypothesis. This commitment arises once closure is preserved within everyday contexts in which we claim knowledge of any everyday proposition. However, it has been argued that no internalist account can account for knowledge of the denials of skeptical hypothesis (given that no internalist justification is available to support such a claim). Resorting to the available externalist option, though, will lead one to wonder why it is necessary to import all of the “sophisticated theoretical machinery” (60) of contextualism. “Why not just simply argue that agents know everyday propositions and thus, given closure, that agents can know the denials of skeptical hypotheses also” (60). The point the author appears to be making is that: once the denials of skeptical hypotheses are claimed to be “known”, then the skeptical problem seems to disappear in such a way that one ought not resort to the apparently counterintuitive contextualist assumptions in order to explain it. (My aside: ironically, it was importing just this machinery that got us to the position of having externalist knowledge of the denials of skeptical hypotheses, knowledge of which would render the machinery cumbersome). And, on another note, the externalist knowledge of denials of skeptical hypotheses which are closurelly-entailed by everyday knowledge in normal contexts, is not obviously explained. Says Pritchard: “Of course, a great deal needs to be said to explain how one could know the denials of skeptical hypotheses even on an externalist theory of knowledge” (60). A.C. doesn’t have a very clear answer to this, even though it is committed to it.
The moral of the story seems to be this: we’ve looked at two anti-skeptical strategies, and independent of other problems of these respective strategies, each is inconsistently motivated. On this note, the dialectical transition will be to investigate a third anti-skeptical strategy that is not inconsistently motivated: neo-Mooreanism. Unfortunately, though, we’ll see that whilst neo-Mooreanism looks quite good compared to the Dretskean and attributer contextualist anti-skeptical strategies, there is another problem on the table, which has to do with any externalist response to the skeptical dilemma which does not recognize that the tenor of the skeptical strategy is essentially internalist.

Zagzebski on the Value of Knowledge

2006-06-14T19:57:00.000+01:00

In her paper “The Source for the Epistemic Good” Linda Zagzebski attempts a solution to what she calls the “value problem”—the problem of accounting for how it is that knowledge is more valuable than true belief. She claims that “if knowing a proposition is more desirable than truly believing it, it is because it is more desirable to believe in an admirable way” (Pritchard and Brady, 26). Believing a true proposition in an admirable way amounts to a way in which the agent gets credit for believing the true proposition; this credit is earned when the agent arrives at the true belief because of her virtuous intellectual acts motivated by a love of truth (25).
Her solution looks strong in comparison to what she convincingly shows to be bad approaches (i.e. the machine-product approach). However, while reading through this, I couldn’t help but to wonder how she would account for knowledge of tautologies (i.e., from now on, the law of non-contradiction) as being more valuable than true belief in this law. Believing that ~(p and ~p) seems to be of the sort that couldn’t be believed because of intellectually virtuous inquiry. For what sort of person could possess intellectual virtue to the extent that she could inquire into whether the law of non-contradiction holds prior to knowing that it holds? Put another way, how could one virtuously inquire whilst not already knowing the law of non-contradiction?

The problem I offer can be stated as:

1. An agent’s knowing that ~(p and ~p) is more valuable than her merely truly believing it only if the agent believes the true proposition in an admirable way.
2. It is not possible to believe ~(p and ~p) in an admirable way.
3. Therefore, knowledge of ~(p and ~p) is not more valuable than true belief in ~(p and ~p).

I’ll anticipate some responses:

First, she might just flat deny that the law of non-contradiction cannot be reached in an admirable way. However, I’d be prepared to say that it could also be reached not in an admirable way (for instance, by someone who hates being bound by logical truths, and hates the fact that the law of non-contradiction is obvious to him). It seems funny to say that the truth-hater’s knowledge of ~(p and ~) is not more valuable than merely true belief whereas the intellectually virtuous agent’s knowledge of ~(p and ~p) is more valuable than her true belief in it. This route isn’t promising, and it could only be pursued if we grant the (I think implausible) assumption that truth in the law of non-contradiction can be reached through virtuous inquiry.

Another response she might have: She could deny that knowledge in the law of non-contradiction is more valuable than true belief in it. This might be more promising (at least more so than the other suggestion). However, she would then only have a conditional solution to the value problem, in the sense that her position explains the value of knowledge to true belief only if the propositional content of the belief is not tautologous.

