MCMP – Epistemology

Hykel Hosni (CPNSS) gives a talk at "Progic 2013", the Sixth Workshop on Combining Probability and Logic (17-18 Sept, 2013), titled "The logical structure of de Finetti's notion of event".

Alexander Bird (Bristol) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (24 July, 2013) titled "Externalism, Internalism, and the KK Principle". Abstract: The KK principle states that if a subject knows some fact then she is in a position to know that she knows that fact. This paper examines the relationship between the KK principle and the epistemological externalism and internalism. There is often thought to a very close relationship between externalism and the rejection of the KK principle and between internalism with its acceptance. How strong are the connections? The stronger proposals are: externalism entails the denial of the KK principle; internalism entails the truth of the KK principle. We will consider a number of problems for the theses as stated; we examine two ways of amending them so that they avoid these problems.

C. Ulises Moulines (LMU) gives a talk at the MCMP workshop "New Perspectives on External World Scepticism" (9-10 July, 2013) titled "Is There Anything Besides Me?". Abstract: The question “Is there anything besides me?” appears to be a most basic philosophical question. It is basic in an ontological, an epistemological, and—so it may be argued—also a semantic sense. It challenges our most fundamental categories of thought. To this question, four different answers may, in principle, be given: (1) a realist answer: “Yes”; (2) a solipsist answer: “No”; (3) a sceptical answer: “Perhaps, but I’ll never know”; and finally (4) a positivist answer: “This question makes no sense”. Most contemporary philosophers maintain either (1) or (4). Grounding on the scenario laid out by Calderón in his Life Is a Dream I argue in this paper that there is no good reason for maintaining (4), and that the usual arguments for (1) fall short of being fully convincing. Besides being historically prior to Descartes’ genium malignum, Calderón’s model has at least two epistemological advantages: (a) It has some degree of empirical plausibility; (b) it makes a clear case for a coherent answer of type (3) and even opens the door for a conceivable answer of type (2). Through some minor modifications of the plot in Calderón’s play, it will be shown that its main character, Segismund, can rationally choose to take positions (2) or (3).

Berit Brogaard (St. Louis) gives a talk at the MCMP workshop "New Perspectives on External World Scepticism" (9-10 July, 2013) titled "Immediate justification, bootstrapping and cognitive penetrability". Abstract: I argue that dogmatism offers an adequate reply to the skeptic and then consider the bootstrapping and cognitive penetrability problems that appear to inflict immediate justification theories. I argue that the cognitive penetrability problem can be avoided by ensuring that only properly grounded seemings provide immediate justification. This move, however, comes at a cost. It introduces a potentially undesirable form of externalism into the theory of immediate justification. I then show that the bootstrapping and cognitive penetrability problems don’t arise on a version of dogmatism that takes perceptual seemings to provide immediate justification for belief. Though this move requires an apparently inaccessible notion of rationality, I argue that the resultant view is nonetheless a form of internalism.

Thomas Grundmann (Cologne) gives a talk at the MCMP workshop "New Perspectives on External World Scepticism" (9-10 July, 2013) titled "Rethinking Scepticism about Justification. Don't Forget the Old Evil Demon.". Abstract: Mentalism about justification is typically motivated by the new evil demon intuition. According to it, mental duplicates, i.e., people who share all their non-factive mental states, also share their justificatory properties, no matter whether they are in abnormal conditions or whether they are permanently deceived by an evil demon. At the same time, mentalists often ignore another intuition that drives many traditional sceptical arguments and that I will call the old evil demon intuition. According to this second intuition, demon scenarios are sceptical hypotheses that challenge one's own justification unless one is in a position to rule them out from one's own epistemic perspective. Moreover, there are two different kinds of sceptical hypotheses: hypotheses that conflict with the truth of a target belief, and hypotheses that conflict with the belief's reliability. As I will argue, claiming that one needs to rule out the later kind of hypothesis in order to achieve first- or second-order justification commits one to the view that reliability is at least a necessary condition for justification and, hence, that mentalism is false. I will conclude with some suggestions how both intuitions may fit together within an overall reliabilist framework.

