Analysis of jobs advertised in Jobs for Philosophers October and November 2004

The most striking thing to me was the paucity of jobs in logic. I don’t know if that’s compensated for by people using open area searches to hire logic people, or if departments are thinking that logic is not a pressing need, or it is simply random variation. Apart from that the numbers are pretty much as you might have expected.

On more sombre notes, if you want to donate money to earthquake/tsunami victims, there are a number of good links here.

(1) At the last turn in the 400m final, Harry stopped running and jogged the rest of the way.

That’s despite the fact that (2) could sound true even if the way Jack moved on his way to work was exactly the same as what he did down the straight in that 400m.

(2) Today, Harry ran to work.

In other words, whether a certain kind of jogging counts as running seems to depend on features of context, very broadly construed.

The repeated reference here to broad construal is because it isn’t clear whether the best explanation of (1) and (2) is by something analogous to contextualism in epistemology, or something analogous to subject-sensitive invariantism. (These are not the only options of course.) The contextualist about runs says that it is the speaker’s context that determines the boundary between running and something less energetic, the subject-sensitive invariantist says that it is the context of the subject.

At first glance, (1) and (2) look more suitable to the SSI account. Another reason for thinking this is that it’s unlikely there is a syntactic place attached to runs that marks how energetic the motion must be for it to count as running. Since SSI doesn’t need this variable place, but (according to some theories) contextalism does, SSI looks more plausible.

So (1) and (2) are meant to be analogous to high-stakes/low-stakes examples that (allegedly) support contextualism/SSI about knowledge. There is another way in which runs is like knows. In both cases contrast effects, either through explicit mention or the use of contrastive stress, can decrease the range of cases that fall under the verb.

Assume, as was the intended background in (2), that Harry normally flies to work on his broomstick, but today started his exercise regime of jogging to work. He jogs reasonably briskly, but he isn’t going to break any landspeed records. In a discourse-initial setting, the appropriate answer to (3)

(3) Did HARRY run to work today?

is Yes. On the other hand, the appropriate answer to (4)

(4) Did Harry really run to work today, or only jog?

is He only jogged. And possibly, though it might depend a lot on the features of the conversation, the most appropriate, or natural answer to (5)

(5) Did Harry RUN to work today?

is No, he jogged.

The same effects seem to arise with knowledge.

Assume Harry believes that his boss dislikes him because (a) Harry knows that his boss dislikes all the other workers and (b) Harry can’t see any reason why he’d get specially favourable treatment. Moreover, Harry is right – his boss does dislike him, though Harry has no direct evidence of this.

I think the appropriate answer to (6)

(6) Does HARRY know his boss dislikes him?

and (7)

(7) Does Harry know HIS BOSS dislikes him?

is Yes in each case. But when knows is explicitly contrasted with something else, as in (8)

(8) Does Harry really know his boss dislikes him, or only believe it?

the most appropriate answer is He only believes it, with perhaps an additional comment that the belief is indeed true. And even some kinds of stress can get the same result, though as with (5) here it depends a lot on the context and a lot on the particular type of stress.

(9) Does Harry KNOW that his boss dislikes him?

It’s not too hard to get oneself into the frame of mind where the appropriate answer to that question is No.

This kind of data is less obviously explicable on the SSI model, because the subject has not changed. There are three options on the table, both in the case of runs and in the case of knows.

First, we could adopt the kind of contextualist options currently on the market. (With, presumably, some work to show how they apply to runs.)

Second, we could say that focus, stress, contrast etc have truth-conditional effects, so the appropriate answers in all these cases are the true answers, but this is because of phonologically (or typographically) encoded semantic features, rather than the kind of contextual effects currently posited.

Third, we could say that changing stress patterns can’t change the true answers to these questions, though they can change the speaker meaning of the questions, which in turn changes the appropriateness of various answers. This move is available in both the runs and knows cases.

The main point here is just to stress analogies rather than to promote one or other of these lines. A subsidiary point is to point out the importance of keeping effects of changing expectations (as in (1) and (2)) apart from effects of changing contrasts. It’s perfectly consistent to think that the background (whether it’s a 400m race or a jog to work) affects the truth of running-ascriptions, but changing contrast sets does not. (I’m not necessarily endorsing this view, I’m just saying it’s consistent, and the arguments against it should be sensitive to this kind of distinction.)

But what I really want to stress are the analogies, which seem much closer than between knows and, say flat or tall. The obvious way in which runs is closer to knows is that it’s a verb not an adjective. It also is hard to find natural ways of making the salient and intended running-standard explicit, just like it is hard to find natural ways of makiing the salient and intended knowing-standard explicit.

Having said all that, there is one very important disanalogy between runs and knows. (I’m grateful here to Zoltán Szabó for pointing this out.) Runs is an event verb, and knows is a stative verb. Hence it would not be at all surprising if they differed in some crucial respects. This is not to say they must differ in the kinds of respects being discussed here, just that we should be very wary of drawing too many analogies. The analogies do seem closer than with flat or tall, but they are not at all exact, so it’s more than possible that we shouldn’t make the moves in the contextualist debates about runs as in contextualist debates about knows.

