Reasons vs. Causes (again)

Thinking about this last night before bed, it seems to me that there's a simple response to those who would argue for statism and against factualism on the grounds that reasons are causes.   

P1. Causes have to have to be fully determinate, fully specific entities. 

P2. Reasons cannot be fully determinate, fully specific entities.

C. Reasons cannot be causes.

The motivation for P1 might initially seem a bit obscure since some authors (e.g., Mellor) have argued that facts can be causes.  Remember, however, that we're looking at an argument that's an argument against those who have already decided that facts cannot be causes, presumably on the grounds that they are not concrete.  

As for the motivation for P2, the idea is that the rational role of reasons requires an entity that's graspable.  Facts, propositions, and states by virtue of the fact that their natures seem to be determined entirely and exhaustively by the way they are canonically picked out linguistically.  Whereas causes have to satisfy Steward's 'secret life requirement', reasons cannot have secret lives upon pain of failing to be a graspable.

This is all back of the envelope stuff, but I think it's a start.  

 

Knowledge, Reasons, and Causalism (Draft)

I've finished another draft of a paper on knowledge, reasons, and causes. (I've changed the title because I've discovered that Harman has a paper with the title I thought I'd use.)

Knowledge, Reasons, and Causalism

In this paper, I explain why I don't think the considerations that support the causalist view of rationalizing explanations lends any support to a statist view of epistemic reasons. Almost all of the extant views of the basing relation treat the basis for one's beliefs as states of mind. I don't argue that the view is without any motivation, but I do argue that the only motivation I know of for the view is no motivation at all.  I then point to some surprising consequences of the factualist view of reasons I prefer. (I was surprised by some of these consequences!  Not all the surprises were happy surprises.)

Swinburne on designators and dualism

Another stab at Swinburne's argument for dualism. I don't think the introduction of the notion of an informative rigid designator is at all helpful. Here's why.

Introduction

Swinburne has a new argument for property dualism.  If successful, the argument would seem to show that many familiar forms of physicalism are false.  I don’t think the argument is successful.

The Anti-Physicalist Argument

To understand his argument, we need to understand some of Swinburne’s machinery. Swinburne introduces the notion of an informative rigid designator (IRD) to help introduce identity criteria for properties.  On his view of property identity, properties are individuated by the IRDs that pick them out (2013: 24). Whereas a rigid designator will designate the same thing in every possible world (where it designates anything at all), an IRD is such that one who grasps its meaning will know what something has to be to be designated by that designator:

For a rigid designator … to be an informative rigid designator it must be the case that anyone who knows what the word means … knows a certain set of conditions necessary and sufficient (in any possible world) for a thing to be that thing (whether or not he can state those conditions in words) (2013: 12).

To use a well worn example, think about ‘lightning’ and ‘electrical discharge’.  If it is true that lightning is just electrical discharge, we might expect that it is necessarily the case that lightning is electrical discharge. The expressions seem to rigidly designate the same thing and so there is no possible world in which it’s false that lightning is electrical discharge.  While someone might grasp fully the meaning of lightning without being in a position to say anything at all about electrical discharge (e.g., speakers who were ignorant of the relevant scientific discoveries and had no concept of electricity), one might think that someone who knows what ‘electrical discharge’ means knows what it would take for something to be an electrical discharge and see that lightning fits the bill.

Let me note two interesting (apparent) consequences of this approach.  The first is that an identity sentence involving a pair of IRDs is not simply necessarily true if true but logically necessary if true.  The denial of the sentence would entail a contradiction (2013: 19). The second is that any identity sentence involving a pair of IRDs will be knowable apriori if true (2013: 24).  Thus, if it is not apriori that a pair of IRDs designate the same thing, it is supposed to be necessarily false that they designate the same thing. The sentence that asserts that they designate the same thing would entail a contradiction.

With this much in place, there is a quick argument against the identification of any mental property with any physical property.  To show that mental properties are distinct from any and all physical properties, Swinburne argues that it is not apriori that the IRDs that designate the physical properties or the mental properties designate the mental properties or the physical properties:

Since the informative designators of any physical properties are not logically equivalent to those of any mental properties (since there are different criteria for applying the designators), no mental property is identical to a physical property. The criteria for being in pain are not the same as the criteria for having some brain property … The criteria for being in pain are how the subject feels, and the criteria for brain and behavioural events are what anyone could perceive (2013: 70).  

The argument is quick, but is it effective?  I fear that there are two notions of IRD at play in his discussion. Once we’re clear on what they are, we shall see that his argument is no more persuasive than familiar unpersuasive conceivability arguments against physicalism that don’t make use of his notion of an IRD.  

Evaluating the Argument

In the passage quoted earlier, Swinburne suggested that a speaker who knows the meaning of an IRD will associate a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that something must satisfy to be designated by the IRD in this or in any possible world:

IRD1: If a speaker knows the meaning of ‘a’ where ‘a’ is an IRD that designates a, there is a condition C that is necessary and sufficient for being a in any possible world that the speaker associates with being a.

We can introduce another notion of an IRD, one that’s a bit more demanding:

IRD2: If a speaker knows the meaning of ‘a’ where ‘a’ is an IRD that designates a, for any condition C, a knows whether C is necessary or sufficient for being a in any possible world.

To see that these notions of an IRD are distinct, suppose there are two conditions, C1 and C2, that a meets.  Suppose that satisfying C1 is necessary and sufficient for being a in every possible world. Suppose that satisfying C2 is also necessary and sufficient for being a in every possible world.  A speaker might satisfy the conditions set out by IRD1 for knowing the meaning of ‘a’ by associating C1 with ‘a’ without associating C2 with ‘a’. (Similarly, the speaker might associate C2 with ‘a’ without associating C1 with ‘a’ and still know the meaning of ‘a’.)  While it would be apriori that a satisfies C1, it might not be apriori that a satisfies C2.  According to IRD1, the speaker would know the meaning of ‘a’. According to IRD2, the speaker would not.

It’s quite possible that the notion of knowledge at meaning is itself one that’s subject to various ambiguities. I would like to avoid tricky disagreements as to whether IRD1 or IRD2 captures the true meaning of ‘knowledge of meaning’.  There might be a weak sense in which knowing the meaning of ‘a’ requires satisfying the conditions set out in IRD1. There might be a strong sense in which knowing the meaning requires satisfying the more stringent conditions set out in IRD2.  To fix meanings, let’s refer to these two kinds of knowledge as knowing the meaning in the weak and the strong sense respectively.

A concrete example might help to illustrate the distinction and help to explain why there’s a potential worry here with Swinburne’s argument.  On Swinburne’s view of persons, each person has a thisness that ‘makes’ a person the person he or she is (2013: 151).  Swinburne holds that we know the meaning of various IRDs that we can use to designate ourselves:

Now what sort of designator is ‘I,’ or ‘Richard Swinburne,’ as used by me? These seem to be informative designators. If I know how to use these words, I cannot be mistaken about whether or not they apply to a certain person--given that I am favorably positioned (e.g., his body is my body) with faculties in working order, and not subject to illusion. And when I am considering applying these words to a person in virtue of his having some conscious event, these conditions will be maximally satisfied and no mistake is possible. I am, in Shoemaker’s … phrase, ‘immune to error through misidentification’ (2012: 119).