Another possibility is that I am missing something here and not being fair to Zagzebski’s view with this criticism…

Any thoughts would be welcome!

Lucky Virtue and Neighbor's Knickers: Two Problems with Goldman's Veritistic Unitarianism

2006-06-13T23:57:00.000+01:00

In his essay “The Unity of the Epistemic Virtues,” Alvin Goldman defends a species of virtue unitarianism which he calls veritism—a consequentialist, truth-linked account of what, exactly, shall qualify as an epistemic virtue. Goldman defines veritism as:

V1: A process, trait, or action is an epistemic virtue to the extent that it tends to produce, generate, or promote (roughly) true belief.

Veritism is a species of virtue Unitarianism not in traditional senses which suggest the virtues are either reducible to one, or inseparable, but rather, because there is a thematic unity (i.e. all epistemic virtues produce, generate or promote true belief). This position which Goldman advances is to be contrasted with virtue pluralism as well as with any other Unitarian account that stipulates a non-veritistic thematic unity.

Goldman takes labor in his paper to defend veritism against objections from a variety of breeds of opposition, and for that reason, he has at least made the case that veritism has some excellent explanatory virtues. I think, though, that there are two problems that stand out as potentially damaging for any endorsement of veritism.

(1) The problem of “Lucky Virtue”

In section four of his paper, Goldman defends veritism against an objection that, for simplicity, I’m characterizing as:

1. If veritism is to be a Unitarian approach, then it must posit one (not two) epistemic values.
2. Veritism is committed to positing two epistemic values, true belief and error avoidance.
3. Therefore, veritism is not a Unitarian approach.

P1 is correct, and so Goldman seeks to disrepute P2 by showing how maximizing true belief and avoiding error can be blanketed under one veritic value. Goldman strategy here takes the form of his proposing a veritistic value scale. Given a proposition p, Goldman postis that the highest degree in belief in p would be 1.0 (subjective certainty), the lowest degree of belief would be 0, and .5 would represent “maximum subjective uncertainty” toward p. Goldman writes: “I propose that the highest degree of belief in a true proposition counts as the highest degree of “veritistic value” (witih respect to the question at hand, e.g., whether p or not-p is the case). In general, a higher degree of belief in a truth counts as more veritistically valuable than a lower degree of belief in that truth” (Fairweather and Zagzebski, 36).

As I see it, by positing this veritistic value scale, Goldman is essentially dodging the objection he intended to at the expense of opening the door to a separate and I think equally troubling objection. I will present this objection as “The case of Lucky Virtue”

The Case of Lucky Virtue

Lucky and Careful are investigating separate barnyards, with the goal of identifying cows. Lucky got a fortunate draw, for in the barnyard in which he is inquiring, there are five fat cows, and five giraffes, and those animals exhaust the barnyard. Lazy sits in a lawnchair, takes a quick survey and immediately develops subjective certainty (degree of belief 1) that there are five cows in the barnyard. “For surely,” he thinks, “cows have not got 30 foot necks.”
Careful, on the other hand, is investigating a barnyard with five skinny cows, five fat goats, five oxen, five black-painted fattened sheep, five tusk-free rhinos and five cow facades. Rather than to take a quick survey as Lucky had done, Careful takes out his notebook and tenaciously surveys all of the animals. His pre-barnyard-investigating knowledge of cows was equivalent to Lucky (mediocre at best), but the ecumenical obfuscation of his barnyard makes his epistemic position such that, after his three hour survey, he does not have subjective certainty in his belief that there are five cows. (His belief, though correct, is only held with .9 confidence).

Out intuition should be, I think, that Careful is more intellectually virtuous than Lucky. However, if we apply Goldman’s veritistic value scale to the situation, then Lucky will have acquired more “veritistic value” given that he has a higher degree of certainty in his true belief. Because Careful actually displayed much more intellectual virtue in his inquiring, though, the verdict Goldman would give seems counterintuitive.

I’ll move now to the second potentially problematic objection to Goldman’s verisitsic Unitarianism.