Back when I was a wee grad student, one of the jokes circulating the internet, and eventually stuck to the wall of the grad ‘office’ concerned the putative causes of death of various philosophers. (My favourite was Thales: Drowned.) The list seems to have grown under Hugh Mellor’s supervision, and the current version is here.

In a similar spirit, Cornell students have started work on break-up lines of the philosophers. They’ve mostly associated lines with schools at this stage, but I think expanding to individual philosophers would be a splendid idea.

Here’s the list (mostly below the fold) Paul Kelleher sent me, along with attributions. (My favourite, by the way, is the quasi-realist. I might yet use that one day.) Feel free to stick the list to the wall of your office, or to add more in comments. Unlike earlier threads, self-attributions are more than encouraged!

The Teleologist: We aren’t meant for each other. (P.K.)
The Deontologist: We aren’t right for each other. (P.K.)
The Consequentialist: We aren’t optimal for each other. (P.K.)
The Solipsist: It’s not you, it’s me. (P.K.)
The Empiricist: I think we should see other people. (P.K.)
The Rationalist: I’m not a priority to you any more. (P.K.)

The Rationalist, v 2.0: I’ve been doing some thinking… (Paul Audi)
The Rationalist, v. 3.0: If you can’t see your faults, there’s nothing more I can say. (P.K.)
The Content Externalist: Ever since we moved, you’ve changed. (Paul Audi)
The Continentalist: You’ve lost that love and feeling. (P.K.)
The Egalitarian: This is the best thing for both of us. (Paul Audi)
The Paternalist: In time you’ll come to see that this is the best thing. (Paul Audi)
The Humean: Just because we’re always together doesn’t mean we BELONG together. (Paul Audi)
The Humean, v. 2.0: Relationships need to be about more than just constant conjoining. (P.K.)
The Reliabilist: This just isn’t working anymore. (Paul Audi)
The Nagelian: You just don’t know what it’s like to be me. (P.K.)
The Functionalist: I don’t care about accommodating your feelings. (P.K.)
The Quinean: I’m sorry, but you don’t mean anything to me anymore. (Jacob Miller)
The Foundationalist: We have nothing left to build upon. (P.K.)
The Foundationalist, v2.0: I need to be able to branch out more. (P.K.)
The Relativist: It’s no one’s fault. (P.K.)
The Atheist: These things just happen. (P.K.)
The Kantian: You lied to me! (P.K.)
The Consequentialist, v 2.0: You should have lied to my mother about her pot roast! (P.K.)
The anti-Fictionalist: I’m sick of faking it. (P.K.)
The Cartesian: I don’t clearly and distinctly perceive a future together. (Kathryn Schubert)
The Hegelian: Do we have to go through this again? (Kathryn Schubert)
The Lockean: Our primary qualities simply aren’t compatible. (Kathryn Schubert)
The Lockean, v. 2.0: Compared to my last partner, I’m not getting nearly enough, nor as good. (P.K.)
The Cornell Realist: You no longer move me. (P.K.)
The Quasi-Realist: Of course we’re going to be together forever… (P.K.)
The Motivational Externalist: Even though I believed it at the time, I know now that I never really loved you. (P.K.)
The Behaviorist: I just can’t keep going through the motions anymore. (Brendan Jackson)
The Presentist: There just isn’t any future for us. (Brendan Jackson)
The Eternalist: At least we’ll always have that weekend in Paris. (Brendan Jackson)
The Modal Realist: This will never work—we’re from different worlds. (Brendan Jackson)

So let’s start with a simple induction. Many intellectual giants suffer the indignity of having doctrines named after them that they never endorsed. This leads latter day scholars to come along asking “Was X an X-ian”. This question has been asked about Hume, Marx and Keynes, amongst others I’m sure. By induction, the same thing will happen to Lewis eventually. It’s just a matter of when. So here’s the first question.

How long until the first “Was Lewis a Lewisian” paper?

I’m putting the over/under line at 2015, and taking the under. (If only because I can write the paper in 2014 if no one else does.)

You might be tempted to think that no such paper could be written, because Lewis’s writing is so clear that no one could attribute meanings to him that he didn’t actually endorse. The argument form here is historically dubious. Russell too was a clear writer, but compare Russell’s theory of “Russell” with the Russellian theory of “Russell”. Yet I come not to question the validity of this argument, but rather its soundness.

Lewis appeared to write clear, transparent philosophical prose. But it is clear to those with eyes to see it, that many layers of meaning lay hidden beneath those welcoming texts.

For instance, the folk take Lewis’s masterpiece On the Plurality of Worlds to be an argument for the plurality of worlds. And this clearly is the exoteric meaning of Lewis’s text. But could a thinker of Lewis’s quality really have believed in this metaphysical monstrosity? It is hard to credit. The real meaning must lay deeper.