Suppose that that is so.  This is consistent with the further idea, defended by Kripke (1980), that certain facts about our origins are necessary for us.  If Kripke’s arguments are to be believed (and their conclusions are surely consistent with everything Swinburne has argued for in arguing for dualism), we could not have had our origins in any combination of egg and sperm other than the combination actually was involved in our generation.  We can exploit this to introduce further IRDs that designate us that identify conditions we do not associate with ourselves in using ‘I’ to refer to ourselves.  Indeed, if successful use of ‘I’ turned on knowing our origins, we would lose this immunity to error through misidentification that Swinburne associates with our use of ‘I’.  Thus, there is a perfectly good sense in which George Bush would have grasped the meaning of ‘George Bush’ even if he was in no position to say whether George Bush could have been born into the Kennedy family.  As the example hopefully illustrates, knowing the meaning in this weak sense is both consistent with knowledge of meaning in a stronger sense but is not for that knowledge of meaning in a totally uninteresting sense.

Do we know the meaning of, say, ‘pain’ and ‘firing of C-fibers’?  Swinburne is surely right that there is a perfectly good sense in which we know the meaning of ‘pain’ if we have had painful experiences and can use this term to describe them in the normal way.  We’ve also all read enough philosophy of mind to know something about the firing of C-fibers.  The crucial question is what we know in knowing the meaning.  Do we know the meaning of ‘pain’ in the weak sense or the strong sense?  Suppose that we know the meaning of ‘pain’ and ‘firing of C-fibers’ only in the weak sense. If so, it is consistent with what we know that the criteria of application of ‘pain’ and ‘firing of C-fibers’ will coincide in this and in every possible world.  Thus, knowing that ‘pain’ properly applies to something will not put us in any position to know that ‘firing of C-fibers’ does not also apply.  Thus, while it might not be apriori that anything that is a pain is a firing of C-fibers, it could nevertheless be necessarily true that it is.

The success of Swinburne’s argument, then, depends upon something quite strong.  For any of us to know apriori that a pain is not just the firing of C-fibers, we would have to know the meaning of ‘pain’ and ‘firing of C-fibers’ in the strong sense, not merely the weak sense.  I doubt that any of us have this knowledge. I certainly doubt that having this knowledge is what we have when we know what pain is by learning the criteria for its correct application (i.e., how certain things feel).  In knowing that I feel a certain way, I can know that it is appropriate to say that I’m in pain but I’m not thereby well positioned to assert the stronger claim that what I’m feeling does not require the firing of C-fibers.  What a physicalist should say is that we do not know the meaning of ‘pain’ or ‘firing of C-fibers’ in the strong sense. Once we have distinguished between different senses of knowledge of meaning, there is no reason to be ashamed to say that we don’t have this knowledge now and may never have this knowledge.

The introduction of the distinction between two senses of IRD and two kinds of knowledge of meaning can be independently motivated. Interestingly, it seems to save Swinburne from trouble.  Consider the debates between the Cartesian interactionists and the occasionalists.  Both parties to this debate presumably knew what ‘pain’ meant in what I’ve called the weak sense.  They certainly grasped the criteria for the correct application of the term.  What they disagreed about was whether pain was the sort of thing that could be caused or cause a physical thing without divine intervention.  The Cartesians would impress nobody with this argument:

Our debate is about ‘pain’. The criteria for the correct application of this term has to do with how the subject feels. Knowing the meaning of ‘pain’ involves grasping facts about how things feel to the subject. We could introduce an IRD, ‘o-pain’, that designates a state that must meet two conditions: having the feel that is characteristic of ‘pain’ and being such that it cannot causally interact with anything physical without divine assistance. Since it is not apriori that pain is o-pain and both ‘pain’ and ‘o-pain’ are IRDs, it is not true that pain is o-pain. Thus, your occassionalist view of pain is mistaken.

The occassionalists could run a parallel argument for ‘c-pain’, an IRD that designates a state that has the felt quality of pain and is such that it can causally interact with something physical without divine assistance.  Neither the Cartesian nor the occassionalist would be impressed by the claim that their opponent knew what ‘pain’ meant in the weak and the strong sense.  What both parties should say that what they know about the meaning of ‘pain’ is sufficient for them to apply it correctly and concede that their knowledge of the meaning of ‘pain’ leaves unsettled questions about whether pain is c-pain or o-pain.

Suppose Swinburne were to reject my suggestion that there are two notions of IRD at play and two notions of knowing the meaning of an IRD.  Suppose he insisted that in knowing the criteria that would enable one to correctly apply an IRD, one is thereby in a position to know apriori the conditions it meets.  If he insisted on this, the debate between the Cartesians and occasionalists should worry him.  

It does seem that it is apriori that pain is either c-pain or o-pain, but not apriori that it is one or the other.  Notice that if all necessary truths are apriori and I’m right about the lack of apriori entailments between ‘pain’, ‘o-pain’, and ‘c-pain’, we can generate a contradiction from Swinburne’s system. These three claims, after all, would constitute an inconsistent triad if all necessary truths are apriori:

(i) Necessarily, pain is either c-pain or o-pain.

(ii) Although I grasp the meaning of ‘pain’ and ‘c-pain’, it is not apriori that pain is c-pain.

(iii) Although I grasp the meaning of ‘pain’ and ‘o-pain’, it is not apriori that pain is o-pain.

To see that these three constitute an inconsistent triad in Swinburne’s system, suppose (ii). Since both ‘pain’ and ‘c-pain’ are IRDs, this entails that pain is not c-pain. This entails by (i) that it is o-pain. This, however, is incompatible with (iii) because (iii) entails that pain is distinct from o-pain.

Such contradictions are easily avoidable if tinker with Swinburne’s system. We can say that there are necessary truths about the relationships between things designated by IRDs that are not apriori. If we said this, we could say that (i)-(iii) are true, but then the fact that it is not apriori true that pain is C-fibers firing would be consistent with the fact that pain just is the firing of C-fibers.  Alternatively, we could hold onto the idea that the all necessary truths are apriori and assert that (ii) or (iii) must be mistaken if we concede that what we know about the meaning of ‘pain’, ‘o-pain’, and ‘c-pain’ is sufficient to understand what these terms mean without our understanding putting us in a position to determine which of these claims is true.  If we say this, we shouldn’t be moved by Swinburne’s anti-physicalist argument because we’d have to concede that we know what ‘pain’ is only in the weak sense that doesn’t put us in a position to know apriori whether or not it is the firing of C-fibers.  There are lots of ways of rearranging the deck chairs so as to avoid an apparent contradiction, but on none of these ways of doing so should we think that we’re in any good position to say what pain isn’t simply by virtue of having a painfully good grasp of what it is.   

Conclusion

Everyone knows that there are potential problems with a certain style of apriori argument against physicalism.  The apparent cases of aposteriori necessities should worry us that the apparent power to conceive of a real distinction between two things is really just due to our ignorance of the complex ways that these things are.  The introduction of the distinction between rigid designators and informative rigid designators was supposed to help us overcome this apparent difficulty, but it hasn’t done so at all.  IRDs understood as IRD1s will not underwrite the sort of anti-physicalist argument that Swinburne is after because  it is possible to know the meaning of ‘pain’ in the relevant sense without knowing that nothing can be a pain unless it is a firing of C-fibers.  IRDs understood as IRD2s will not underwrite the anti-physicalist argument that Swinburne is after because it is not at all clear that we know the meaning of ‘pain’ or ‘firing of C-fibers’ in the strong sense.  Our ability to correctly and knowingly apply predicates like ‘pain’, ‘belief’, or ‘desire’ does turn on having criteria for correct application (and so knowledge of their meanings in a weak sense), but not on having the kind of knowledge that’s required for knowledge of meaning in the strong sense.  I submit that the introduction of the notion of an IRD has not helped to advance the case against physicalism at all.

