“Michelle”:http://www.platonicrelationship.com/2004_03_01_blogarchive.html#107912617199758442 doesn’t like some of the trends in contemporary epistemology.
bq. We as humans are not brute memorizing machines…we do not aim only to collect the most true information possible (which is probably a reason that we don’t memorize the phone books). What we are are __rational__ beings who seek reasons and explanations for things. We want to make sense of the world, and we do that by understanding it…. I find it shocking that contemporary epistemology doesn’t seem very interested in what I take to be a fundamental drive that we all, as rational creatures, possess. Why are lottery paradoxes more important than trying to sort out the nature of understanding and explanation? Why have word games and brain teasers become standard fare in epistemological debates, while far more fundamental issues are ignored?
There is a large field of study of explanation – for some of the best current work see “here”:http://www.stanford.edu/~strevens/research/overview.html#expln – but for some reason it doesn’t seem to be classified as part of mainstream epistemology.
I often don’t understand the classifications of people into various areas of philosophy. This has a few quirky consequences. For one thing, when people ask what I do, I have to stutter in place of answering because I don’t have a nice classification. For another, when I’m hiring I don’t pay as much attention as some people to the areas in which the department is nominally hiring. My usual rule is that if you advertise for an X, you hire the best philosopher who can teach undergraduate classes in X. Occasionally I look for people who can teach grad courses in X too, if it’s really important that those courses get taught and no one else can teach them. But normally I just have some initial constraint of making sure the person can cover some needs in area X, and then look for the best philosopher. This leads to a bias towards generalists, which of course I’m perfectly happy with.
Returning to the topic of understanding and explanation, I’ve been trying to think of a decent way of working the marginal revolution into a blogpost ever since Wednesday’s seminar and not having much success. It seems to me the marginal revolution should be a nice case study for theories of explanation, but I can’t quite figure out how all the pieces fit together.
On the one hand, it seems to me that in some pretty important sense that by 1880 we understood why diamonds were more expensive than water, and before 1870 we really didn’t understand that. We just didn’t __know__ why cost did not equal average utility. On the other hand, it’s not like the marginalist story is entirely unproblematic. It involves all sorts of idealisations, and even with those idealisations it might not work in every single case (e.g. we might have to complicate the story in the labour and capital markets). And although the pre-marginal explanations of why diamonds are more expensive than water don’t always make a lot of sense, they can probably be reconceptualised as idealised, not-fully-general, causal explanations. If I ever get around to writing a massive paper on explanations in social sciences, I want to say __something__ about this, but I’m a long way from knowing exactly what.
Getting directly back to lotteries, I think it’s a little unfair to lump that in with other ‘word games’. (I of course enjoy word games, but I enjoy all sorts of frivolities.) I think thinking about lotteries is a good way to get insights into the role of probabilities in epistemic concepts. And I think that’s true whether we care primarily about knowledge or about explanation.
Just what should the status of probabilistic reasoning be in explanations? Presumably this depends on what the probabilities are. If we know that there is a physical chance x of some event being caused by y, then we shouldn’t expect an explanation of the event that causally entails its happening, just an explanation that says “y happened, and that caused x to happen.” But if the probabilities are not primitive physical probabilities, but some other kind of probability, then perhaps things are trickier.
If we have a lottery that is strictly speaking deterministic, but which we couldn’t possibly know in advance how it will turn out, or even rationally assign higher probabilities to some outcomes rather than others, is it sufficient to explain why a particular ticket lost that it was highly probable that it would lose? If not, does this show we can never use anything other than physical probabilities in explanation? I think the answers are _no_ and _no_, but getting a theory of probabilistic explanation that accounts for both those answers will be non-trivial. So I suspect lotteries will be helpful even for those who care about less momentous matters than the intension of the English word ‘knows’. Maybe it won’t be, but I’d suspect it will.
While on epistemology, which I sort of was, “Scepticism, Rationalism and Externalism”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/sre.htm got accepted for the “Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference”:http://www.class.uidaho.edu/inpc/7th-2004/index.html. I’m quite happy about this because it’s one of my better papers; one of my rare efforts to really attack a central philosophical problem rather than knocking off peripheral puzzles as they arise. In general I think the periphery is where philosophy has most contact with the outside world, so I don’t feel too bad that I don’t spend much time on core puzzles. But it is nice to dive back into central issues from time to time.