For a long time I thought that the book was obviously an argument for the existence of God. Lewis conspicuously fails to discuss theological ersatzism – the view that ersatz possible worlds are really constituents of the mind of God. Given the devastating attacks Lewis launches on rival theories, and the utter implausibility of Lewis’s preferred alternative, I thought the esoteric message was clear. Philosophy needs a theory of modality. Theological ersatzism is the only viable theory of modality, the others being disposed of in Lewis’s book. Theological ersatzism needs God. Hence God exists. A fittingly impressive argument for a great thinker’s masterpiece.

But, and let this be a lesson in how intricate Lewis’s texts can be, I too had been deceived. The clue I missed was from the paper Putnam’s Paradox. Lewis ever so clearly lays out Putnam’s ‘paradoxical’ argument for anti-realism. And then, in his customary fashion, provides a solution so outlandish that the trained scholar is clearly meant to reject it. He even acknowledges that the solution bears the trademarks of medieval scholastic corruption of Greek thought.

This paper poses a puzzle though. Why, if Lewis thought Putnam’s argument was sound, is he so hostile to Putnam in the paper? Returning to Plurality makes everything clear. As the title of Part 2, “Paradox in Paradise…” indicates, Lewis thinks the paradox spreads throughout paradise, and infects all talk related to modality. And as he says in Part 1, ever so slyly using the literal voice, this covers all manner of things philosophers care to think about. Putnam’s error, Lewis is saying, was to not see how far his anti-realist argument spreads. Plurality, when read in light of Putnam’s Paradox argues for anti-realism about modality, and hence for all of metaphysics.

This clearly rebounds on the theological argument above. For if God exists, then theological ersatzism is true, and hence a (reductive) realism about modality is correct. But we should be anti-realists about modality, so we must be anti-realists about theology.

That line of reasoning seemed compelling, but it was delicate enough that I would have expected Lewis to offer some kind of confirmation that it was correct. And he does in Evil for Freedom’s Sake. There he argues that the various realist positions on God, classical theism and atheism, are reduced to an indecorous squabble over burdens of proof. The clear message is that the Putnamian anti-realism he defended in Putnam’s Paradox and expanded upon in Plurality should be extended to theology.

As I have been deceived before about the meanings of Lewis’s texts, I fear there may yet be much more meaning meandering beneath the meniscus. Anyone who can come up with a better explanation is more than encouraged, nay is entreated, to do so.

This post owes a lot to Brad DeLong’s work on Strauss, which taught me everything I know about textual interpretation. Thanks also to Michael Glanzburg for some helpful suggestions.

A couple of weeks ago I did an analysis of the jobs in the first JFP. I’ve now updated and expanded this to include the second JFP and the web ads. I’ve also done a more detailed breakdown of the jobs than last time. Since this goes on for a while, I’ve put it in the extended entry.

First, the data, then some explanation.

In the ‘distributed’ tables, I counted a job as being 1/n’th of a job in each area listed as being open for it. So an applied ethics/ancient/epistemology job would count 1/3 for each of those three areas. Most importantly, the 117 open jobs counted as 1/17’th of a job in each area. This is not obviously appropriate – an open job is more valuable for a candidate in theoretical ethics or early modern or mind than it is for a candidate in aesthetics or Asian philosophy or (to some extent) philosophy of language. But it was the best I could do. In those tables I also counted open rank jobs as being 1/2 a tenure-track job.

In the ‘every area counted’ I didn’t use any such fractional analysis. An applied ethics/ancient/epistemology job would count as 1 job in each area.

Most of the categories in the top two tables are self-explanatory, but a note on the two ‘other’ areas. ‘Other history’ mostly ended up meaning medieval, but also included a few 19th and 20th century positions. ‘Other’ included, inter alia, philosophy of religion and feminist philosophy. I was more than a little embarrassed by the stereotypes I was living up to in throwing those into a generic ‘other’ category, but not embarrassed enough to go back and recode everything – which by the end became a bit of a task because of how bad a coder I am.

For the summary categories at the end, ‘Core’ is Science + Language + Mind + Logic + Epistemology + Metaphysics, ‘Ethics’ is Theoretical and Applied Ethics, Legal, Political and Aesthetics, ‘History’ is Ancient + Early Modern + Other History, and ‘Other’ is everything else. (‘Ethics’ really is value theory, broadly construed.)

The first column counts all jobs in Jobs for Philosophers. The second column restricts attention to jobs in philosophy departments. The third to tenure-track jobs in philosophy departments, and the fourth to tenure-track jobs in top 50 philosophy departments. (Top 50 here means in the top 50 in the Leiter Report or, for schools outside the US, listed as being equivalent to a top 50 department or, for schools without a PhD program, of the standard of the departments previously listed.)