In terms of Swinburne’s overall case against physicalism, the failure of his argument for property dualism is significant.  Physicalists have long held that it is possible to maintain a perfectly respectable sort of physicalism without any commitment to type-identity theory (i.e., the theory that all mental properties are identical to some physical properties).  The physicalists thought that even if type-identity theory might be false, it still might be true that all substances and events were physical substances and physical events.  As Swinburne conceives of the terrain, however, the failure of type-physicalism would seem to immediately lead to the failure of physicalism.  Events are, on his view, nothing more than property instantiations or changes (2013: 1).  If events are conceived of in this way, all mental events must be distinct from physical events once it has been shown that mental and physical properties are distinct.  Substances are, on his view, mental if they have any mental properties essentially (2013: 141).    

References

Kripke, S. 1980. Naming and Necessity.  Blackwell.

Swinburne, R. 2012. How to Determine which is the True Theory of Personal Identity. In G. Gasser and M. Stefan (ed.), Personal Identity: Simple or Complex. Cambridge University Press.

____. 2013.  Mind, Brain, and Free Will. Oxford University Press.

New Blog: Philosophers King's

Charles Cote-Bouchard and Antonio Delussu have started a new blog for KCL philosophy graduate students: Philosopher's Kings.

They have just two posts up, but I think it should be good once they get going.  (Get going!)

Some thoughts on epistemological disjunctivism

Having read Duncan's work on epistemological disjunctivism a few times, I've written something up that explains why I don't think his approach can overcome the basis problem.  I'm in the midst of writing something up on a similar problem that confronts McDowell's epistemological argument for metaphysical disjunctivism. In the meantime, a paper on epistemological disjunctivism and the basis problem.

A beast with two backs

I've had this problem lately finding a place to sit.  In the old flat, I had more seats than I needed but no desk. Now I have a wonderful desk and can't seem to find a place to sit.  I've fixed this. In so doing, I've conclusively refuted Peter van Inwagen.

One chair with a broken back. One chair in need of a seat.

Voila!

Where there had been two objects, we now have a chair with a back and a seat.

This is the most comfortable chair I've ever had.  I'm pleased with myself because I've just done what Peter van Inwagen takes to be impossible--make a comfortable chair out of chairs!

I think Martino Gamper would be proud.

New Blog! Fsopho

Hi all,

There's a new blog that I wanted to draw your attention to:

http://fsopho.wordpress.com/

Fsopho has lots of good posts on issues near and dear to me.

The K took my baby away

On Monday I gave a talk at the Aristotelian society that had to do with the norms of belief (listen here). My view has long been that knowledge isn't the norm of belief (or assertion, practical reason, etc.), but I've started to think that it might be.  The view I defended in Justification and the Truth-Connection was a kind of truth-first view. Starting from the idea that the fundamental epistemic norm is a truth norm, we could say what needed to be said about epistemic normativity by identifying various derivative norms that derive their authority from the truth norm. At the end, we'd say what needs to be said about epistemic normativity without ever having to say anything at all about knowledge.

I've started to change my mind about this. I think there were two reasons for this and I don't think they're unrelated.  First, I had thought that having something as part of your evidence didn't require knowing that the thing was true.  I'm no longer convinced that this is so.  I'm not entirely certain that your evidence can't include p unless you know p, but I'm just not totally persuaded by my old Gettier-based arguments against E=K.  Since I still think that there are norms that govern belief that have to do with whether your beliefs can provide reasons, I've started to shift towards the idea that there is indeed a knowledge norm that governs belief.  

The second reason for the change is the subject of the Aristotelian society talk.  As I was thinking about what to talk about, I was struck by something I suppose I hadn't really thought about before.  Practical assessment seems to be largely outward looking. What I mean is that it seems that the deontic standing of your actions turns largely (if not exclusively) upon whether those actions were fitting in the circumstances.  (There are tricky cases that Steve Sverdlik describes in his excellent book Motive and Rightness, but we can set these aside for now because the point that I want to make doesn't turn on whether his arguments are successful or not.)  Thus, I think Judith Thomson is right when she says that it's an odd idea that we need to look into the agent's head to determine whether some prospective course of action would be permissible. (I'm not convinced that she's drawn the right lesson from this, but that's for another time.)  At any rate, it's striking that everyone seems to think that epistemic assessment is largely inward looking.  We care about whether the agent's reasons are good reasons and how the agent reasoned. The deontic standing of a belief seems to turn on this, not (just) whether it fits the facts.

So, there's an interesting asymmetry between practical and theoretical assessment that I've struggled to understand. Why does one seem to be so excessively concerned with the relationship between guiding and explanatory reasons when the other doesn't seem to be terribly concerned with this at all? 

It's because of this asymmetry that I started to think that the truth-first approach couldn't ultimately explain why the deontic status of one's beliefs turns on the reasons for which one believes and their relation to good reasons to believe.  It seems that any such explanation would have to start from the idea that the content of the fundamental epistemic norm has to do with truth and then try to derive additional norms by appeal to some ideas about what guiding reasons require or about how we're supposed to follow norms. Those claims look pretty good until you realize that these are supposed to be claims about how guiding reasons as such are supposed to work. Those claims threaten to undermine the asymmetry between practical and epistemic assessment.

A better approach, I thought, was a knowledge-first approach.  To the extent that knowing requires believing for good reasons, the knowledge norm could explain why epistemic assessment is inward looking without threatening to undermine the asymmetry by introducing some ancillary assumptions about how norms work or what guiding reasons require. So, I've shifted. You can listen above or read the paper here. I suppose the good news is that most of what I argue for in the book can stay pretty much the same. What changes is that the distinction between justification and knowledge that I thought could be maintained now seems to be undermined.  Oh well. 

What are we supposed to learn from deviant causal chains?

I don't have the patience to work through most papers on causal deviance. This isn't an attempt to solve any of the problems having to do with deviant causal chains, only an attempt to say something about the significance of deviant causal chains.

The problem that deviant causal chains pose for a Davidsonian approach to action is one of the motivations for Steward's agency incompatibilism.  As she sees it, actions just aren't the sorts of things that have causal antecedents. It's a mistake to think of actions as events that have been brought about in the right way by the agent's states of mind or mental events.

Here's a worry.  It seems that you'll run into problems having to do with deviant causal chains in trying to give a causal account of believing for a reason, but it doesn't seem like beliefs are the sorts of things that shouldn't have causal antecedents. Agency incompatibilism has its merits, but I don't think that determinism is a threat to belief.

On Marcus' account, it looks like acting for a reason and believing for a reason are given the same treatment--to believe for a reason or act for a reason is to represent the belief or action as to be believed or done in light of something else. On one way of reading this, deviant chains cannot arise because that requires a causal chain between two distinct existences. A virtue of Marcus' approach is that it does away with the distinct existences. Believing for a reason doesn't involve a causal relation between a reason or some reasons and a belief. It involves representing the fact/proposition believed as to be believed in light of something else and that representation isn't a relation between two distinct existences.