The Case of the Neighbor’s Knickers

After counting cows, Careful (now discouraged for having lost—he thinks unfairly—veritistic value competition to Lucky) sits on his front porch in disgust. Two neighbor children, Tommy and Bobby approach him. Tommy tells him that he peeked at the neighbor girl’s knickers and found that they were green. Bobby disagrees and says that the saw them and that they are yellow. Careful thinks to himself, “Well, I certainly like to produce, generate or (roughly) promote true belief, and so I’ll climb the ladder and peep into the neighbor’s bedroom to determine which is correct.” Careful climbs the latter, catches a glimpse of the neighbor’s knickers (they are red, by the way), and climbs down the ladder grinning.

Shame on Careful! But wait: should we slap his wrist or honor him as a beacon of intellectual virtue? This is a tricky question for Goldman’s account. First off, consider what process Careful is using to arrive at the true belief: “The neighbor’s knickers (contrary to opinion) are red!” Perhaps the process of careful investigation? Tenacious inquiring? Verifying testimony? No matter how the pie is cut, Careful’s disposition to investigate the color of the knickers reflects a disposition that would “promote, generate, or (roughly) produce true belief” which secures his disposition a spot on Goldman’s list which fall under the unified theme of veritistic. In section eight of his paper, in his discussion of welfare Unitarianism, Goldman makes it clear that he recognizes that problems of knicker-peeping sort will occur—i.e. situations in which what morality seems to demand will set limits on the extent to which epistemic inquiry ought to be carried. He says:

Epistemological or scientific value sometimes conflicts with moral value, and when they conflict, epistemological value must give way. There is a moral “side constraint” on scientific research, which is that the conduct of such research should not violate human rights or injure people.” (45)

This might appear to be a solution to the problem, but I think it is an overly hasty one. Ought epistemological values always yield to moral values? Those who identify intellectual virtues as a subset of the moral virtues (i.e. Zagzebski 1996) don’t seem to run into this sort of problem, but because Goldman does, I think he must also meet the task of defining clear conditions under which the exercise of veritistic virtues should yield way to the exercise of moral virtues that yield contrary courses of action. Merely offering the default position that intellectual virtues ought always yield to moral virtues seems somewhat careless (especially, for example, when the consequences are great.) For example, if it was not knickers Careful was attemping to peep into through the window, but rather, some word printed on the neighbor’s wall that, if he uttered it on the streets, a bloody war would end, it is not so clear that the intellectual virtue that would dispose him to peep should give way to the moral virtue of (say) not violating rights.
Another problem I see is that, even if Goldman were to outline careful “trumping” conditions, it seems that veritistic virtues would then be a sort of “conditional” virtues (i.e. investigate carefully only if you aren’t violating x, y, and z) that they would be quite far removed from the Aristotelian conception of virtue as being such that it leads us to act naturally in line with the virtue. Even though it is true that Goldman certainly doesn’t limit what qualifies as virtues as proper character traits, his position of veritisim nonetheless allows for them to make the list by meeting his veritistic condition. And so, I fail to see how an adequate picture of the virtues that are “deep and enduring character traits” (i.e. such as Careful’s trait of careful inquiry) could be adequately explained on his view, given that his view would require a careful conditionalizing of them—a conditionalizing to the extent that they would not longer be dispositions to act. Virtues of character, then, would be reduced to maxims which the agent must consider carefully (i.e. I’ll act intellectually virtuously only if x, y, and z) which seems to be quite a stretch from whatever we ought to call a “virtue theory.”

Luck

2006-06-12T20:49:00.000+01:00

After reading Ch. 5 "Luck" in "Epistemic Luck", I wanted to organize a few thoughts/concerns before I forgot them...

(1) An definition of luck which gets presented, and then amended, is L1:

(L1) If an event is lucky, then it is an event that occurs in the actual world but which does not occur in a wide class of the nearest possible worlds where the relevant initial conditions for tha tevent are the same as in the actual world. (p. 128)

This definition is successful in making clear how what we call "lucky" is distinct from what we call "chance" or "accident" (even though, lucky events are usually associated with chance or accident). This is helpful because it isolates respects in which luck differs from these two related concepts, which had previously been taken by some to just "be" what luck is. Pritchard points out, though, that L1 needs some supplementing to be adequate. For one, L1 doesn't capture the "subjective significance" element of luck (and hence, an amendment (L2) is required; secondly, there need to be clear specifications about the initial conditions for events in nearby possible worlds.

