If-Then Knots ---------------------->

Modeling Epistemic Agents

Suppose you could define an ideal (maybe just a median) Bayesian agent. Then you could make definitions along these lines:

Testimony Skeptic: One who is more reluctant to accept testimony than the ideal Bayesian agent.

Testimony Denier: One who will not accept testimonial evidence at all.

You could start to model different epistemological types by defining scalars on outcomes of probability assessments for given classes of evidence, to get a piecewise function.  Like this:

P_α(h|e&b&c) =  P_ideal(h|e&b&c) for e not in B

                           P_ideal(h|e&b&c)*s for e in B

To get the definitions of skeptic and denier given above you let B be the class {evidence based testimony}. But you could let it be {evidence based testimony about __________}. You could have any number of classes defined in different ways and model all sorts of individuals this way.

An Argument for the Irrelevance of Egoism

An egoistic act is one that has as its primary motive one's own interest.  There are of course smart and stupid egoists.  Sometimes an act that we think is in our own interest is not, so some egoistic acts are not actually in one's own interest.  There are a number of complicated questions surrounding egoism, whether we necessarily are egoists, and whether we should be egoists. 

Writing Process

Finishing my paper on Williamson's "Knowledge and Its Limits" is going torturously.  I have always done this and I think its a pattern I need to break out of.  Rather than just writing then going back and editting, I tend to belabor every single point as I'm writing.  So, if I can't quite make my mind up I'll just do something else for a bit.  I can't get myself to move on from a point then come back to it later.  I guess its an odd kind of perfectionism or something.  Presently it's driving me batty.  I've had this paper pretty well worked out in my head for weeks.  I just keep ruminating the same points over and over.  Then I sit down to write and can't spit them out.  Bahhhh.  Tomorrow I must finish.

Libertarians Love Rawls.

UPDATE (12/12/06): More from Wilkinson.

I had no idea.  Brink Lindsey's recent article "Liberaltarians" has sparked some interesting discussion at the CATO Institute's blog and elsewhere around the web, including the at lefty hub DailyKos (I picked this up initially at the left-libertarian blog Freedom Democrats).  Will Wilkinson in particular has applauded the idea of "Rawlsekianism"; basically taking Hayek's empirical findings in economics and plugging them into a Rawlsian framework.  That post got me wondering why a libertarian such as Wilkinson would count Rawls (and not Nozick, e.g.) with Hayek as " the greatest social/political thinkers of the 20th Century."  Well, in a recent post  by Wilkinson I have my answer.

Knowledge by Inference from False Testimony

Over at Certain Doubts Claudio has a post about knowledge by inference from false testimony.  Here are the cases:

The Spokesperson: The very reliable spokesperson for the president assures me that (q) the president is in Jordan. Based on my belief that q, I infer that (p) the president is not in the Oval Office. Suppose that p is true and q is false: A last-minute change in his Middle Eastern tour schedule now has the president in Israel, not Jordan. Don’t I know that p?

The Santa Claus Case: Mom and Dad tell young Virginia that Santa will put some presents under the tree on Christmas Eve. Believing what her parents told her, she infers that there will be presents under the tree on Christmas morning. She knows that.

Philosophy Isn't Easy

I'm having a difficult time understanding the sentiment expressed here, regarding Hannah Arendt:

Yet if her star shines so brightly, it is because the American intellectual firmament is so dim. After all, who or where are the other political philosophers? The last great political American philosopher, John Dewey, died in 1952. Since then American philosophy — with the partial exception of Richard Rorty — has vanished into technical issues; within the subfield of political philosophy, the largest of its figures, John Rawls, remains abstract and insular. His work may quicken the attenuated pulse of academic philosophers, but it does not move the rest of us.

No kidding.  Philosophy is abstract?  Who'da thunkit. 

Patricia Churchland on Decisions, Responsibility, and the Brain

Preceiving that p.

Timothy Williamson's account of knowledge regards knowing as the most general "factive mental state."  Insofar as it is "factive", the content of the state must be a true proposition.  You can't know that "there is a chair" without "there is a chair" being true.  A more specific factive mental state is seeing.  You can't see that "there is a chair" without "there is a chair" being true.  I think that Williamson is onto something, but it's interesting that this is a specific way of using "see": putting "that" after it.  There are some contexts in which "see" is (to coin a word) existive rather than factive.  For example, "I see a chair" in some contexts would require there to be a chair.  In these contexts, if I found out that no chair existed where I had thought one did I would say "I guess I didn't see a chair".  I wonder if factivity is parasitic on existivity. . .  Of course, there are non-existive uses of "see" as well.  A hypnotist may ask a subject whose eyes are closed what she "sees" and she may well respond perfectly appropriately "I see a chair."

