A few quick notes on the APA while I try and properly write up my thoughts on imaginative and prepare a few classes. (By the way, Tom Stoneham also has some good thoughts on imaginative resistance. If I can get my ideas past all the bloggers, I have nothing to fear from J Phil referees, right?!)
First, there were a lot of impressive performances by young metaphysicians. Andy Egan, Josh Parsons and Ryan Wasserman all produced impressive papers, and Troy Cross’s commentary on Josh’s paper was also very good. There’s quite a bit of future in Lewisian metaphysics I think. The slightly less young metaphysicians also produced some great performances, but you expect that.
Having said that, the best session of the conference was John Hawthorne’s epistemology paper with commentaries by Jim Pryor and Jonathan Schaffer. John didn’t quite put it this way, but one of the underlying arguments concerned this argument for scepticism. The premises here are relatively strong – perhaps it will be more interesting if Betting is weakened a little – but I think it’s interesting as it stands.
- : If you know that A and you know that if A then B, and from those you derive B, then you know B.
- Practical Reasoning: If you know that doing F makes you worse off than doing not F, then it is irrational to do F.
- Betting: For any contingent proposition p, there are odds o such that it is rational to bet on p at those odds.
- Knowledge about bets: It is always possible to know that if p is true then you will be worse off betting on ~p than not betting on ~p.
Assume you know some contingent proposition c. By Betting, there are odds at which it is rational to bet on ~c. By Knowledge about bets, you can know that it is possible to know that if c is true, then it you will be worse off taking that bet than declining it. By Closure, you can combine that conditional with c to conclude you will be worse off taking the bet than declining it. By Practical Reasoning, it is irrational then to take the bet. But this contradicts our assumption that it is rational to take the bet.
John made two points. First, contrary to some claims made by contextualists, it is not clear that contextualist theories help with the puzzle. John has some fairly careful arguments for this point, but to start it is not clear just which premise the contextualist means to deny here. Secondly, if we are particularly careful about modality and tense, we note that the argument is not strictly speaking valid. At most the argument shows that if someone offers you a particularly attractive bet on ~c, then you don’t know that c. But this is compatible with your actually knowing that c. To make the argument valid we need an extra premise to the effect that the offer of a bet cannot destroy knowledge. (Or something perhaps a little more precise.) That premise looks pretty plausible, but it might be false. Importantly, this is not a contextualist premise, since what matters is that the alleged knower faces a bet on ~c, not whether sceptical possibilities are salient to us ascribers. There don’t look like there are many good options here, and maybe this kind of subject-sensitive theory is the best we can do.
I’ve still got plenty of notes to write up from the conference, so maybe this post is to be continued tomorrow.