Here are two worries. First, Marcus' account cannot be applied to the case of non-inferential belief.  Thus, the account seems insufficiently general. Whatever story we tell about believing for a reason in the non-inferential case, we'll need to rule out deviancy in this case without using his trick.  You might think that whatever we do to understand the relationship between the reason for which you believe and your belief in, say, the case of perceptual knowledge, we'll be able to tell a similar story in the case of inferential knowledge.  Second, there are deviant causal chains that don't have to do with belief, action, or reasons at all.  There are cases of that show that the connection between, say, the fragile glass' shattering and the striking of the glass isn't right for the glass to have shattered because of its fragility.  (I think I owe this point to Hyman).

Swinburne's designators

I'm reading Swinburne's Mind, Brain, and Free Will (OUP 2013) and trying to get a grip on his latest arguments against physicalism.  In the discussion, the notion of an informative rigid designator seems to play an important role. He says that rigid designators are supposed to designate the same thing in every possible world. (Let's bracket worries about what rigid designators designate in worlds where there's nothing that exists that could be designated by the expression.) Some of these (e.g., 'Richard Swinburne', 'This', 'Here') can be used by speakers who know the meaning of these expressions without knowing a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that the thing designated must meet to be the thing designated by the designator.  With informative rigid designators, however, 'it must be the case that anyone who knows what the word means ... knows a certain set of conditions necessary in sufficient (in any possible world) for a thing to be that thing' (12).  

The notion of an informative rigid designator does a lot of work in Swinburne's book. He says that properties are individuated by the informative designators that pick them out. As a consequence of this, it is a purely apriori matter whether one property is the same as another.  (As you might expect, the fact that there are no true apriori claims about the relationship between mental and physical properties is taken to be a reason to reject type identity claims. (And since events are defined in terms of properties and their instantiations, we get a quick argument against certain familiar forms of token identity theories. Editorial note: the quickness of that argument is a reason to worry about his approach to these issues, not a reason to worry about the status of token physicalism. The fact that you can't take seriously the idea that token physicalism might be true even if type physicalism is false just means that you aren't trying very hard to get the notion of an event right.)) 

So, what are these bloody informative rigid designators?  I fear that Swinburne's guidance isn't quite as helpful as it should be.  Here are two ways of thinking about IRDs that won't suit Swinburne's purposes but does seem to satisfy his initial gloss on the notion: 

IRD1: If I know the meaning of 'this' when I say 'This is F', I know that for any x, x = the semantic value of 'this' iff 'this is x' is true.  Since I'd know a condition that's necessary and sufficient for determining whether any x meets this (trivially because I know that they'd have to be identical to the semantic value of 'this'), all RDs are IRDs.

IRD2: If I introduce a descriptive name such as 'Julius' by means of a description, such as 'The person who actually invented the zip', I'd know a condition that's necessary and sufficient for any x to be Julius. For any x to be Julius, x has to be identical to the actual inventor of the zip.  This allows us to maintain some distinction between RDs and IRDs if we say that some such descriptive knowledge is necessary.  

It's obvious that the first proposal isn't at all in the spirit of Swinburne's suggestion and pretty clear that neither way of introducing IRDs would suit his purposes.  That's because it's supposed to be apriori whether two IRDs pick out the same thing and the case of descriptive names shows that it's quite possible to introduce a kind of RD where it's true that one thing is picked out in two ways without it being apriori that this is so.

It seems what Swinburne needs, then, is something stronger: 

IRD3: If I know the meaning of an IRD, I know _all_ the conditions necessary and sufficient for its proper application, not just a condition that's necessary and a condition that's sufficient.

He says, "Since the informative designators of any physical properties are not logically equivalent to those of any mental properties (since there are different criteria for applying the designators), no mental property is identical to a physical property" (69).

He says, 'The criteria for being in pain are how the subject feels, and the criteria for brain and behavioral events are what anyone could perceive. And the same applies to any other pure or impure mental property' (70).  

Notice that his argument that's supposed to establish that mental properties are distinct from physical properties because the IRDs for mental and physical properties (and, by extension, events) is that the criteria for _applying_ IRDs for the physical properties make reference to things that are publicly observable and the IRDs for the mental properties make reference to how things feel.  Now, if the subject who knew the meanings for the relevant IRDs knew all the necessary and sufficient conditions for their applicability, it seems that they'd know _more_ than just the criteria of application. That just requires knowing a sufficient condition for the IRD's application.  What the argument needs to establish non-identity, however, is both knowledge that, say, pain requires just that something feels a certain way AND ALSO that there's no physical property that's necessarily instantiated by virtue of things feeling a certain way.  

So, there seems to be a slip. It seems that Swinburne's argument against physicalism starts with the plausible idea that we know the meaning of the IRDs we use to talk about the mental where the plausibility of that idea turns on thinking of IRDs on the IRD2 model. That won't support the argument he's offering, however, because that requires thinking of IRDs on the IRD3 model. If we're clear that that's the relevant notion we have in mind, then there's just no reason at all to think that ordinary speakers know the meanings of the IRDs they use to refer to the properties that they do.  

Maybe the quick way of putting the point is this. It's plausible that we know conditions _sufficient_ for the application of 'pain' or 'C-fiber firing', but only because this knowledge doesn't require knowledge of the total set of necessary and sufficient conditions that have to obtain for the term to be properly applied.  What we need to establish non-identity claims is knowledge that meeting the condition for successfully attributing 'pain' does not involve, inter alia, meeting the condition for successful of application of, say, 'C-fiber firing'.  Swinburne's argument goes nowhere precisely because it's supposed to provide us with this knowledge. Instead, it subtly assumes that we have this knowledge in an attempt to establish a non-identity claim.  Being slippery in how we talk about IRDs just obscures this fact.

Narrow contents and justification: security vs. sufficiency

I've been thinking a bit about the varieties of mentalist views about propositional justification. There's a view that's attractive to those of us who have internalist instincts (not me!) according to which the only states of mind that contribute to justification are those that are phenomenally individuated.  This includes some intentional states, but not states with wide content.  (I'm following Smithies' discussion of the view here.)

Here's a rough worry about the view.  It doesn't deny that the belief that, say, this glass contains water can be justified on the basis of your experiences. It insists that its justification is provided by phenomenally individuated states which are supposed to be common to subjects on Earth and Twin Earth. Here's the objection to this proposal:

P1. To have sufficient justification to believe propositions about the external world, these propositions have to be more likely than their negations on the evidence one has for these propositions.

P2. If these propositions are the contents of beliefs with wide contents, phenomenal mentalism implies that these propositions will not be more likely than their negations on the evidence one has for these propositions.

C. Phenomenal mentalism implies that one cannot have sufficient justification to hold beliefs with wide contents.

The first premise says that you cannot justifiably believe p if you need evidence to believe p and the evidential probability of p is not greater than the evidential probability of ¬p.  I take this premise to be eminently plausible. To deny it, it would have to be possible to have beliefs about the external world that were not more likely to be true than not on one’s evidence.  It’s not at all plausible to deny that.

Let 'w' be the proposition that the glass contains water and 't' be the proposition that it contains t-water. Now, we might suppose that our subject only grasps the concepts to entertain w but the grounds she has for believing w are the same grounds as the grounds her counterpart has for believing t.

The second premise says that the evidence you have to believe this glass contains water (‘w’) is the same evidence you have to believe that this glass contains twater (‘t’). The evidential probability of w cannot be greater than .5 because it is equal to the evidential probability of t and w and t are incompatible. (Indeed, since the evidential probability of the disjunction of t and w isn't 1, it will be less than .5.) Even if these exhausted the possibilities (which they don’t), w wouldn’t be more likely than not given your evidence.