There’s a few obvious trends. The ratio of Core to Other jobs inside the Top 50 and outside it is noteworthy. The 5.8 Top 50 jobs in ‘Other’ is actually quite misleading, because that’s just a consequence of the fact that there are 17 open jobs in the top 50. If we assume those are really core/ethics/history jobs, the number of other jobs falls to 1 or 2. I was a little surprised by the low number of applied ethics jobs in the Top 50.

There are also a few things I didn’t really expect. I don’t know if it’s a one-year trend, but Science is way ahead of other core areas, especially when the distributions are done. Partially this is because there are very few jobs in just metaphysics, while there are quite a few jobs in just science. The low numbers for metaphysics and logic should be a little worrying to students working (or thinking of working) in those areas. Any such candidate should, at the very least, try to go on the market with a very solid competency in a related area (especially science, epistemology or mind), and ideally with a second AOS.

Also, I hadn’t expected how many jobs there would be in each area. The 117 open jobs are obviously pushing up the numbers here, but it seems most candidates could, if their placement offices were so inclined, apply for upwards of 150 jobs. In my (admittedly limited) experience most candidates apply for 40 to 70 jobs, so actually people are passing up a few jobs for which they could, technically, apply.

Many people worry about the possible psychological consequences of cloning. Of course we can’t know what these will be until we try, but it’s certainly worth trying to figure out what these will be before going ahead with cloning. In one respect in one (fairly significant) situation, I think the psychological effects will be quite positive.

Consider a couple who cannot have children because the man is infertile. Their only way of having a child is to use a sperm bank. I think this is morally acceptable, but in most cases it has one cost: the child will not know who her genetic father is. So she does not know her full lineage. Now while that’s not the worst harm ever, I think it is something that could be bad, and for some people it might cause a notable amount of psychological pain.

(This is definitely not meant to be a universal truth. Many adopted children have no interest in finding out who their biological parents are. But we know that many do, so many people value knowing their genetic lineage.)

If the child is cloned from her mother, she will be in a position to know her full lineage (at least for the first generation or two). I think a cloned child may prefer that state of affairs to being the (biological) child of a stranger. Some children may be indifferent between the two, but I’m not sure that many children would prefer being the biological child of a stranger to being the clone of their mother.

(As an aside, here’s another possible benefit of cloning – one that I don’t think is really beneficial but which may appeal to some. In the case I described, it would be possible for the child to be a clone of the father. In that case there will be a sense (and only a sense) in which the child is the product of both parents, since it will grow to human size in the mother’s womb, as well as being the father’s clone. If the fact that reproduction involves both parents is meant to be important, this is a way of sorta kinda allowing for that. I don’t particularly approve of the division of reproductive labour here, so I wouldn’t think this approach is particularly worthwhile, but I can see how some might. If you think Aristotle should have been right, and the form should be contributed by the father and the matter by the mother, you should love this approach. I don’t, so my defence of cloning rests on separate grounds.)

Back to the main point. Here’s an argument I considered about the risks involved in cloning.

1. In all probability, the cloned child will be better off existing than not existing, even if it suffers various physical ailments as a result of being a clone.
2. If it is better off existing than not existing, then the harms it suffers are no reason to not produce it.
C. The harms that likely go along with being a clone do not provide a reason against producing a clone.

This would be a fairly powerful argument if it worked, because it would mean that even if we were fairly confident that a cloned human would be defective in various ways, as long as it was not so badly off that it was better off not existing, it would be acceptable to produce it.

One worry about the argument is that one of the concepts involved, being better off existing than not existing, might be nonsensical. It certainly pushes our understanding of ‘better off’ about as far as it can reasonably be pushed. I don’t have any argument here, and I recognise that on some theories of value this might not make a lot of sense, but I think we can understand this concept. (I’m possibly going to be convinced that this appearance of understanding is chimerical. Perhaps that’s for cloning post 3.)

The bigger problem with the argument is that premise 2 is pretty clearly false. Here’s two cases showing that it is false.

The Bridesmaid Dress (due to Dan Brock)
A woman knows that if she conceives this month, the child she conceives will suffer some severe ailments, but not so severe that it would be better off not existing. But if she puts off conceiving, she will not fit into her bridesmaid dress at a wedding scheduled for nine and a half months time. So she goes ahead and conceives.

The Barometer (due to Gerald Dworkin)
A couple knows that if they conceive while the barometric pressure is below a certain threshold, the child they conceive will likely suffer a similar severe ailment to in the previous case. But they don’t bother to check the pressure before conceiving, and the pressure is too low and the child does suffer the ailment.

In each case the child so conceived is better off existing than not existing, but the harms it suffers are sufficient reason to not bring it into existence. (Some might think the child cannot be harmed by something that makes it, all things considered, better off – namely being conceived. I’ve been convinced by Liz Harman’s arguments that this is the wrong way to think about harm. Unfortunately Liz’s arguments on this point are not available online. When they are I’ll try to link to them because I think they’re helpful in understanding cases like Brock’s and Dworkin’s, which I think are very relevant to the cloning debate.)

