Bloggage

I pretty much stopped blogging when I was finishing my dissertation and especially when I was on the job market. I think I even made them invisible so that no "incriminating" stuff could be found on me.

Since settling down at Baylor, I do almost all my blogging on Certain Doubts or Prosblogion, so it's best to put this blog on hiatus. I do have a "personal" and "popular" blog that I use as an archive of interesting things I find called The Counsel of Trent (get it?).

Someday when I have time to think about think about metaphysics and other disciplines I don't publish in again, I'll resume this. But that's going to be awhile...

Bloggage

Had some good discussion with Jeremy Fantl and Matt McGrath concerning interest relativism over at Certain Doubts recently. I give my favorite counter-example to knowledge-action principles and discuss the nature of practical reasons.

Also been discussing naturalism and explanation over on Prosblogion. Naturalists got some 'splainin' to do.

A great first year at Baylor!

Well, I stopped blogging a few months before I went on the job market last year. You can't be too careful about these things, as words can be taken very differently than they are intended. I figured it best to park that action for awhile, and, after all, it was an extremely busy time.

Speaking of extremely busy, my first year at Baylor was filled with such great times and such an active conference schedule--thanks to Baylor's generous funding--that I continued not-blogging through the academic year.

Well, I'm booked solid till March of 2011, so if I'm ever going to blog again, I'm going to have to say "damn the schedule, get 'er done!"

Mostly this blog will be a record of what I blog at Certain Doubts and Prosblogion, but I'll sometimes put up less polished stuff here.

See ya round.

It's good to be back...

Last week I was at the Oberlin Colloquium, which was great, and then went straight to the PEW (Pragmatic Epistemology Workshop) on the beach, which I co-organized (I was really more of a mascot) with Ted Poston.

It was a great time talking with Mark Kaplan, Matt McGrath, Jeremy Fantl, Jennifer Nagel, Juan Comesana, Richard Fumerton, and Jon Kvanvig, all people who know a lot about something I'm very interested in.

I got some great feedback, which I posted about here on Certain Doubts.

I plan to return to blogging more this summer.

The Truth Connection

Excerpt from a recent email exchange. The question was something like this. Evidence for p indicates the truth of p. So to know that we have evidence for p, requires "getting outside" and looking to see when certain kinds of states are correlated with p's being the case.

The problem is supposed to be similar to the problem with not being able to "get outside" and tell whether one is reliable.

Here's a part of my reply:

The bottom line is that truth-indicativeness is taken in two senses. One is "external" and one is "internal" though that language is dispensable.

One has to do with objective correlations in the world, one has to do with the character of experience. Think of the grand old phrase "the testimony of the senses." I love that phrase. When someone testifies that p, we needn't be in a position to verify the testimony before the testimony counts as evidence for p.

Now there are lots of ways of explaining why it is that testimony counts as evidence. I'm not going to try to settle that debate here. I only want to point out that *whatever* the story is there, one has the option of telling a relevantly similar story about the testimony of the senses.

My preferred account has to do with the fact that our experience has the character as of revealing an external world to us, and the best explanation of this is that it is so. One is justified in believing what the balance of one's reasons supports. The basic notion of a reason is something that counts in favor. It goes in the "Pro" list and not the "Con" list. If there are no defeaters, quite moderate evidence can justify belief because the reasons for will outweigh the reasons against.

The apparently revelatory character of our experience counts in favor of its veridicality. It could be that it's mistaken, but possibilities are not reasons in the relevant sense here. When there is no reason to doubt the character of my experience, then the balance of my reasons supports believing and belief is the propositional attitude which bests fits my evidence.

That's the simple, intuitive evidentialist picture, and I've never seen much reason to doubt it. Most philosophy is sophistry or what Lycan called "philosophy crap." Someone once told me never to exchange what I'm more sure of for what I'm less sure of. It's a Moorean picture really. It's the picture I accept.