Might the phenomenal mentalist try to avoid this worry by arguing that probabilities are only defined relative to propositions that you grasp? I suppose that's a possibility, but it seems like an odd one. Without going this route, it looks like the security of the grounds for our beliefs about the external world undermines the thought that these grounds are sufficient.

Another one for the knowledge norms

P: You stole from my kin!

U: Who was fixin' to betray us.

P: You didn't know that at the time.

U: So I borrowed it till I did know.

P: That don't make no sense!

P: It's a fool who seeks logic in the chambers of the heart.



I like this exchange. (From O' Brother Where Art Thou) As I see it, Pete wins. Evidence for the knowledge norm of practical reason?

Did Davidson slip? A quick one on reasons and causes

Finally tracked down my copy of _Essays on Actions & Events_.  There are places where Helen Steward describes a certain view about the relationship between singular and sentential causal claims as 'Davidsonian', but I wasn't entirely clear where Davidson defends the view.  Found it. In 'Causal Relations', he discusses the view that causes correspond to sentences rather than singular terms for events.  On such a view, the logical form of (1) is given by (2):

(1) The short circuit caused the fire.
(2) Because there was a short circuit, there was a fire.

He argues persuasively that these differ in logical form and it seems that one of the take away lessons of that we should think of causal relations as holding between events and causal explanatory relations as holding between something else entirely. (He says sentences, but I'd prefer propositions or facts. Let's just call everything in this lot 'dicta'.)  This leaves us with a question, which is how singular causal claims are related to sentential causal claims like (2).  Davidson suggests on pp. 155 that (1) entails (2), but (2) doesn't entail (1).

I'm sort of surprised to see Davidson say this.  If swallowing the Burgundy just is swallowing the poison, then wouldn't Davidson have to agree that both of these are true if one of them is?

(3) The swallowing of the Burgundy caused the death.
(4) The swallowing of the poison caused the death.

He wouldn't hold, however, that these are both true:

(5) Because there was a swallowing of Burgundy, there was a death.
(6) Because there was a swallowing of poison, there was a death.

I don't see how (5) and (6) can be entailed by (3) and (4) if both (3) and (4) is true but (5) is false.  The truth of the singular causal claims doesn't turn on how the event is picked out. Sentential claims like (5) and (6) seem to provide us with information about causally relevant features that isn't provided by the singular causal claims that Davidson suggests entails them.  So, he must be wrong, right?

I've been working through Davidson because I've been struggling to understand why he might have thought that reasons were causes.  He says that they are in 'Actions, Reasons, and Causes', but I don't see anywhere in there any reason to think that reasons are causes as opposed to dicta.  If he thought that sentences like (1) entailed (2) because (2) was really just some sort of generalization of (1) [a view that seems just completely unmotivated, so far as I can tell], then maybe he thought it didn't matter much whether we thought of reasons as causes or dicta. If there's no logical relationship between (1) and (2), however, maybe the question is a bit more pressing.

Here's a pitch for identifying reasons with dicta rather than causes.  First, let's assume that Davidson is right and nothing can be both a cause and something that corresponds with or is the explanans.  Second, let's note that we can identify the cause of an event and be utterly in the dark as to why something came to pass.  It seems that questions about relevance often arise after we've identified a cause.  It seems that these questions have all been put to rest, however, once an explanation is in place.  We should identify reasons with dicta rather than causes for just this reason.  When you have the reasons before you and they figure in a correct explanation, questions of relevance have all been settled. The singular causal claims don't settle these questions.  So, singular causal claims don't identify reasons.

Sincerity, Assertion, and a Case for Common Standards

Another quick post, this time on assertion.  I've been trying to finish off an introductory piece on the norms of assertion and I'm not quite sure what to think about a certain argument.  

Some of us think that there are common epistemic standards that govern assertion and belief. If (<-- assertion="" be="" belief.="" belief="" d="" div="" expect="" following="" if="" is="" it="" knowledge="" nbsp="" norm="" of="" onsider="" or="" say="" that="" the="" then="" thesis.="" we="" would="">

Commonality: If one must not assert p because one lacks sufficient warrant to do so, one must not believe p

Commonality implies that if knowledge is the norm of assertion, it must be the norm of belief. Question. Why should we accept Commonality?

Kvanvig mentions an argument for Commonality in his paper on assertion and lotteries, but I don't think that he endorses the argument. If I recall, he mentions it, sets it aside, and offers an argument that strikes me as being entirely plausible. Forget _that_ argument, though, and consider the one that he sets aside. The argument appeals to a kind of sincerity norm:

Sincerity: One must not assert p unless one believes p.

The argument can be stated as follows:

P1. One must not assert p unless one believes p.  P2. One must not believe p if C obtains.C. One must not assert p if C obtains.

I think I have two worries about the argument.  The first is that I'm not sure the 'must' is the right kind of 'must'.  Commonality, I take it, is about a distinctively epistemic requirement. It's not clear to my mind whether Sincerity is about a distinctively epistemic requirement.  Actually, I wouldn't think that insincerity in assertion is an epistemic failing at all.  So, there's the worry about equivocation here.  Even if that's a worry that we can put to rest, isn't the argument invalid?  Compare it to this one, which I think must be invalid:

P1. One must not apologize for breaking the neighbor’s window unless one breaks the neighbor’s window.

P2. One must not break the neighbor’s window if the neighbor has not given one permission to break it.

C. One must not apologize for breaking the neighbor’s window if the neighbor has not given one permission to break it.

Am I right that these arguments are parallel? Am I right that the second argument is invalid? (It seems the premises are true and the conclusion is false. That's pretty good evidence of invalidity, isn't it?)

Reasons and abilities

I really like this paper of John Hyman's. Go read it.

Welcome back.  After hemming and hawing for a while, I've come around to the idea that you can't act for the reason that p unless you know p. Previously, I had argued that various sorts of Gettier cases caused trouble for the idea. I know think that I'm wrong.  I don't want to dwell on that.

Hyman offers an account of knowledge according to which it's a species of ability, not belief.  Knowledge is the ability to do things, or refrain from doing things, or believe, or want, or doubt things, for reasons that are facts (441).  While this strikes me as entirely correct, a weaker claim would do for my purposes. Let's suppose knowing p entails having the ability to X for the reason that p.  

In previous work, I've grappled with some of Fantl and McGrath's suggestions about justification and reasons. Their view is that to justifiably believe p, one must have the right to treat p as if it's a reason.  It wasn't always clear to my mind whether they thought that to justifiably believe p, p must be a reason that you can treat as such. In places they seemed to like this idea. In others, it wasn't clear.  As far as I can tell, their current view is that motivating reasons can consist of falsehoods, so they might endorse both the authority idea and the ability idea: 

Authority: To justifiably believe p, one must have justification to treat p as if it's a reason.
Ability: To justifiably believe p, one must have the ability to treat p as a reason for X-ing (for some appropriate X).

It's also clear, I think, that if they were convinced that to X for the reason that p, p has to be true, they'd drop Ability and retain Authority.  Now, I think splitting these two up is a rather strange idea. If we want to understand the point of belief, surely the point of belief is to provide one with reasons that one can then reason from and treat as reasons. If any belief doesn't do that, it seems to violate the fundamental norm of belief. Norm violations can be excused, but they don't count as justified when there's no further norm that would require the belief.

That's a big picture sort of argument. I don't expect it to persuade anyone unless I add in lots and lots of detail that I won't repeat here. Instead, let me offer an alternative line of argument. On standard accounts of doxastic justification, doxastic justification is propositional justification plus proper basing. To justifiably believe p, one must have a justification to believe p and that has to be the reason for which one believes.  With this much in place, we can easily establish this much: to justifiably believe p, there must be something known that serves as the basis for one's belief.