So do these cases show that cloning should be banned? No, because there are a lot of distinctions to draw, and the overall effect of the distinctions is to weaken the argument against cloning. But the matters here are very delicate.

The first distinction is between the immoral and the illegal. I agree with the usual judgements that in Brock’s and Dworkin’s cases the agents act immorally. I’m not so sure they act illegally. Would it be proper to have criminal sanctions against the agents in these cases? My tentative opinion is no. Whatever the morality of reproduction, I’m tentatively an absolutist about a legal right to reproduction.

The second distinction is between conceiving and helping others to conceive. This is relevant to the cloning debate, because part of what we care about is the role of the medical practitioners in these cases. If a doctor helped the woman in Brock’s case to conceive, when she could have refrained from helping until the danger of the child suffering the ailment had passed, she acts immorally. (Doesn’t she? I could be wrong here, but it seems she does.) And it might be appropriate to have legal, or at least professional, sanctions in such a case. So while the moral/legal distinction weakens the case for a ban, it does not have as much bite when applied not to parents but to their ‘assistants’, especially if those assistants have professional obligations not to harm others.

The third distinction, and the crucial one, is between cases like Brock’s and Dworkin’s and cases where any child those agents have has a risk of such an ailment. I think this makes quite a difference to the case. In this case, where any child a woman or a couple ever have has a serious risk of major suffering, consider the following four questions.

• Is it immoral to conceive in such a situation?
• Should it be illegal to conceive in such a situation?
• Is it immoral to assist in conception in such a situation?
• Should it be illegal to assist in conception in such a situation?

My answers are: Tentatively no, Definitely no, Tentatively no, Slightly stronger no. (I know a blogger should have firmer opinions, but I think these are hard questions.)

Now I think when we are thinking about legalising cloning, on the proviso that its use is restricted to those couples who otherwise could not have children, the last question is the salient one. And I since I think there should be no law against such assistance, I think there should be no law against cloning. (At least for this reason.) But note I’ve effectively conceded that there should at least be restrictions on cloning, until we lose our grounds for believing that it is a very risky process for the child involved.

At this point a concern several people raised becomes pressing. What counts as “otherwise could not have children”? There are (at least) four possibilities.

1. Could not conceive by traditional means.
2. Could not conceive by traditional or modern (e.g. IVF) means without using sperm or eggs from third parties.
3. Could not conceive by traditional or modern (e.g. IVF) means even with using sperm or eggs from third parties.
4. Could not conceive by any means or adopt a child.

They haven’t put it this way, but several people have in effect suggested that adoption is an alternative to cloning. That becomes important here, because I think it’s important to the evaluation of the Brock/Dworkin style examples that there be no alternative to having a child in the risky way. And it isn’t just a matter of of a technical disagreement, because if we agree that cloning be restricted to those who could not otherwise have children, and that means 4, then we are in effect ruling out cloning, because for the forseeable future there will be a steady supply of adoptable children.

At risk of sounding like a wimp, I’m going to stop here for now rather than argue about which of these 4 is the contextually appropriate way to understand ‘could not otherwise have children’. I think the right answer is 2 or 3 (probably 2) but if there’s a good argument for 4, that would be a better argument against cloning than I’d previously considered. Maybe I’ll say more about this in later posts.

We are caught between the rock of fallibilism and the whirlpool of scepticism. Both are mad! … Better fallibilism than scepticism, but it would be better still to dodge the choice. I think we can. We will be alarmingly close to the rock, and also alarmingly close to the whirlpool, but if we steer with care we can – just barely – escape them both.

This is, I think, exactly how the story is most commonly used nowadays. But of course it isn’t the story Homer has Odysseus tell. In that story it’s just taken as a given that you can’t escape them both. Any path that takes you out of Scylla’s reach leaves you vulnerable to the whirlpool. The only thing to do is to cut your losses, sail past Scylla’s shore, trim the sails for high speed and don’t put up too much of a fight, and you’ll get by only losing 6 or 12 men.

That’s more or less exactly what wise Odysseus does. The only difference is that brave Odysseus does put up a fight. It’s not clear this is rational, and it isn’t entirely clear, at least to me, why he does so, since Circe told him not to do so, and in all other respects Circe’s advice proved sound. (The other option, which Odysseus took on the way back, is to stay out of sight and hope to sail right under Scylla’s nose. That works too, if a God has got your back.)

As I read it, it isn’t a story about finding the tricky middle ground at all, but about learning to cut your losses and move on.

Ironically enough, I think the story in its Homeric version actually serves as a perfect metaphor in the epistemological case. Lewis’s literary sensibilities are sharper than his epistemological sensibilities here. You shouldn’t try and sail between fallibilism and scepticism, you should just head for the fallibilist rock and hope the losses aren’t too great. There are costs, but they are managable. (The empiricist skipper, or at least the internalist navigator, will be lost to the fallibilist monster.) Try and steer a middle course, as Lewis does, and you end up basically being a sceptic, albeit one who has earned (or at least bought) the right to sing out “But in some contexts I can truly say I know what food penguins eat“ as you are sucked into Charybdis’s whirlpool. If there’s one thing that Charybdis can do well, you see, it’s change the context.