Are rights contingent?

I thought this was an interesting argument for the contingency of rights. 

Badland: The people of Badland are haunted by an evil deity named 'God', who shows every indication of being omniscient, omnipotent, and truthful, though he has a taste for human sacrifice. God installed a magical lottery machine in the town centre, and explained to the townsfolk that, once a month, the device will pick one of their names at random. They are expected to sacrifice this person to God, and if they do so then God will leave them alone till next month. However, if the chosen person remains alive after 24 hours, then the furious and spiteful God will wreak havoc and cause thirty random townsfolk to spontaneously combust.

One feature of the scenario is that a right to life is not, in the scenario, (I'm not sure how else to put it) metaphysically inherent.  The imagined world, with the cruel deity, is one in which there are no natural (God given or otherwise natural) rights, since it is a world in which a/the deity does not  honor/grant such a right.    (If you're a Midianite and you read the OT you might think this is such a world, btw).  So the example shows that "if there are no natural rights then rights are contingent," which is less than it purports to show--I think.  Well, now that I think about it I'm a bit muddled about contingency and possible worlds in what I just said there.  The point is, this scenario might show that there is a p-world in which there are no natural rights and in which the utilitarian best thing to do is to violate what we take in our world to be rights (where, the proponent of rights would protest, rights are natural).  But that doesn't show that rights depend on utilitarian justification/conceptual foundation here in our world.  Does it?

Knowledge Without Belief

UPDATE: (11/26/06) I've got Williamson's view wrong below.  He allows that belief is necessary for knowledge but still not conceptually prior.  The example he uses that puts this clearly is that anything red is necessarily colored, but we don't understand the property of being red through the property of being colored.

In the book we're reading for my epistemology seminar, "Knowledge and its Limits," Timothy Williamson denies that belief is "conceptually prior" to knowledge.  That is, he doesn't think that we should be analyzing knowledge as a kind of true belief. 

Usually philosophers have thought that knowledge is something like "justified true belief."  (Edmund Gettier's "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge" introduced a class of counterexamples called Gettier problems and a search for a fourth condition).  You can get true belief by a lucky guess but that wouldn't be knowledge.  You need something further like reasons, justification, or warrant, they've argued.  Because of this, analyses of justification have been central to epistemology rather than analysis of knowledge itself.  If knowledge is a composite concept (ie, analyzable into components like "belief," "truth," and "justification") then discussion of the components becomes central.  But if knowledge is a simple, unanalyzable concept then we need to make that concept itself central to our epistemological inquiry.

Well, my first reaction reading the introduction was that obviously belief at least is necessary for knowledge.  Why?  Belief is necessary for knowledge if knowledge entails belief.  Let's say X believes that p if X thinks p is the case.  Isn't it clear that you can't know anything that you don't think is the case?  Can you know, for example, that Chicago is east of Iowa City and not think it the case that Chicago is east of Iowa City?  That just doesn't sound right.

Then I started chewing on a counter-example to the necessity of belief for knowledge.  Here it goes, the Low Self Esteem Spelling Champ (LSE Champ):

Richard is stricken with severe self doubt.  Richard enters a spelling bee.  Each time he is given a word he thinks to himself about how it could be spelled.  He's studied Latin roots and all the sorts of things spelling bee champions use and these are the things he reflects on.  However, because of his self doubt he never believes that the spelling he comes up with is correct.  In fact, if he weren't on a timer Richard would haver indefinitely without ever spitting out an answer because he never believes that any particular spelling is correct.  But he is on a timer so he finally just spits out the spelling that he does not believe is correct but which is the product of his reflection.  Much to Richard's surprise, he wins the spelling bee.

Richard doesn't believe p, where p is some particular proposition about the spelling of some particular word, but he knows p.  That's at least an appealing intuition about what is going on in this case and it is enough to get me into Williamson's book without thinking the project just has no motivation.  Another intuition might be to say that Richard is just irrational and believes both p and not-p.  I don't find that to be all that appealing because we should take Richard at his word if he says he never believed that any of his spellings were correct.  Finally--this has the most appeal to me--we might save the idea that belief is necessary for knowledge by making a distinction between knowing how and knowing that.  That is, I'm inclined to say that Richard in fact does not know that each word is spelled a certain way, yet he knows how to spell each word.  The distinction would be between having a belief and having an ability and might make sense of the LSE Champ case without abandoning belief as necessary for knowledge.  In any case, Williamson's book looks fascinating and I'm excited to read it.