In some cases, it's clear that there's no further reason apart from the fact believed that's eligible as a basis for belief. If so, the distinction between justification and knowledge should collapse.  What about the other cases? It will be interesting to see if the argument can generalise. (I think it can, but doing so will wait for later. It just repeats some arguments connecting the factivity of evidence to the factivity of justification discussed in the book.) Anyway, surely this is controversial enough. There are only a handful of people who think that to justifiably believe with non-inferential justification one must know.  

I'd be curious to know whether there's any principled reason for pulling apart assessments of authority from assessments of ability.  I think people think that justification is a normative concept, knowledge might be a concept that's tied to abilities, and assume that there's a kind of independence here. Maybe there's no good reason to think that.  Maybe claims about abilities have some bearing on claims about normative authority.

Arkansas, Abortion, and Notion of Specific Intent

You might have heard about the "Heartbeat Protection Act" (SB 134), a bill recently passed by the Arkansas House of Representatives. (You can read about it here.) The bill is supposed to ban abortions after 12 weeks (barring special circumstances). Because this was crafted by the Arkansas House of Representatives, I thought there was a fair chance that it would contain some colossal cuss up.  I found the text of the bill (here) and I think I might have found the colossal cuss up.  

Here's what the bill would prohibit: 

A person authorized to perform abortions under Arkansas law shall 29 not perform an abortion on a pregnant woman with the specific intent of causing or abetting the termination of the life of an unborn human individual whose heartbeat has been detected under § 20-16-1303 and is twelve (12) weeks or greater gestation. 

Notice the phrase 'specific intent'.  My initial worry about the bill's language is this. In discussions of abortion in moral philosophy, a distinction is often drawn between what's foreseen and what's intended. A doctor could remove the fetus knowing that it would result in the death of the fetus without intending the fetus' death (e.g., if the doctor's purpose was to remove a cancerous uterus and this required removing the fetus).  If a doctor can remove the fetus without intending the the termination of the fetus' life, it would seem that the bill wouldn't prohibit abortions after 12 weeks of gestation.

Of course, moral philosophy is one thing and the law is something else entirely.  As a friend pointed out in a scholarly discussion of this (on Facebook), the law will often say that an agent did something intentionally so long as they did something knowingly. If you knew with practical certainty that something would result, that would be sufficient to establish that you did something intentionally (e.g., if you plant a bomb on a plane with the purpose of killing a rival but without hoping the injure the other passengers, you  would count as intentionally injuring or killing the other passengers if you knew with practical certainty that this would result).  

If that's the end of it, then maybe I didn't find the colossal cuss up.  It turns out that matters might be more complicated still.  The legislature used the phrase 'specific intent', and I've been told that there's a difference between specific and general intent in the law.  Here's a passage taken from United States v. Bailey, 444 (1980) (here) (Thanks to Andrew Wake):

At common law, crimes generally were classified as requiring either "general intent" or "specific intent." This venerable distinction, however, has been the source of a good deal of confusion. As one treatise explained:

"Sometimes `general intent' is used in the same way as `criminal intent' to mean the general notion of mens rea, while `specific intent' is taken to mean the mental state required for a particular crime. Or, `general intent' may be used to encompass all forms of the mental state requirement, while `specific intent' is limited to the one mental state of intent. Another possibility is that `general intent' will be used to characterize an intent to do something on an undetermined occasion, and `specific intent' to denote an intent to do that thing at a particular time and place." W. LaFave & A. Scott, Handbook on Criminal Law 28, pp. 201-202 (1972) (footnotes omitted) (hereinafter LaFave & Scott). 

This ambiguity has led to a movement away from the traditional dichotomy of intent and toward an alternative analysis of mens rea. See id., at 202. This new approach, exemplified [444 U.S. 394, 404]   in the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code, is based on two principles. First, the ambiguous and elastic term "intent" is replaced with a hierarchy of culpable states of mind. The different levels in this hierarchy are commonly identified, in descending order of culpability, as purpose, knowledge, recklessness, and negligence. 4 See LaFave & Scott 194; Model Penal Code 2.02. Perhaps the most significant, and most esoteric, distinction drawn by this analysis is that between the mental states of "purpose" and "knowledge." As we pointed out in United States v. United States Gypsum Co., 438 U.S. 422, 445 (1978), a person who causes a particular result is said to act purposefully if "`he consciously desires that result, whatever the likelihood of that result happening from his conduct,'" while he is said to act knowingly if he is aware "`that that result is practically certain to follow from his conduct, whatever his desire may be as to that result.'"

So, maybe this dog will hunt. If specific intent requires conscious purpose or desire and a doctor can perform an abortion without the conscious purpose or desire to terminate the life of the fetus, there might be a problem with the bill after all. Or, maybe not. I'm not an expert.  That's what the comments box is for. 

Draft of Foley Review

Richard Foley, When is True Belief Knowledge? Princeton University

Introduction

The orthodox view is that true belief is that true belief is sometimes knowledge.  What distinguishes the true beliefs that make for knowledge from those that don’t? Is it that a person is justified in believing a true proposition? No, not if Gettier is right. Is it reliability? Sensitivity? Safety? Aptness? No, not if Foley is right. If Foley is right, it was a mistake to try to find some general differentiating condition that distinguishes knowing p from being justified in believing correctly that p.  In his bold new book, Foley argues that what we need to add to true belief to get knowledge is more true belief.  If you believe p without knowing p, you’re either mistaken about p or there’s some important truth that you’re missing.  If you’re right about p and you have adequate information, you’ll know p.

What does it take to have adequate information?  Foley understands information as true belief.  Adequacy isn’t understood in terms of quantity.  You might have little information concerning p and still have enough to know p.  The adequacy of your information doesn’t supervene upon facts about the true beliefs you have.  Somebody could have the very same true beliefs that you do and not know something you do.  Adequate information seems to be defined by what’s missing.  Your information is adequate if you’re not missing an important truth.  If your belief about p is correct and there’s no important truth that you’re missing, you know that p. If there’s some important truth that you’re missing, you won’t know that p. 

What’s an important truth? Foley doesn’t think that there’s much that important truths share in common.  Just as the particularists seem to think that right acts share little in common apart from rightness, Foley seems to think that what important truths share in common is importance.  He recommends an “ecumenical” approach.  Sometimes an important truth might concern a clue that the subject is missing. Sometimes it might have to do with the reliability of processes or methods responsible for a subject’s beliefs.  Sometimes differences in practical stakes mean that truths that aren’t important for you will be important to others.  Foley is skeptical of the commonly held view that there’s some general way of characterizing the defects and depravity that undermine knowledge.  If there’s no general account of important truths, how can Foley’s approach shed light on the notion of knowledge?  He thinks we have a knack for finding important truths.  In any of the normal cases where a subject’s true belief doesn’t constitute knowledge, he thinks we’ll find the important truth if we look for it.

It’s not difficult to recommend Foley’s excellent book.  He has offered a genuinely novel approach to the theory of knowledge.  It’s not immediately clear whether his approach improves upon extant approaches you’ll already find in the literature.  If you’re dissatisfied with the standard accounts of knowledge, you’ll likely agree that a new approach is called for.  Time will tell whether Foley’s approach will advance the discussion.

