We just started a reading group at Brown on Dave Chalmers’s book The Conscious Mind. I’ve never read it straight through, though I suspect I’ve read every page at different times, so it will be good to have a chance to do that. And of course, I wanted to start by quibbling with the introduction. Dave says that an important part of his project is Taking Consciousness Seriously. Now I don’t mind people taking various things seriously. There probably should be more of it. But I think saying that’s what you’re up to is a fairly cliched way to start. Does anyone ever start a book on X by saying they aren’t going to take X seriously?

Then I realised I can change things. If no one else will do this, I can write Taking X Frivolously articles. Then Taking X Seriously won’t be contentless, because it will situate ones dialectical position in opposition to my playful frivolity. But perhaps an article is too much. Perhaps we should start with something shorter. A blog entry say.

Here’s a perfectly frivolous argument that knowledge equals true belief. (Different to the somewhat by not entirely frivolous argument for that conclusion from a couple of weeks ago.) It starts with a story.

The older man cast a worried glance down the bar.

–Looks like Frank’s in no condition to drive imself ome.
–E’s not too bad is e? replied his younger friend.
–Yeah, he’s that bad, said the barman.
–Well Bob, he’s your friend, you better tell im we’re taking im ome, said the older man.
–Thanks Doug, grumbled the younger man. Then he had an inspiration.
–Look we don’t even need to tell him. He doesn’t have a choice in the matter does he? I bet he doesn’t even know where his car is.
–How much? asked the barman.
–How much what? asked Bob with surprise.
–How much d’ya bet that he doesn’t know where his car is?

Bob was a little shocked by this, but he remembered some pretty wild bets he’d had with this barman before. Still, this was a pretty good shot he thought, staring over while Frank struggled to tell the ashtray from the peanut bowl.

–Fifty.
–You’re on, said the barman, and turned to Frank. C’mon y’old drunk. Stop eating the cigarettes and get yirself home.
–I got no home, said Frank.
–Sure you do, said the barman. You moved into it last Monday.
–Good point, said Frank.

They all headed out the door. Doug trying to protect Frank, Bob already counting his winnings, and the barman anxious to give Frank every chance to win the bet for him. His heart sank a little when he overheard some street kids talking about a car they’d stolen for a joyride. He could barely decipher their street lingo – it was a foreign language to his companions – but the car they were describing sounded a lot like Frank’s car. And the wheel they were playing with looked like Frank’s too.

Meanwhile, Bob was getting happier and happier. Frank was now walking the opposite direction to where he’d left his car three hours ago. Pretty soon he’d give up, and the bet would be won. He thought he could hear the coins jangling already. But the sound wasn’t right. More like keys jangling in fact. Car keys. Frank’s car keys. Frank’s car keys that he was putting into the door of a car. His car.

Bob was too dumbstruck to speak. He simply stared at the fresh tire marks streaking out from behind Frank’s car.

–How did you know to find your car here? asked Doug.
–Sha’s alwiys parched ere, replied Frank.
–Not tonight, said Doug. There was a parade, we had to park on the other side of town.
–A parad? mumbled Frank.

At this point Doug thought of tackling Frank to stop him driving home, but then he noticed that the car was missing a view vital parts, like a steering wheel. Frank wasn’t drunk enough to try driving without a steering wheel. He couldn’t quite tell what was missing, but Frank knew something was wrong. Sensing a way out of his troubles, he fell asleep at the wheel-mount.

The barman was grinning with delight. What luck that the kids had left Frank’s car right where he always parked it!

–Hand it over.
–Hand what over? asked Bob.
–The fifty.

Bob thought about arguing that Frank didn’t really know where his car was, that he’d just walked by it and noticed it. Then he remembered that they’d walked directly here. Frank had hardly looked at the other cars he’d gone past. In fact he’d hardly looked at anything above his own shoelace. If he didn’t pay up now there’d have to be a fight.

He turned over the fifty.

The argument now should be obvious. The circumstances demand Bob pay up. If he doesn’t pay, he’ll get thumped. And not just because someone feels like hitting him. Because he’s not paid up when he should have. Given a not excessively violent bettor who has bet that p, if the other party is in danger of violence if he doesn’t pay when all the facts are in, then those facts are such as to make it the case that p. Call this the fighting argument for knowledge = true belief.

I think this argument has some merit. Note how natural it is for Doug to ask how Frank knew where his car was. Admittedly in the story Doug and Bob don’t know all the details about the kids, but they know something is wrong, yet they don’t challenge the barman’s knowledge claim – or at least his claim to have won the bet on his knowledge claim. And Doug uses a ‘knowledge’ locution.

But that’s not why I posted this. Rather, I wanted to post a reply to that argument which I owe in its important respects to Andy Egan. Imagine instead of betting on Frank’s knowledge, Bob and the barman bet on whether Hydrogen was faster than Hyperion. Both these horses, it turns out, were entered in the 4.15 that afternoon, and the bet was placed at 4.10. In those circumstances, whoever bets on the horse that finishes ahead in the race wins the bet. If they other party doesn’t pay up, things could get ugly. But of course the correlation between being faster and finishing ahead is quite loose. One of the horses might be carrying more weight, or get impeded in their run, or just be having a bad day. But for betting purposes those things are ignored.

There seems to be a principle here. Unless p is easily verifiable one way or the other, a bet that p will instantly transform itself into a bet on the closest operational approximation of p. It’s hard to tell who’s really faster – easy to tell who finished in front, so that becomes the bet. In the case of betting that Frank knows where his car is, that gets transformed into a bet on whether he will walk more or less directly to his car. This explains why Bob has to pay up. He might have been right – it wasn’t true that Frank knew where his car was. But the best operational approximation to that proposition is true, so he loses.