Virtue: It's practical rationality all the way down, whether moral or epistemic

Excerpt from a recent email:

This is the most reasonable and clear thing I've read in a long time. Thanks.

It all sounds right to me. All I have to say in reply is that "moral" seems to be defined not conceptually but--as, in my view, almost all other terms--by ostention to paradigm examples. The first appellation (using it as a verb, sorry) is lost to history, but it's been used to name certain things and there we are. Sometimes it's best to keep that, sometimes not, hard to say.

Perhaps the best thing to do is to follow Bob Roberts and just talk about "the virtues" and call them "intellectual virtues" when we are thinking about their promotion of the limited goal of obtaining true beliefs.

As I now see it, then, one of my main taxonomic goals is to make clear the distinction between the proper functional/externalist sense of virtue where it is success in achieving the teloi of human nature, and the internalist sense which is aimed at conscious choice. I cannot but see the latter as the more pressing issue. The target seems to have been described pretty well, what I want to know is how to meet it. This leads back to where I'm more comfortable: practical rationality.

One follow-up: If what you say is right, then what's the most general notion of a reason? It seems to me to be one of practical rationality. Then epistemic reasons are reasons w.r.t. the narrow goal of now having true beliefs for all we consider. I still can't make out a moral reason though. It will still be a species of practical reason, but what's the unity in the goals. We know what the epistemic goods are relatively well. But what are the moral goods. What could it be but maximizing happiness (over all sentient beings). [Yes I'm a consequentialist.]

But then we seem to have a basis for delineating the moral virtues. They are dispositions to promote happiness. Now this raises issues about whether and when truth promotes happiness. Obviously sometimes we are more sad when we know a truth. However, I believe that in the long run we are happier the more truth we know. The odd thing here is that it seems that then sometimes a virtue is both moral and intellectual and sometimes not.

Some virtues tend to promote getting truths and happiness in some people yet not so in others, truth but not happiness or happiness but not truth. Since, as we have noted, the success component is both contingent and largely out of our control, it seems the atomic acts are the proper locus of evaluation and the method of evaluation most appropriate seems to be practical rationality (other than the rather useless--even if true--judgment that so-and-so is just broken because they don't love truth or other people enough or just *can't* see how to pursue it). But Aristotle said not to study the broken specimens. Assuming someone has proper lover for truth and people, what more can we judge than whether they pursue means of getting truth and promoting happiness which, by their lights, have the greatest chance of success?

Bottom line on pragmatic encroachement

Here's something that is clearly possible:

To try to decide wheter p is true without regard for any practical concerns.

What comes to the same thing:

To try to believe p iff p.

Now suppose I correctly assess the evidence and correctly come to believe p.

My belief has some positive normative property as a result.

You got a better name for that than "epistemic justification"?

In the end, though, I just don't care what you call it. Call "*purely* epistemic justification," call it "theoretical justification," "evidential justification.". Whatever. It's *that* property I want my beliefs to have. So it's *that* notion I want to explore.

I don't care if it's related to knowledge, and I don't care who has or who has not discusses it in the past. To put it bluntly: this is about me and what I want.

If some philosopher really thinks I SHOULD care about something else, then I suppose I'll listen, though the proper reply seems to be "mind your own buisness."

On the "physical" might come to include "mental" meme.

Just a snippet from a dialog.  I had mentioned I have very little idea what "physical" and "material" even mean.

------------------------------

don't know what "physcial" means when applied to a substance or entity.

I understand what the laws of physics are.

Thus I can construct a sense for "physical object" as "object governed by the laws of physics."

All the current presumed laws of physics exclude freedom (quantum indeterminacy being no place to locate freedom).  

When someone, anyone, can give me a reason, any reason, to think that they know what a completed physics will look like, I'm all ears.

Until then, the only sense of "physical object" I can make any sense of is such that no physical object is free.

Let's consider the following thesis:

SPEC-P  Possibly, "physical" comes to extend to consciousness.