When is True Belief Knowledge? is divided into twenty-seven chapters.  In the first seven, Foley outlines the basic contours of his account. In the remaining chapters, he addresses some puzzles, discusses different sources of knowledge, and argues that the theories of knowledge and rationality/justification should be developed independently from one another.  In this review, I’ll identify some features of his view that strike me as being the most problematic.    

Rationality and Knowledge

According to Foley, knowledge doesn’t require rationality or justification.  A virtue of this approach, he says, is that:

It frees the theory of knowledge from the dilemma of either having to insist on an overly intellectual conception of knowledge, according to which one is able to provide an intellectual defense of whatever one knows, or straining to introduce a nontraditional notion of justified belief because the definition of knowledge is thought to require this (126).

If rationality/justification aren’t understood in terms of their relationship with knowledge, how should they be understood?  Foley offers an account of rationality/justification in Chapter 26.  Believing p is epistemically rational, on his view, if it is epistemically rational for you to believe that believing p would acceptably satisfy the epistemic goal of now having accurate and comprehensive belief (148).  Believing p is justified if it is epistemically rational to believe that your procedures with respect to p have been acceptable given your goals and your limitations (132).  Epistemic rationality is, on Foley’s view, the foundational concept in an account of practical rationality.  Whether it would be rational to f in sense X (e.g., moral, prudential, etc.) depends upon the rationality of believing that f-ing would do an acceptably good job at satisfying your goals of type X (128).[1]  Perhaps if ‘goal’ is understood broadly enough, the account can provide an account of overall practical rationality.  Some provision should probably be made to handle cases where agents have adopted confused or unreasonable goals (e.g., it isn’t clear that there’s a rational way to go about trying to count the moon, but perhaps somebody could have that as a goal).

One area of potential concern has to do with pragmatic encroachment.  At various places Foley expresses some sympathy for the view that knowledge can be harder to attain when the practical stakes are high.  It’s not clear what role, if any, practical significance plays in his account of epistemic rationality.  That’s because it’s not at all clear what role the practical stakes can play in determining whether believing p would satisfy your twin epistemic goals. Provided that p isn’t itself about some practical subject matter, it seems that the account would exclude practical considerations.  Would an account that combines a purist account of epistemic rationality with an impurist account of knowledge be stable? It might be. It might not be incoherent.  Would it accommodate our intuitions? That’s hard to say.  Much of the intuitive motivation for accepting pragmatic encroachment has to do with intuitions about when it’s rational to proceed on the information you have and when it would be rational to search for additional evidence before making a decision.[2]  In light of this, it’s hard to see how to square the standard intuitions offered in support of pragmatic encroachment for knowledge with a seemingly purist account of rational belief if Foley is right and the rational thing to do is determined by rational beliefs about what would do an acceptable job meeting your goals.

A second area of potential concern has to do with the seriousness of the dilemma Foley wishes to avoid.  There are many plausible accounts of rational/justified that would preserve the link between knowledge and justification that don’t lead to an overly intellectual conception of either knowledge or justification.  (It’s not clear, for example, why Foley’s own theory of rational belief doesn’t solve this dilemma since it’s not clear whether there are cases where you know p where it’s not rational to believe that your belief concerning p would do an acceptably good job in terms of meeting your own epistemic goals.)  Moreover, we do have some independent reason to think that knowledge and justification do go together.  Suppose you know (p or q) and that you justifiably believe ~p without knowing ~p.  You infer q.  It seems that there must be something going for believing q because you’ve deduced q from a set of premises justifiably believed or known.  We can’t assume that q is known because it’s not deduced from a set of known premises (and it’s consistent with what’s been said that q is false).  To accommodate the intuition that there’s something good about believing q, we either need to say that the belief is rational/justified or introduce some wholly new term of epistemic approval.  I can’t see any good reason to coin a new term here to pick out beliefs that are good in some way because deduced from premises justifiably believed or known that are not themselves justified or known, so I’d prefer to describe the belief as rational or as justified.  This seems to require that there’s a link between knowledge and rationality/justification.  Assuming that there is a connection between knowledge and justification helps us make sense of what’s happening in cases with this shape.[3]

Let me mention one final concern.  One of the costs of severing the connection between rationality and knowledge that’s emerged from the recent literature on epistemic norms is that it’s difficult to explain why certain combinations of belief and concessions about what your not in a position to know strike us as being irrational.  If we know that knowing has nothing at all to do with rationality and rationality has nothing at all to do with knowledge, why is it irrational to believe outright, say, that dogs bark while conceding that you don’t know whether they do? This is easily explained on views that treat knowledge as a goal, an aim, or a standard of correctness and uses the regulative function of knowledge to explain the standards of rationality.  

Is knowledge a mutt?

On Foley’s approach, pedigree doesn’t matter in the way that it does in more familiar accounts of knowledge.  He doesn’t think that reliability, for example, is a necessary condition for knowledge.  He does acknowledge that it will often seem to us that a case of unreliably formed, true belief isn’t a case of knowledge, but he thinks that the reason that the subject doesn’t know is that the subject is missing an important truth.  It’s not unreliability, per se, that undermines the belief’s epistemic standing.

To test this, he thinks we should consult our intuitions about cases involving subjects that have maximally comprehensive accurate sets of beliefs.  Consider an example:

Imagine that Sally’s beliefs are as accurate and comprehensive as it is humanly possible for them to be. She has true beliefs about the basic laws of the universe, and in terms of these she can explain what has happened, is happening, and will happen. She can explain the origin of the universe, the origin of the earth, the mechanisms by which cells age, and the year in which the sun will die.  She even has a complete and accurate explanation of how it is that she came to have all this information.  Consider a truth p-cells about the aging mechanism in cells.  Sally believes p-cells, and because her beliefs about these mechanisms are maximally accurate and comprehensive, there are few gaps of any sort in her information, much less important ones. Thus, she knows p-cells (33).

It’s consistent with the story that Sally doesn’t meet the conditions on knowledge imposed by a reliabilist account of knowledge.  Let’s stipulate that the processes that produce Sally’s beliefs are unreliable. We can suppose that it was a series of strange processes and unlikely events that led her to believe p-cells. Under these conditions, is Foley right that Sally knows?

I don’t share Foley’s intuition about the case.  If we stipulate that Sally is trapped inside Nozick’s experience machine, I don’t think she knows p-cells.  On this stipulation, I also fear that the case hasn’t been described in suitably neutral terms. Suppose someone believes correctly that the barn burned down because a cow kicked over a lantern.  Suppose, however, that she doesn’t know that the barn burned down, doesn’t know that a cow kicked over a lantern, and doesn’t know that the barn burned down because a cow kicked over a lantern. (Because our subject has been stuffed into Nozick’s experience machine, her beliefs are only accidentally correct.)  Can she explain why the barn burned down?  I don’t think so.  She can explain why barns burn, why cows topple lanterns, etc., but she cannot explain why events she didn’t know about transpired.  Give Sally all the knowledge she needs to be able to explain these things, and I’d probably agree that she knows p-cells. I’m less inclined to do so if you describe the case carefully as one in which most of her beliefs are only accidentally true.

Anticipating this response, Foley tries to motivate his description of the case by noting that “Sally is fully aware that however strange and unlikely this history may be, in her case it led to her having maximally accurate and comprehensive beliefs” (34).  I still have reservations. First, I don’t think he’s entitled to describe the case as one in which Sally is ‘aware’ of these facts. Can you be aware that p if you don’t know that p?  He might argue that Sally is aware of the facts related to p-cells, but that’s a controversial description that needs justification.  Second, Sally’s beliefs about her own strange and unlikely history are among the beliefs that aren’t grounded by reliable processes.  If we think those beliefs don’t constitute knowledge, it’s not clear that they’d help to turn her belief about p-cells into knowledge.