There is an especially interesting section about L1 on pp. 129-130 that I think could be grounds for good discussion. Pritchard considers an objection to L1 on the grounds that someone might get a 50-50 guess right on a game show, and we'd intuitively say that person is "lucky", and yet, it isn't the case that in a wide class of the nearest possible worlds (with the relevant initial conditions) the contestant would get the answer wrong. In fact, it would be right at half of them.

In responding to this, Pritchard first offers that he suspects our intuitions would shift to a "non-lucky" assessment if the game-show example were altered so that the contestant gets the answer right, but that rather than having two choices, one right and one wrong, she had four choices, three right and one wrong. Here's Pritchard: "If the contestant guessed correctly in this case then I think it would be unlikely that we would put this down to luck since the odds were squarely in her favour." (130). He adds: "This suggests that the correct reading of "wide class" in L1 is at least approaching half of the relevant nearby possible worlds, and that typically events which are *clearly* lucky will be events which do not obtain in most nearby possible worlds." (130).

My initial response to this suggestion is to think that:

* the guess in the 3-out-of-4-right case is *lucky*
* the guess in the 1-out-of-two case is *luckier*
* both guesses are *clearly* lucky.

It seems intuitive to me, actually, to think that if a man were to play Russian Roulette with a gun with a 99999 blank chambers, and only one loaded chamber, and shot at his head, and got the blank, that he would clearly be lucky, even though with the same initial conditions, the same result occurs in almost all nearby possible worlds. According to (L1) the event of the agent's shooting a blank and not killing herself would not be lucky, and according to the later discussion of the gameshow objection, we could infer that the Russian Roulette case would not be clearly lucky because the worlds in which the chap gets the loaded chamber don't even come close to approaching half. Yet, it just seems wrong to say that "the fact that you didn't kill yourself wasn't a matter of luck."

This line of reasoning led me to think that L1 didn't quite capture the fact that some events are clearly lucky even if they obtain in almost all nearby possible worlds, and that the only thing that changes relative to the number of nearby worlds the events do not obtain in is the "degree" to which we'd say they are lucky. And hence, my thinking was that whilst the Russian Roulette case (and the 3-of-4-case) are both clearly cases of luck, neither is lucky to a very significant degree.

But then... (as happens frequently)... I thought of a different case which makes me think that my initial problem with L1 might be vitiated. What I thought of was a case that is structurally similar to the Russian Roulette case, but which I am not prepared to say is clearly lucky.

Golf case:

Golf legend Ben Hogan was reported to have once gone an entire summer, of playing every day, without missing a single putt inside of six feet. This is quite remarkable, and probably amounted to 500 or so consecutive putts without a miss; let us suppose (justafiedly!) that during that summer, Ben Hogan's putting was exceptionally skillful from that particular range. Now consider the event of Hogan's having successfully holed one of those 500 (or so) putts that he made consecutively that summer. Do we want to say that he was lucky? The intuitive response is... well of course not.

This is probably because, in such a conversation, we would be contrasting luck with skill, and because Hogan was skilled and well-practiced, his having made that particular putt (say, the 350th of 500 putts) doesn't seem to admit of being a matter of luck.

What's odd, though, is that Hogan's chances of missing are much greater than 1 in 100,000 (the chances of getting the loaded chamber in Russian Roulette), and yet we (or at least I) might feel more inclined to attribute the Russian Roulette player's having shot a blank at his head a matter more lucky than Hogan making his 300th of 500 consecutive putts.

And so what should be made of all of this? Perhaps two things:

(1) Granting that the Russian Roulette blank-shooter was lucky might lead us away from accepting L1 insofar as L1 would disqualify as lucky events that take place in almost all nearby possible worlds.
(2) My own initial assessment of the Russian Roulette case must be flawed; this is because I suspected that the degree of luckiness would correspond proportionally to the number of nearby worlds in which the event failed to occur.

I'll end this already-longwinded post by offering two suggestions. They appear like they could be auspicious only with regard to the spefic problem I have of trying to understand how it is that I arrived at the strange intuition that Hogan's event of making one of those 500 putts is not lucky, whereas catching a blank is... (even though it's much more likely that a blank will be caught than that Hogan will make.)