Book XII of Homer’s Odyssey translated by Richard Butler, from the Internet Classics Archive

“‘Of these two rocks the one reaches heaven and its peak is lost in a dark cloud. This never leaves it, so that the top is never clear not even in summer and early autumn. No man though he had twenty hands and twenty feet could get a foothold on it and climb it, for it runs sheer up, as smooth as though it had been polished. In the middle of it there is a large cavern, looking West and turned towards Erebus; you must take your ship this way, but the cave is so high up that not even the stoutest archer could send an arrow into it. Inside it Scylla sits and yelps with a voice that you might take to be that of a young hound, but in truth she is a dreadful monster and no one- not even a god- could face her without being terror-struck. She has twelve mis-shapen feet, and six necks of the most prodigious length; and at the end of each neck she has a frightful head with three rows of teeth in each, all set very close together, so that they would crunch any one to death in a moment, and she sits deep within her shady cell thrusting out her heads and peering all round the rock, fishing for dolphins or dogfish or any larger monster that she can catch, of the thousands with which Amphitrite teems. No ship ever yet got past her without losing some men, for she shoots out all her heads at once, and carries off a man in each mouth.

“‘You will find the other rocks lie lower, but they are so close together that there is not more than a bowshot between them. [A large fig tree in full leaf grows upon it], and under it lies the sucking whirlpool of Charybdis. Three times in the day does she vomit forth her waters, and three times she sucks them down again; see that you be not there when she is sucking, for if you are, Neptune himself could not save you; you must hug the Scylla side and drive ship by as fast as you can, for you had better lose six men than your whole crew.’

“‘Is there no way,’ said I, ‘of escaping Charybdis, and at the same time keeping Scylla off when she is trying to harm my men?’

“‘You dare-devil,’ replied the goddess, you are always wanting to fight somebody or something; you will not let yourself be beaten even by the immortals. For Scylla is not mortal; moreover she is savage, extreme, rude, cruel and invincible. There is no help for it; your best chance will be to get by her as fast as ever you can, for if you dawdle about her rock while you are putting on your armour, she may catch you with a second cast of her six heads, and snap up another half dozen of your men; so drive your ship past her at full speed, and roar out lustily to Crataiis who is Scylla’s dam, bad luck to her; she will then stop her from making a second raid upon you.

…

“Immediately after we had got past the [Sirens’] island I saw a great wave from which spray was rising, and I heard a loud roaring sound. The men were so frightened that they loosed hold of their oars, for the whole sea resounded with the rushing of the waters, but the ship stayed where it was, for the men had left off rowing. I went round, therefore, and exhorted them man by man not to lose heart.

“‘My friends,’ said I, ‘this is not the first time that we have been in danger, and we are in nothing like so bad a case as when the Cyclops shut us up in his cave; nevertheless, my courage and wise counsel saved us then, and we shall live to look back on all this as well. Now, therefore, let us all do as I say, trust in Jove and row on with might and main. As for you, coxswain, these are your orders; attend to them, for the ship is in your hands; turn her head away from these steaming rapids and hug the rock, or she will give you the slip and be over yonder before you know where you are, and you will be the death of us.’

“So they did as I told them; but I said nothing about the awful monster Scylla, for I knew the men would not on rowing if I did, but would huddle together in the hold. In one thing only did I disobey Circe’s strict instructions- I put on my armour. Then seizing two strong spears I took my stand on the ship Is bows, for it was there that I expected first to see the monster of the rock, who was to do my men so much harm; but I could not make her out anywhere, though I strained my eyes with looking the gloomy rock all over and over

“Then we entered the Straits in great fear of mind, for on the one hand was Scylla, and on the other dread Charybdis kept sucking up the salt water. As she vomited it up, it was like the water in a cauldron when it is boiling over upon a great fire, and the spray reached the top of the rocks on either side. When she began to suck again, we could see the water all inside whirling round and round, and it made a deafening sound as it broke against the rocks. We could see the bottom of the whirlpool all black with sand and mud, and the men were at their wit’s ends for fear. While we were taken up with this, and were expecting each moment to be our last, Scylla pounced down suddenly upon us and snatched up my six best men. I was looking at once after both ship and men, and in a moment I saw their hands and feet ever so high above me, struggling in the air as Scylla was carrying them off, and I heard them call out my name in one last despairing cry. As a fisherman, seated, spear in hand, upon some jutting rock throws bait into the water to deceive the poor little fishes, and spears them with the ox’s horn with which his spear is shod, throwing them gasping on to the land as he catches them one by one- even so did Scylla land these panting creatures on her rock and munch them up at the mouth of her den, while they screamed and stretched out their hands to me in their mortal agony. This was the most sickening sight that I saw throughout all my voyages.”