Lotteries

How does Foley’s approach handle lottery propositions?  Billy believes that his ticket, #345, lost after the drawing was held, but he won’t know that it lost simply on the basis of his correct beliefs about the set up of the lottery and the probability of losing. Foley says that his ignorance is due to some important gap in his information. For example, he doesn’t have this bit of information—ticket #543 was the winner (72).

Is this approach preferable to approaches that impose a sensitivity or safety condition?  That’s not clear.  If the paper announces that #543 is the winner Billy will learn by reading the paper that he lost. So far, everyone is on the same page. What if the paper didn’t announce the winning number but simply announced that Billy’s ticket lost?  If he reads that, he should know he lost.  If that’s sufficient for knowledge, what important truth was Billy missing before he read the paper that he has now?  The important piece of information he’s missing can’t be that his ticket lost.  If information is true belief, that’s information he already had. Maybe the important truth he’s missing is not a truth about what it says in a paper.  This would be an odd way to account for the intuition.  You might think that that information only matters because it provides you with information (in some intuitive sense of ‘provides information’ that’s more demanding than the notion Foley works with) about the winners and losers.  A natural explanation as to why reading the paper matters is that it’s only after you’ve read the paper that you can have a sensitive belief or a safe belief.  While it’s not clear that our intuitive verdicts about lotteries are at odds with Foley’s view, it’s not clear whether his view has the explanatory resources to account for those intuitions in the straightforward ways that rivals accounts do.     

Ignorance as a lack

In Chapter 20, Foley discusses cases in which we admit that we’re not in a position to know something.  Some philosophers think that if you appreciate that you’re not in a position to know p, you can’t then rationally believe p.  Foley thinks that there’s nothing at all puzzling about believing what you concede you don’t know.  He’s right, I think, that reports of the form ‘I believe p, but I don’t know it’ are common (101). Still, there are puzzles lurking here. We often say ‘I believe p’ as a way of hedging. It’s a way of expressing that we don’t take on the commitment to the truth of p typical of outright or full belief.  What about cases of full belief in which you concede you don’t know?  Consider, ‘Dogs bark but I don’t know that they do’.  Here, the speaker expresses the belief that dogs bark and concedes that he doesn’t know that they do.  This strikes many of us as irrational.  Can you know the proposition expressed?  To know that dogs bark, there would have to be no important truths that you were missing.  The second conjunct is true iff you don’t know that dogs bark.  Assuming you believe correctly that dogs bark, the second conjunct couldn’t be true unless there’s some important truth that you were missing.  Foley’s account explains why you can’t know both conjuncts.

Foley’s account nicely handles this sort of case, but I don’t think it can easily handle beliefs expressed by statements of the form, ‘p, but my evidence doesn’t show/establish that p’.  It doesn’t seem that you can know that the proposition this expresses is true.  How can we explain this?  The proposition expressed isn’t necessarily false. If someone believed this without knowing that it’s true, Foley’s account implies that there’s some important truth that the subject is missing.  I can’t think of what that truth might be.

One could try to explain why the proposition can’t be known as follows:

To know the conjunction, you’d have to know both conjuncts. To know p, you’d have to have evidence that establishes p.  If you have that evidence, the second conjunct is false and the conjunction is not known. If you lack that evidence, you don’t know the first conjunct and the conjunction is not known. The conjunction is not knowable.

This explanation isn’t available to Foley because he wouldn’t want to say that knowing p requires having evidence that establishes p.[4] 

One could offer a different style of explanation:

To know the conjunction, you’d have to know both conjuncts.  To know p, you can’t be irrational in believing p.  Believing the second conjunct makes believing the first conjunct irrational.  You can’t know the conjunction without believing the second conjunct.  The conjunction is not knowable.

If he offers this second sort of explanation, he can say that having evidence that shows that p isn’t necessary for knowing. Instead, he can say that not believing that one lacks this evidence is necessary for knowing.  While this seems to be the better route for Foley to take, it faces a handful of problems.  First, this explanation assumes that your ignorance is due to a presence, not an absence.  It’s not due to the fact that you’re missing some truth, but due to the presence of a set of attitudes that’s rationally self-defeating.  Second, this explanation is shallow.  If it didn’t matter whether you had evidence that showed that p, why would it matter what view you had on whether you had this evidence?  Some explanation of the irrationality of believing p whilst believing that your evidence doesn’t show p is in order.  Does it fall out of Foley’s account of rationality? It’s not obvious that it does.  Moreover, it’s not clear that Foley’s account of rationality will help him explain the relevant data if it’s part of Foley’s account of knowledge that knowledge doesn’t require rationality.  

How serious are the problems discussed above? Foley might be right that ignorance is typically due to some lack or deficiency. Cases discussed in this section suggest that the gap isn’t always due to some lack of information.  Some conjunctive propositions might be unknowable truths because it would be irrational to believe the conjuncts in combination.  The irrationality precludes knowledge. Add all the true beliefs you like and you’ll not restore the rationality needed for knowledge.

Knowledge Blocks

Foley acknowledges that a pure version of his view might be difficult to defend. Conceding that his account won’t accommodate all of our intuitions, he suggests that a perfectly good fallback position would be one that acknowledges ‘knowledge blocks’. Think of a knowledge block as something that interferes with the normal conditions for knowledge, say, by preventing the subject from meeting some minimum standard of rationality, reliability, tethering of belief to experience, etc.  On the modified version of the view, knowledge is true belief with adequate information without any knowledge blocks.

To accommodate intuitions, it seems that Foley would need to introduce knowledge blocks. By doing so, it seems he would have to impose general rationality and reliability requirements on knowledge.  Can he do this while maintaining the distinctiveness of his approach?  That remains to be seen.  It depends upon whether the notion of an important truth does any explanatory work once a sufficient set of knowledge blocks is introduced.  

  

References

Adler, J.  2002.  Belief’s Own Ethics. MIT University Press.

Fantl, J. and M. McGrath.  2002.  Evidence, Pragmatics, and Justification.  Philosophical Review 111: 67-94.

Williamson, T. 2007. On Being Justified in One’s Head. In M. Timmons, J. Greco, and A. Mele (ed.), Rationality and the Good: Critical Essays on the Ethics and Epistemology of Robert Audi (Oxford University Press).

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[1] As stated, the account is sketchy.  There are two areas that could use further discussion. The first is that he provides an account of goal-relative practical rationality, but no account of overall practical rationality.  Given the goal of meeting your moral obligations, it would be practically rational in the moral sense to f if it is rational to believe that f-ing would do acceptably well at meeting that goal. Given the goal of looking after your own interests, it would be practically irrational in the prudential sense to f if it is rational to believe f-ing would prevent you from meeting that goal.  What about all things considered practical rationality?  Is that notion confused?  Can we provide an account of that notion in terms of, say, some overarching goal?  He doesn’t say. The second is that he says nothing about the coherence or intelligibility of the goals. Can’t there be goals that are unintelligible or incoherent?  Are there practically rational ways to go about trying to count the moon?

[2] See Fantl and McGrath (2002) for discussion.

[3] See Williamson (2007) for discussion of this sort of argument.

[4] Adler (2002) argues that reflection on Moore’s paradox reveals that this requirement must be met to know and to satisfy the normative standards governing belief.