I’ve been very slack in adding names to the list of tracked pages on the papers blog. So the sidebar there is horribly out of date. One of the names I hadn’t added was Jonathan Sutton. This was too bad, because he’s got lots of fun stuff on his webpage. Better late than never. The most exciting thing (apart from the enormous wedding pizza) is a paper on knowledge and justification arguing, in Jonathan’s words…

I argue (at some length) for the admittedly rather surprising claim that S has a justified belief that p iff S knows that p, in all important senses of ‘justified’. In particular, there are no false justified beliefs.

Makes my paper on knowledge look tame doesn’t it!

One of the (many) nice features of the Rutgers Epistemology Conference is that they have a prize for the best essay by a Young Epistemologist. The capital Y on Young is needed, because the stipulative definition of young (less than 10 years since PhD) definitely is not folk usage. But it’s a good idea nonetheless. And I hope that when the Rutgers Epistemology Conference becomes the Rutgers Metaphysics Conference, as it will every other year in the future, they will keep running the prize. (That is, I hope they will have a Young Metaphysician Prize when it’s a metaphysics conference, though a Young Epistemologist Prize at a metaphysics conference could be amusing for all sorts of reasons.)

This year the prize was won by Michael Bergmann for his paper Epistemic Circularity: Malignant and Benign, which is well worth reading.

The prize is pretty good as is. A place in the conference proceedings, all expenses paid to the conference, paper published in PPR, and $1000 cash prize. There’s only one thing missing: a trophy.

Some of the grad students here (who for some reason want to remain anonymous on this one) suggested a trophy be part of the prize. This is obviously right. Indeed, it seems so obviously right as to be beyond enlightened argument. The only issue was what the trophy should look like. The best suggestions so far are that the metaphysics trophy should be a tailless kangaroo, fallen over, and the epistemology trophy should be a speckled hen with an indeterminate number of speckles. If you have better suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments box. If not, it’s over to the Rutgers organisers to make the trophies happen.

The philosophy papers blog is up.

Many people liked the quotes board from the APA Pacific, so I should try to provide a similar service for other conferences that I attend. Unfortunately I neither tape papers I’m at, nor take them down in shorthand. So I have to do things from memory. I can only remember two notable quotes from the Rutgers Epistemology Conference. (In neither case do I vouch for the literal accuracy of the quotes, but I will stand by their approximate accuracy.)

Jonathan Vogel: Grue is hard.

Timothy Williamson: We need to recover a philosophical innocence so we can see that the phenomenal conception of evidence is laughable.

Whatever else was in the Williamson quote, the words ‘philosophical innocence’ and ‘laughable’ were memorably used. This is really rather a strong claim. It’s very intuitive to a lot of people, even non-philosophers, that how things seem to us is our evidence about how things are, and so we could have the same evidence as we actually have while being a brain in a vat. In my two anti-indifference papers (here and here) I had to point out that the theorists I was responding to simply assumed that phenomenal states constituted evidence. They thought, not unreasonably I guess, that such a conception of evidence could be simply assumed.

But I don’t want to defend the ‘laughable’ theory here. What I do want to point out are some ways in which Williamson’s response goes well beyond what might be a natural reaction against the phenomenal conception. I was reminded of this a bit by reading Quine’s Roots of Reference, which starts by basically dismissing the phenomenal conception of evidence as being based in a faulty metaphysics of mind, but then quickly insists that evidence is still a ‘local’ matter, being constituted by sensory irritations. For Williamson locality goes with phenomenality. He thinks our evidence is just what we know.

At the conference, John Hawthorne noted that Williamson said some odd things about the following three cases. (I had previously discussed something similar here – I can’t remember whether I got the important example from John or somehow else.)

1. I hallucinate a gas guage showing a full tank.
2. I see a well-functioning gas guage showing a full tank.
3. I see a mis-functioning gas guage showing a full tank, but the tank is in fact empty.

On the phenomenal conception, in all 3 cases we have the same evidence. John noted that even if that isn’t plausible, it is very plausible that we have the same evidence in 2 and 3. At the conference, Williamson replied that sometimes we presumably could use the fact that the tank was full in our evidence. But presumably we could also do that sometimes in case 4 (which John didn’t discuss).

4. I see a mis-functioning gas guage showing a full tank. By coincidence, the tank is in fact full, but the guage would have said this even if it were empty.

Williamson is committed to the claim that we have different evidence in case 2 to case 4. And that’s very hard to motivate.

The idea that evidence is local can be motivated further by a case that Stephen Yablo used at the conference.

Knowing that the mine contains gold, you keep digging until you find it … [Y]ou would not have known the mine contained gold if some misleading testimony given in Carson City — testimony you should have been aware of but weren’t — had not been refuted by court records in Reno — with you again unaware of the fact. The court records in Reno play no role in your continued digging here. But they are a factor in your knowing.

If the Reno judge had been on a bender last night and the court had not opened, the documents refuting the Carson City testimony would not have been entered into the court records. If that had happened, and those documents had not become part of the public record some other way (which we’ll assume they would not have) then you would not have known the mine contained gold. In short, what you know about the mine turns on how much the Reno judge drank last night. But if you’re far enough from Reno, if you are in fact down the mine digging, what evidence you have really does not depend on how much the Reno judge drank. This is pretty bad for the equation of evidence with knowledge I think, especially if we are to follow Yablo and tradition on the influence of social factors on knowledge.

