On behalf of verisimilitude

Isaac Asimov:
[W]hen people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

Philosopher's Carnival is Here!

Saint Valentine’s Day fell toward the end of the submission period for this carnival and since that’s the anniversary of my first date with my wife I baked up a baker’s dozen (that’s 13 for me and you) of little philosophy love-muffins for you to celebrate with me.

1. Kenny Pearce starts us of thematically with a doxastic theory of love. "In honor of Valentine's Day, I would like to present today a philosophical theory of love." This post proposes a theory of love according to which love consists in a deeply internalized belief in the intrinsic value of the beloved, and discusses precisely what this theory entails. A second post discusses how this view can account for the distinction between the three traditional types of love (philia, eros, and agape).

2. Brit Brogaard at Lemmings notes that William James had no love for the APA when it started, but was apparently wooed, becoming the organization’s 6th president. History lovers will love this history of the APA.

3. At her love-bird Joe Salerno's blog Knowability guest blogger Bryan Frances here helps those who would love to have a good job determine whether they are showing enough love for their disciplines. He gives an interesting (and unendorsed) theory that most ordered pairs are star-crossed lovers. The center of this love-muffin is more sour than sweet: most active philosophers lack good sense! You should consume this love-muffin with a grain or two of salt and, if you can, chew it with your tongue planted firmly in your cheek which is, I'm sure, somewhat how Bryan wrote it. ;-)

4. Clayton Littlejohn of Think Tonk has, as usual, no lost love for traditional epistemology. In this post he argues that, perhaps like true love, justified false beliefs are a myth. Cupid's arrow missed commentators Tony Booth, Brad C, and Russell Blackford though, who, like the present author, find internal matters more apropos to normative evaluations than mere external circumstances.

5. Lovers often feel each other's pain, but Tanasije Gjorgoski at A Brood Comb here wonders if cyborgs could literally feel each other's pain.
"Two cyborgs, Michael and Ethan walk on the surface of a distant planet after a fight with alien troops. Michael notices that Ethan’s finger has a hole in it.-Does it hurt much? - asks Michael.Ethan unscrews his finger, and hands it to Michael, who replaces one of his own fingers with it.-Gosh, that hurts a lot - says Michael.-Thanks for sharing my pain. - says Ethan. -Now give it back to me."

6. It seems the Scottish world is in love with the epistemology of John McDowell (can anybody explain this to me?!), and Avery Archer at The Space of Reasons here makes an interesting argument that McDowell's content-externalism actually allows him to be a kind of internalist (satisfying a definition scarcely different from Conee and Feldman's mentalism). It seems to me that this is robbing Peter to pay Paul since whatever "access" we have to externalist-styled "mental states" is necessarily opaque.

7. Jesus said that the whole of the Judeo-Christian worldview comes down to loving God with all your being and loving your neighbor as yourself. The latter part is pithily summed up in the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Louis William Rose here at the Florida Student Philosophy Blog defends this august principle from charges of vacuity leveled by Dr. Bernard Gert, Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Dartmouth College. [Bleg: someone once pointed out to me that if you take of the reflexive bit "unto X" you get Kant's categorical imperative. Does Kant himself say this or did someone famous say this?]

8. Speaking of God and love, is the good good because God loves it or does God love it because its good? Alan Rhoda--the Alanyzer--finally solves this dilemma!

9. I personally love thinking about Modus Ponens: it's so basic, yet so puzzle-inspiring. Franklin Scott at What is It Like to be a Blog? has here an interesting post on conditionals and English grammar. Good stuff. [Note: Brit also recently discussed this at Lemmings. And Matthew Mullins makes brief comments here.]

10. Beauty is a common inspiration for love and Bryan Norwood at his blog Movement of Existence has an interesting post here on the mathematical structure of beauty in architecture and the natural world and the relevance of such to the Teleological Argument for the existence of God. Bryan is an undergrad in both Philosophy and Architecture and found his illustrations very nice.

11. Collaboration is is the foundation of any good relationship and Trusted Advisor sprung a new principle on me: Kant's Horizontal Imperative. It apparently has almost ubiquitous relevance.

12. In the spirit of brotherly love I want to note my buddy Jon Matheson's post on our UR blog regarding "meaty justification". He draws an analogy between validity and soundess on the one hand and propositional and doxastic justification on the other hand. I think it's high time that the degree of "meatiness" of justification move into the main focus of epistemology.

13. My discussion of evidentialism with Jason Baher at JanusBlog is along the same lines as Jon's thought.

On Behalf of Feldman contra BonJour on Having Evidence

In the January issue of Mind Larry BonJour reviews Conee and Feldman's _Evidentialism_. It is very complementary so I have few bones to pick but toward the end he says he has an objection to a view of Rich's on what constitutes having evidence. I'm not sure its relevantly different from what Rich does consider but I want to defend the view from the objection.

In "Having Evidence" Rich defends the following proposition (if I recall correctly he's said in conversation that he's not too committed to this view, but I like it).

(HE) S has p available as evidence at t iff S is currently thinking of p.

First let me see that given that this is an account of available-evidence-at-t it seems almost trivially true. How could anything but what's occurant at t (even if subconsiously) contrubute to justification *at t*.

At any rate here's BonJour's objection. He says that (7) runs into trouble with "inferential conclusions for which complicated sets of premisses [sic] are required" as well as "many claims that rest on complicated patterns of sensory or memorial evidence." For the first version of the objection I think there is a plausible fairly quick reply, the latter case is more complicated simply because such cases of belief are more complicated already.

So consider a complex inference consisting of, say, a dozen steps. I doubt I can hold any 12 propositions before my mind at any one time, so it seems that there's no way I could ever reach a point of justification for the conclusion (assuming that all the steps in the inference were necessary to support the conclusion). However I think this is merely an illusion. I'll draw an analogy with Lemmon-style proof annotations. In Lemmon's _Beginning Logic_ (the same system is used in Allen and Hand's Primer) you don't just annotate lines on the right, you keep track on the left of all the lines above which the current line depends on. So each line is a proper terminus of a proof. In a really long proof there's no need to remember all the steps precisely, it's enough to know that the current stage of the proof depends only on the lines annotated at the left.

Notice that you don't even need to remember what those lines said. If you reasonably believe that you did the steps correctly then you an reasonably believe the current line (if you also reasonably believe the previous lines were sufficiently well supported). So toward the end of a fairly long proof your actual evidence for the current lemma will not be your reasonably believing the conjunction of all the prior steps in the inference, rather it will consist in apparent memory states to the effect that you've done the proof right up to present. Likewise, at the end you can reasonably believe the conclusion on the basis of your apparent memories of having gone through the proof correctly (and that the premises were well supported). Since your evidence is what supports your beliefs your evidence just isn't the conjunction of the premises, it's the (apparent) memory of having done the proof (the memorial seemings).

I think a similar reply--mutatis mutandis--can be made for the other kind of case.