Ralph Wedgwood (Southern California) gives a talk at the MCMP workshop "New Perspectives on External World Scepticism" (9-10 July, 2013) titled "Scepticism and Probabilism". Abstract: Philosophers who work within a broadly probabilistic epistemological framework have extensively explored the significance of inductive scepticism. But what is the significance of external-world scepticism within a probabilistic framework? Presumably, if external-world scepticism is false, then the perceptions or sensory experiences that a believer has at a given time must make some difference to the probability function that measures the degrees of belief that it is rational or justified for the believer to have at that time. Specifically, it must normally be the case that if the believer has an experience as of p’s being the case, the probability of p will be raised in some way. In general, an experience as of p’s being the case will have many other effects on the probabilities of other propositions besides p. Still, there must be some limits to the effects that this experience has on these probabilities. It is proposed here that for every experience, there is some partition of propositions such that the experience cannot change the conditional probability of any proposition conditional on any member of that partition; in other words, the rational impact of experience can be modelled by means of some kind of conditionalization. However, it seems that the effect that experience normally has on a rational believer’s degrees of belief can be defeated in some cases. Some philosophers—most notably, Jonathan Weisberg—have objected that conditionalization cannot be reconciled with a plausible account of defeasibility. A reply to this objection is offered here, including an account of how perceptual justification can be defeated. This account implies that the cases in which perceptual justification is defeated are in a sense exceptional or abnormal: it is only when certain special factors are present that perceptual justification will be defeated. The account has this implication because it relies on a principle that seems likely to play a crucial role in any adequate solution to inductive scepticism—the principle that it is rational for the believer to start out with a set of prior probabilities that are systematically biased in certain ways. In fact, it turns out that the sort of rational antecedent bias that is required to make sense of this fact about the defeasibility of perceptual justification is also enough to provide the core of an account of the rational impact of experience. In short, within a probabilistic framework, external-world scepticism and inductive scepticism turn out to have essentially the same solution.

Igal Kvart (Jerusalem) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (20 June, 2013) titled "The Pragmatics of Knowledge, Counter-Examples to Pragmatic Contaminations of Knowledge, Pragmatic Inconsistencies, and the Knowledge Norm of Assertion". Abstract: In this paper, I start with briefly summarizing my account of the pragmatics of Knowledge, contrasting it with the competing accounts favoring the pragmatic contamination of the semantics of knowledge ascriptions, such as Epistemic Contextualism and Pragmatic Encroachment (most notably represented by Subject-Sensitive Invariantism – SSI). The proposed pragmatic account, I claim, explains the examples in question, obviating the need for accounts that invoke pragmatic contamination of the semantics of knowledge ascriptions. I then further propose two different counter-examples to the above Pragmatic Contamination of Knowledge accounts, which in turn hold out in the light of, and are well explained by, the pragmatic account of knowledge I offer. I proceed to offer the notion of Pragmatic Inconsistencies associated with the Steering Role of Knowledge, which is a main feature of the pragmatic account I suggest. I will claim such a pragmatic inconsistency character for Moorean variants, use it against Stanley's Certainty Norm of Assertion, and argue against Williamson's version of the Knowledge Norm of Assertion, arguing for an alternative version of my own.

Veli Mitova (Vienna) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (6 June, 2013) titled "How to be a truthy psychologist about evidence". Abstract: I defend the view that the only things that count as evidence for belief are factive tokens of psychological states. I first assume that the evidence for p can sometimes be a good reason to believe that p. I then argue, with some help from metaethics 101, that a reason is a beast of two burdens: it must be capable of being both a good reason and a motive. I then show that truthy psychologism is the only position that can honour The Beast of Two Burdens Thesis, without ruffling our pre-101 intuitions about good reasons, motives, and explanations.

Jake Chandler (Leuven) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (6 February, 2013) titled "Reasons to Believe and Reasons to not." Abstract: The provision of a precise, formal treatment of the relation of evidential relevance–i.e. of providing a reason to hold or to withhold a belief–has arguably constituted the principal selling point of Bayesian modeling in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science. By the same token, the lack of an analogous proposal in so-called AGM belief revision theory, a powerful and elegant qualitative alternative to the Bayesian framework, is likely to have significantly contributed to its relatively marginal status in the philosophical mainstream.

In the present talk, I sketch out a corrective to this deficiency, offering a suggestion, within the context of belief revision theory, concerning the relation between beliefs about evidential relevance and commitments to certain policies of belief change. Aside from shedding light on the status of various important evidential ‘transmission’ principles, this proposal also constitutes a promising basis for the elaboration of a logic of so-called epistemic defeaters.

Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Groningen) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (24 January, 2013) titled "Reasoning biases and non-monotonic logics". Abstract: Stenning and van Lambalgen (2008) have argued that much of what is described in the psychology of reasoning literature as `reasoning biases' can more accurately be accounted for by means of the concept of defeasible, non-monotonic reasoning. They rely on the AI framework of closed-world reasoning as the formal background for their investigations. In my talk, I give continuation to the project of reassessing reasoning biases from a non-monotonic point of view, but use instead the semantic approach to non-monotonic logics presented in Shoham (1987), known as preferential semantics. I focus in particular on the so-called belief-bias effect and the Modus Ponens-Modus Tollens asymmetry. The ease with which these reasoning patterns are accounted for from a defeasible reasoning point of view lends support to the claim that (untrained) human reasoning has a strong component of defeasibility. I conclude with some remarks on Marr’s ‘three levels of analysis’ and the role of formal frameworks for the empirical investigation of human reasoning.