The first avenue of investigation here might be to consider Gricean conversational implicature as an explanation. When we talk of decisively sporting achievements, "luck" seems to be contrasted with "skill" rather than "likelihood of occurring", whereas in the context of a roulette discussion, skill is inherently out of the picture, and so luck would be understood in terms of strictly probability. And so, since it is incontroversial that Hogan is extremely skilled, we might find in a discussion of his feats ourselves inclined to deny luck, even if we would admit of a miniscule chance that his making the putt wouldn't take place (i.e. we might say he was not lucky whilst admitting that there is a 1 in 10,000 chance that he would have a seizure in mid-stroke and whiff the ball completely).

Another avenue here might be to look to Hawthorne's "Knowledge and Lotteries", when he discusses how "parity reasoning" (p. 14) with regard to the likelihood of an proposition's being the case leads the reasoner to feel less sure of a proposition than would be the case if she did not arrive at hear belief that the proposition will be the case through non-parity reasoning.

Welcome

2006-06-12T06:41:00.000+01:00

Welcome! My intention is that this site be a forum for dicussion that focuses on issues that concern virtue epistemology - so if this suits you, then by all means, give your thoughts!

In the next few weeks, I'll get things going by tossing out some thoughts I've been having while trying (simultaneously... maybe a bad decision?) to give a careful parsing to (1) Zagzebski and Fairweather's "Virtue Epistemology, (2) Pritchard and Brady's "Moral and Epistemic Virtues" and (3) Pritchard's "Epistemic Luck."

My first post of content will (if I can manage to be adequately high-tech) include a link to a protopaper I've been hashing out on Simon Blackburn's essay "Reason, Virtue and Knowledge."

Also, on deck (and I suspect will be finished in the next week or so) is a very rough paper I've tentatively titled "Lorraine Code and a 'Prisoner's Dilemma' of Epistemic Responsibility."

Until then, though, I should mention something that has been bothering me lately, and that is this: Virtue Reliabilists and Virtue Responsibilists make some incompatible claims about what sorts of excellences should qualify as proper epistemic virtues. What is at particular issue here seems to be that virtue reliabilists (Sosa, in particular) have argued that an Aristotelian account of intellectual virtue allows for such faculties as good eyesight and good memory to "count" as virtues. Folks on the virtue-responsibilist side of the line (i.e. Zagzebski) flat-out deny this.

Because each side is making claims which appear contradictory (i.e. x counts as an intellectual virtue for Aristotle; x does not count as an intellectual virtue for Aristotle), my suspicion is that a careful read of Aristotle should be able to resolve the matter. Unfortunately, two afternoons in a row, and a few pots of coffee into it, I didn't find myself much more clear on the matter. The only conclusion I've drawn is that appealing to Aristotle as the textual arbitor doesn't promise to make the outcome of the reliabilist-responsibilist dispute immediately obvious. (i.e. Yes, Zagzebski is right, Aristotle describes virtues as character traits... which are "hexis" or states of the soul. This seems fundamentally different from a reliable faculty such as eyesight. However... yes, reliabilists are right in pointing out that Aristotle mentions excellences as virtues, and reliable, non-character-based faculties appear to be excellences; reliabilists can also point out that it isn't clear (at least to me!) on Aristotle's view that intellectual virtues are a subset of the moral virtues.. (even though Z (1996) makes a strong case for it).

I hope, as the summer progresses (as well as my understanding of moral and epistemic virtues) to determining which warring tribe stands on Aristotle's side of the line on this score... I am about 5-pages into a paper that I unwarrantedly thought I could finish in 10 or 15, which would shed some light on the issue.. but given my frustration thus far, my feeling is that that early attempt needs to go back to the drawing board until the smoke around the matter clears up. (Maybe this blog will engender some fog clearing on that score??)

Also, as an aside: I'll be posting some chapter summaries I've been writing on Pritchard's "Epistemic Luck" which I hope will be of some use (either to you, or to me, if I've gotten some of it wrong). And... yes, epistemic luck doesn't obviously appear to be related (at least fundamentally) to virtue epistemology to an extent that would justify its inclusion on a blog of the latter's namesake... It's too late (Missouri time) for a lengthy defense of this.. but I'll say that I think that virtue epistemology offers interesting (even if maybe futile) attempts to resolve Gettier problems, to which an analysis of epistemic luck is central. Anyhow, time for bed. I'll look to post a bit more tomorrow.