Fodor says somewhere that it’s a law that every technical problem has a technical solution. It looks to some like I’m just raising a technical problem for Bostrom, so it’s a law that it has a solution. If all I’ve done is given Bostrom a reason to read up on some more stats to tidy up the argument, then it’s reasonable to believe that there is a way to tidy up the argument even in advance of his expositing it. So let me try and make the argument as non-technically as possible.

Quick summary of Bostrom’s argument, without the technical details because I want to give the non-technical response. Given some plausible hypotheses about the world, most creatures with experiences kinda like yours are simulations, not material objects. So you’re probably a simulation, not a material object. (The technical objections are all to do with what goes on at the point the arguers say ‘So’. To cut a long story short, there’s an unstated premise here, and it’s inconsistent. Let’s, perhaps generously, bracket those objections.)

We can concede the premise. True, the vast majority of things with experiences kinda like mine are simulated. And what I’m kinda like is part of my evidence. But it isn’t all of it, because I know a lot more than what I’m kinda like. And we should never make judgements from a part of our evidence set when there’s potentially more evidence to use.

To pick a salient example, most things with experiences kinda like mine don’t have their emotional well-being tied to Red Sox wins and losses. No reason yet to conclude that how happy I’ll be this October is more-or-less independent of how the Red Sox do, because I know something more about my particular position in the world.

I actually know quite a lot about my position in the world, on a bit of reflection. There are particular combinations of experiences I’ve had that I can be just about certain no one else in the universe has had or will have. (If the universe is infinite I can’t be so sure, but if the universe is infinite the sense in which ‘most’ creatures like me are simulations becomes elusive. I doubt there’s a higher cardinality of simulated beings than material beings.) What’s the percentage of creatures with experiences just like mine that are simulated, and what’s the percentage that’s material? Bostrom doesn’t know. All he can say is because he doesn’t know, it shouldn’t matter, so I should use the percentages of creatures kinda like me. His motto is ignore evidence when you can’t figure out what effect it has.

What do I say? Well some days I say I do know. I know the percentage of beings with experiences just like mine that are material is 100. In that case, by Bostrom’s reasoning, I should infer I’m material. This isn’t an argument that I’m material, it’s an argument that Bostrom’s reasoning, plus what I know about myself, doesn’t undermine my confidence that I’m material. There’s no reductio argument against knowledge of your own materiality from simulation considerations.

Other days I might waver. At least for the sake of the argument I might, because really I feel I do know the relevant percentage and no one’s given me a good reason to think I don’t. But let’s pretend I’m prepared to doubt this really is knowledge. I still don’t feel any force of Bostrom’s argument. Still, there’s a big chunk of evidence I have that Bostrom says I should ignore, and I don’t know why. He says I should pay close attention to the percentage of people kinda like me that are simulations. I say what about the evidence that tells me more about my place in the universe, evidence that I use every day in reasoning about, for instance, how I’ll feel about the Red Sox. He has to say, “I don’t know how to account for that. Maybe that’s good evidence you’re human, maybe it’s further evidence you’re a simulation, maybe (although this seems implausible) it’s neutral between the two because the percentage of people just like you who are material equals the percentage of people kinda like you who are material. But when we don’t know what to do with evidence we should always take the third option, and treat it like it’s neutral evidence.”

I say that looks like one of the three options, that the evidence is neutral, is being given special status, and I want to know why. (Especially since this is the step that leads to the inconsistencies.) And here I think the simulation argument just goes quiet, because it has nothing more to say. I say (very politely giving myself the last word) that this step needs justification, and without it I’m going to mostly ignore the argument.

If I simply don’t know what effect the largest chunk of my evidence has on the probability that I’m material rather than simulated, then it looks like I simply don’t know the probability that I’m material rather than simulated. And if I don’t know that I might be well within my rights to go on acting as if it’s 1, like I believed all along. Whether that’s within my rights or obligatory depends on some hard questions about the status of epistemic conservatism, and in particular on whether epistemic radicalism is useless or positively misguided. I waver on that question too, so the number of days where I think Bostrom has given me any reason at all to worry is vanishing.

UPDATE: I just noticed that John Turri also sprung to my defence against Yglesias. I think Matthew’s post was quite useful, because it made me think about how to spell out the argument without appeal to technical details. Hence the above rant, which was fun to write at least. (And as Andrew McGonigal quite rightly points out in the comments, I pull some punches here regarding various externalisms, criticisms which again don’t rely on technical details.)

This all got me wondering about the provenance of the phrase ‘core analytic’. I had been under the impression that the contemporary use of the term ‘core’ to describe metaphysics and epistemology and related areas was due to Brian Leiter’s use of it that way in the Gourmet Reports.