This is distinct from

SPEC-L  Possibly, physical laws come to encompass consciousness in such a way to allow for freedom of the will.

What reason do we have to think SPEC-P is true?  I can't think of any.  Well, one: maybe lots of people want, for whatever reason, beats me, to have the sentence "humans are wholly physical in their constitution/composition" come out true and also want to hold that humans are free, and maybe these people have the power to change the language.  

Perhaps mere possibility claims get the benefit of the doubt and so we don't need a positive reason to accept them (dubious).  So suppose SPEC-P is true.  Is this of any philosophical substance?  I don't see how it can be, since it's about a word, not a portion of reality.  

What we'd need for it to be substantive is to discover some underlying similarity between consciousness, and, say, rocks.  I played around with the concept of energy.  The reasons I don't think that will work has to do with SPEC-L.

Why think SPEC-L is true?  I can't see any reason at all.  And without the concept of a law of physics to to give a semantic tether to "physical" I'm still adrift with the term.

In fact, I think I can see a reason to think SPEC-L is false.  What possible sense of "law" could cover a truly free will.  I think "law-like" analytically entails "not-free."  Some of our behavior (the not-free part) is law-like, but our free choices cannot in principle be predicted.  [Complication: I actually don't accept PAP for Frankfurtian reasons, and I do think that there's one important sense of "free" which applies to choices which could be predicted, ones which issue from a freely formed character, but I think this sense of "free" is parasitic on the deeper sense.  The latter sense is the one that gives rise to PvI's "Mystery of free will" problem.  As a consequence of this view, I do not accept that there are true counterfactuals regarding this class choice-points.  A few people--Richard Swinburne, Alicia Finch--have mentioned that these rare moments are the fulcrum of freedom (my phrase).]

Now regarding Thomistic "monism."  I'm unhappy about this.  It is "monistic" only in consequence of a different definition of "substance."  Thomists are substance dualists in the modern definition of "substance."  Thomists think the soul can subsist without the body, they think that when the body is dissolved, the person/soul/whatever survives.  Mileage may vary, but they all believe in something that can subsist without the body in some form or other.  This is what naturalists oppose, no matter what you call it.  

Naturalism is more tied to the concept of a law than to any conception of substances, entities, particles or whatnot.  

Anyway, the concept of a law is much more fundamental to naturalism than the concept of an object/entity/particle/whatever.  What inspired Enlightenment materialists was *mechanism*.  So suppose there's reason to think that the concepts of object/particle/entity/substance/whatever will all drop out of physics and be replaced with the concept of energy or field or, as Polkinghorne thinks, information.  That's not going to bother the naturalist.  It's all law-governed, that's what matters to the naturalist.  Even if they loose the battle over "physical" (the word) and all sorts of merry dualists are running around calling themselves "physicalists" they'll just move to "science-ist" or some such thing (whatever the "-ist" of "scientism" is, LOL).  

And the essence of science, they'll say, is to discover the most fundamental law or laws which determine the course of events of nature, and, this is where the "-ism" comes into play, NOTHING IS BEYOND THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE (or at least nothing rational).  That's the bottom edge of the bottom line.  (Science = search for fundamental laws) + (Nothing outside scope of Science).  Given the disjointness of the law-governed and the free (in the relevant senses), this scientistic worldview has no room for substantive freedom, the kind of freedom libertarians have been thinking about (this should not be identified with PAPists, though the term has sadly come to be used as if that's what "libertarian" means).  

It is this notion of science's ability to, in principle, predict all future events, to discover the laws which allow them to do this, that is at the core of physicalism.  "Physics" just stands for "fundamental science.'  If that identity fails, if there's a science more fundamental than physics--call it "fundics"--then fundics is the fundamental science (the "new physics").  Then all the former "physicalists" will be "fundicalists" and all the same debates will be with us: is consciousness fundical?  Does causal closure of the fundical hold?  Etc.  Only the names will have changed...