The upshot is that if evidence isn’t constituted by phenomenal states, I think it’s best to go with Quine and say that it’s constituted by sensory irritations. John suggested that we go with something slightly more external, say what is perceived, but either way it’s important to make evidence be closer to home than Williamson does.

I’ve been rereading Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe, and I think that figurative language in fiction poses a problem for his view. Maybe he solves this problem in later parts of the book that I’m not back to yet, or there’s a solution in the literature, but I couldn’t tell immediately how to solve it.

Walton’s main idea is that a work makes a proposition fictional by prescribing that you imagine it. But many things other than fiction as traditionally conceived contain prescriptions to imagine. Figurative language, for instance, is also meant to be understood as containing prescriptions to imagine certain things. So what happens when figurative language gets used in fiction?

For instance, in the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Ulysses Bloom is variously described in many different ways, with the descriptions being intended to recall many different genres. In the first of these he is described as a knight in a parody of Mallory’s Arthurian tales. It seems clear that (a) the reader is at this point meant to imagine Bloom as an Arthurian knight and (b) it is not fictional in Ulysses that Bloom is an Arthurian knight.

I think Walton’s solution to this puzzle is to say that there are several fictional games going on here, and it is not part of the Ulysses game, or perhaps of the core Ulysses game, that one must imagine Bloom as an Arthurian knight. But neither of those moves looks very good. If we take the first option, that this prescription is not part of the Ulysses game, it is unclear what game it is a part of. If we take the second that this prescription is not part of the Ulysses game, we have to define, somehow, what are core and non-core prescriptions, and I don’t see a way to do that.

I’ve been rereading Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe, and I think that figurative language in fiction poses a problem for his view. Maybe he solves this problem in later parts of the book that I’m not back to yet, or there’s a solution in the literature, but I couldn’t tell immediately how to solve it.

Walton’s main idea is that a work makes a proposition fictional by prescribing that you imagine it. But many things other than fiction as traditionally conceived contain prescriptions to imagine. Figurative language, for instance, is also meant to be understood as containing prescriptions to imagine certain things. So what happens when figurative language gets used in fiction?

For instance, in the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Ulysses Bloom is variously described in many different ways, with the descriptions being intended to recall many different genres. In the first of these he is described as a knight in a parody of Mallory’s Arthurian tales. It seems clear that (a) the reader is at this point meant to imagine Bloom as an Arthurian knight and (b) it is not fictional in Ulysses that Bloom is an Arthurian knight.

I think Walton’s solution to this puzzle is to say that there are several fictional games going on here, and it is not part of the Ulysses game, or perhaps of the core Ulysses game, that one must imagine Bloom as an Arthurian knight. But neither of those moves looks very good. If we take the first option, that this prescription is not part of the Ulysses game, it is unclear what game it is a part of. If we take the second that this prescription is not part of the Ulysses game, we have to define, somehow, what are core and non-core prescriptions, and I don’t see a way to do that.

Welcome to all the visitors from the Leiter report! While you are here, please stop by the philosophy papers blog, which is a site dedicated to reporting on new philosophical papers as they appear on the internet.

And if you aren’t familiar with them, also check out some of the other blogs in the blogroll, especially those by Chris Bertram, Greg Restall, Wolfgang Schwarz and (though he seems to be on hiatus right now) Tom Stoneham.

Or if you wanted to learn more about me, you could look at my home page, my papers page or my cv.

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias comments disparagingly on Leiter’s link, and on the quality of booze served around Harvard Square.

The philosophy papers blog is up.

My previous speculation about the Midwest, that it determinately excluded all of New York, seems to have been conclusively mistaken. The speculation I reported (due to Andy Egan) that the Ohio-Penn border may be a sharp boundary between the determinately Midwestern and the not determinately Midwestern, has received more support. Let me try one other speculation.

I suspect that everywhere in Missouri is determinately part of the Midwest. And I suspect that everywhere in Tennessee is determinately not part of the Midwest. But those states share a (relatively short) border constituted by the Mississippi river. And I think (or at least I think I think) that it’s a sharp boundary around the Midwest at that point.

Note that this doesn’t prove that some vague terms can have sharp boundaries. (I owe the following suggestion to David Sosa. Unless I’m getting what he thought all confused, in which case I owe it I guess to the Fates.) We might take it to be constitutive of vagueness that it always percolate all the way up. More plausibly, we might think that vagueness is really a property of boundaries, rather than of terms. The Midwest has some vague boundaries (though just where they are is a matter of some dispute) and some sharp boundaries. The Mississippi river is, for a while, a sharp boundary. We could, derivatively, talk about terms being vague when some of their boundaries are vague, or when all of their boundaries are vague, but primarily vagueness is a property of boundaries. And what the Midwest shows is that once we think this way, whether we require that vague terms have all vague boundaries or merely some makes a difference.

Last week I ran through some arguments that ought might be ambiguous between a deontological and an epistemic meaning. It turns out this issue has been the subject of some sustained research within formal semantics, and the best arguments seem to be on the side of there not being an ambiguity. See, for instance, Anna Papafragou’s paper Inference and word meaning: The case of modal auxiliaries. The most serious problems with the ambiguity theory are that (a) the alleged ambiguity is spread across so many words and languages that it needs explanation and none of the explanations provided seem to do the trick, and (b) it’s too easy to find uses where it is unclear which of the two meanings is meant, while it’s notoriously hard to do this with uncontroversially ambiguous words like bat and ball.