If that’s true, it indicates that Prof Leiter really is quite powerful. He’s managed to have enough impact on the profession that people now create positions to fill his classifications. That’s quite an achievement. I should lobby him to create a new category for philosophy of probability and philosophy of language and philosophical logic and metaphysics and epistemology.

I was reading Keith DeRose’s Assertion, Knowledge and Context, and I was feeling unconvinced by the old Bank Cases that are meant to motivate contextualism. I thought the ‘relevant alternatives’ explanation of the cases was much to be preferred. If you don’t know the cases, here’s Jason Stanley’s version of the case.

Hannah and her husband are driving home on a Friday afternoon. They plan to stop at the bank on the way home to deposit our paychecks. But as they drive past the bank, they notice that the lines inside are very long, as they often are on Friday afternoons. Thinking that it isn’t very important that their paychecks are deposited right away, Hannah says "I know the bank will be open tomorrow, since I was there just two weeks ago on Saturday morning. So we can deposit them tomorrow morning." But then Hannah’s husband reminds her that a very important bill comes due on Monday, and that we have to have enough money in our account to cover it. He says, "Banks do change their hours. Are you certain that’s not what is going to happen tomorrow?" Hannah concedes, uttering "I guess I don’t really know that the bank will be open tomorrow."

Keith takes this kind of case to be good evidence for contextualism. Other people (including Jason in the linked paper, and John Hawthorne in his talk at the last APA Pacific) think that the best explanation for them is a kind of relevant alternatives view. If it is not important to Hannah whether the bank is open Saturday morning, then she does know, if it is important then she does not know. The idea is that whether an alternative is relevant might depend on how much it would affect the speaker if it were true. I’ve always thought this kind of explanation was a much better explanation of the Bank Cases than the contextualist explanation, and I just noticed what I think is a new-ish argument for just that position. (Actually, there’s a few inter-related arguments here, I think.)

Change the case so that the following is all (explicitly) true

• The bank is open Saturday morning


• Hannah decides that despite the importance of banking the check, she’ll leave it until Saturday, because the queues are very long. Since the bank is open this is OK. (Aren’t bank queues reliably very bad on Saturday mornings too? Does this affect the intuitions about the case?)


• Suzanna is in the position Hannah thinks she is in at first, where it doesn’t matter whether she deposits her paycheck until Monday if the bank happens to be closed on Saturday. She has slightly worse evidence than Hannah for the Saturday opening, having last been at the bank on Saturday morning three weeks ago.

We’re now having a conversation on Saturday night.

(1) WOODY: Why didn’t you deposit the paycheck Friday afternoon if it was so important?

(2) HANNAH: Because I knew the bank would be open Saturday morning.

(3) WOODY (Scowls doubtfully): What about you Suzanna? Did you also know the bank would be open Saturday morning?

(4) SUZANNA: Yes.

Here’s my intuitions about the conversation. Hannah’s utterance (2) is no more acceptable by regular conversational standards than if she had held her ground in the original story and said at the end "Whatever, I know it’s open Saturday morning." (Changing the stress pattern on ‘Whatever’ can change the acceptability of this utterance I think, but I take it the contextualist thinks it is bad.) On the other hand, Suzanna’s affirmative reply in (4) is perfectly fine. I don’t think contextualists can explain this pattern.

The first problem is that Hannah is no longer in a high stakes situation, since the check is now safely in the bank. What makes (2) dubious is that the stakes were high for the subject of the ascription – her Friday afternoon temporal part – even though they are low for the ascriber – her Saturday night temporal part.

Perhaps the contextualist can respond to this by saying that the conversation, in particular Woody’s question in (1) has made the high stakes situation somehow salient. But if we’re now in a ‘high stakes’ context, why can Suzanna say ‘yes’ in (4). In the high stakes context, she doesn’t know.

Finally, if ‘know’ changes extension between the (1)/(2) context and the (3)/(4) context, then I think Woody’s ‘also’ should sound defective. The relation Hannah self-attributes is different to the relation Suzanna self-attributes. To put the point another way, where does the context change? At (2)? At (3)? At (4)? I think it’s hard to explain the behaviour of cross-contextual references on the contextualist theory.

Note that the Relevant Alternatives theorist has no problem with any of this. Hannah didn’t know at the time, because for her then, the possibility of a change in bank hours was relevant. Suzanna did know, because that possibility wasn’t relevant for her. This is the very same ‘know’ in each case, it’s just that it’s application is sensitive to external conditions in a way that epistemologists have not historically given sufficient attention.

UPDATE: I might have been a bit harsh on the contextualists, so let me note one respect in which they may (may) have an advantage over the RA theorist. Imagine the bank’s manager asks her marketing director how many people know the bank is open Saturday morning. I would guess that whether or not Hannah has an important bill to pay on Monday is completely irrelevant to how she should answer. So maybe the RA theory isn’t entirely the right way to go.

Of course, I’m on record arguing thinking that “How many Xs know” question leads to an argument that knowledge = true belief, so whether this is altogether good news for the contextualist is not obvious.