In a “previous post”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2014/04/01/arbitrary-boundaries-in-academia/ I said that the study of Shakespeare was well outside the bounds of philosophy as it is practiced, though it easily have been inside. This was a mistake. Klaas Kraay pointed out to me that there is even an upcoming conference on “Shakespeare: The Philosopher”:http://philevents.org/event/show/13977.

I’m very happy to have been proven wrong about this. Shakespeare’s connection to philosophy seems like a rich and interesting field of study, and I’m thrilled to see people working on it.

It is a little interesting that the conference doesn’t look like it is growing out of work in history of modern philosophy, or even history of Renaissance philosophy, but out of aesthetics. That wasn’t what I expected either, though perhaps I should have. I suspect in general there are interesting connections to be drawn between the work of the leading poets, playwrights and, eventually, novelists. I wonder if we’ll think of work looking at those connections as being part of aesthetics, or part of history of philosophy? Either way, it’s wonderful to see this kind of work being done.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the ways in which Higher-Order Evidence cases might be like Pascal’s Wager. In each case, an agent is presented with a reason for changing their doxastic state that isn’t in the form of evidence for or against the propositions in question.

Since most philosophers don’t think that highly of Pascal’s Wager, this isn’t the most flattering comparison. Indeed, some will think that if the cases are analogous, then the discussion of higher-order evidence isn’t really part of epistemology at all. Even if Pascal had given us a prudential reason to believe in God, he wouldn’t have given us an epistemic reason. I suspect, though, that this is a touch too quick. There are a variety of Pascal like cases where it isn’t so clear we have left epistemology behind.

Melati and Cinta are offered epistemic deals by demons. Here is the deal that Melati is offered.

bq. There is this proposition _p_ that you know to be true. I have a method _M1_ that will yield great knowledge about subjects of great interest. It is perfectly reliable. The only catch is that to use the method, you first have to firmly believe that _p_ is false. If you do, you’ll get lots of knowledge about other things, indeed you’ll learn over 100 things that are of similar interest and importance to _p_.

And here is the deal that Cinta is offered.

bq. Here are 100 propositions that you believe to be true. As you know, most people are not that reliable about the subject matters of those propositions. I can’t say whether you’re better or worse than average, though your accuracy rate is comfortably above 50%. Here’s what I can say. I have a method _M2_ that will yield very reliable beliefs about these subjects. People who have used it are 99% reliable when they use it. And given the subject matter, that’s a very high success rate. The only catch is that to use _M2_, you have to start by doubting every one of those propositions, and then only believe them if _M2_ says to do so.

There are two big parallels between Melati’s and Cinta’s deals. Both of them are asked to change their attitudes because that is necessary for commencing to use a method. At some level, they are asked to change their beliefs on prudential grounds. But note the payoff is not Pascalian salvation; it is knowledge. And the payoff is pretty similar in the two cases; probably around 100 pieces of new knowledge, and 1 false belief.

Yet despite those parallels, the cases feel very very different. Melati has no epistemic reason to believe that _p_ is false. Indeed, it isn’t clear that she has all things considered reason to believe that _p_ is false. And if she’s anything like me, she wouldn’t be capable of accepting the deal. (Carrie Jenkins, Selim Berker, Hillary Greaves and several others have discussed versions of what I’m calling Melati’s case, and the intuition that Melati has no epistemic reason to accept the deal seems incredibly widespread.)

Cinta’s situation is quite different. After all, the deal that the demon offers Cinta is very similar to the deal that Descartes offered his readers. Doubt a lot of things, including some things that you surely know, apply my method, and you’ll end up in a better position than where you started. In Descartes’s case, it wasn’t clear he was able to keep up his end of the bargain. That is, it wasn’t clear that he really had the magic method he claimed to have. But if he did have such a method, it wouldn’t be clear he was offering a bad deal. Moreover, we teach Descartes inside epistemology. If Cinta is being offered a version of Descartes’s deal, then it is arguable that she really has an epistemic reason to accept the deal.

What interests me about the cases of Melati and Cinta is that they suggest a way to capture the asymmetry in intuitions about higher-order evidence. Many people think that higher-order evidence can be good grounds to lose a belief. But I’ve never seen a case where the natural intuition is that higher-order evidence gives the agent grounds to adopt a belief where the first-order evidence is insufficient. Here’s a hypothesis that explains that. Higher-order evidence should be grouped in with things like Descartes’s motivation for doubting all one’s prior beliefs, if not with Pascal’s motivation for belief in God. And it is plausible that these kind of considerations in terms of epistemic consequences can provide reasons, perhaps even epistemic reasons, to lose a prior belief, without providing reasons to adopt a previously unheld belief.

My colleague Maria Lasonen-Aarnio’s great paper “Higher-Order Evidence and the Limits of Defeat”:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phpr.12090/abstract is just out in PPR. I agree with her conclusions about higher-order evidence. Indeed, on a number of points I agree with her because I’ve been convinced by her arguments. But I did want to register one quibble, one that I don’t think undermines the position she ultimately adopts. In fact, it offers a way to respond to an objection.

Lasonen-Aarnio is interested in cases with the following structure:

1. S has evidence E, and let’s assume S knows she has E, and E is in fact excellent evidence for p.
2. S has strong but misleading evidence, call it H, that E is not any kind of evidence for p.
3. S has no other evidence that tells in favour of p.

There is a widespread intuition in these cases that S should not believe p, because H undermines the support that E provides for p. Lasonen-Aarnio wants to argue against this intuition. Or, at least, she wants to argue against this intuition given a ‘rule-based’ conception of epistemic rationality. The difference between the two possible conclusions will turn out to matter for what I say.

By a ‘rule-based’ conception of epistemic rationality, I mean (and I think Lasonen-Aarnio means too), a theory with the following two principles:

1. All epistemic norms are to be explained by the existence of epistemic rules.
2. For any one of these rules that explain epistemic norms, there is a distinction between following the rule, and merely complying with it, and full rationality requires following not merely complying.

Lasonen-Aarnio’s first step is to argue that even if you accept the intuition here, you should still think that rules like “Believe what the evidence supports” are good rules. It’s true that the intuition in question implies that the rule is somehow trumped. But that doesn’t mean we should have a more restrictive rule saying “Believe what the evidence supports, unless one of these conditions obtain”, where the conditions are the conditions where the rule is trumped. The reason for this is that the intuition that started us down this track is completely general. Any time an agent gets evidence that a rule is unreliable or untrustworthy, the intuition says that rule is trumped. So no finite rule can accommodate all the possible trumping conditions.

One possibility would be to have an infinite rule. It isn’t hard to describe what such a rule would look like. Consider the function from possible situations to belief states that are permissible in that situation. (Ignore the possibly serious problem that such there are too many situations for this to even be a function.) Call this an über-rule of rationality. Such a rule could cover all cases, including the one S faces in our example at the start.

But there is a pressing problem that Lasonen-Aarnio raises here. The reasons for thinking that no finite rule will capture the intuition are reasons for thinking that the über-rule will be infinitely complex. And that in turn means it will be hard for agents to genuinely follow the rule. Put another way, once we start considering über-rules, the distinction between following a rule and merely complying with it will be obliterated, since the most a non-Godlike agent could do is merely comply with it. But once this distinction is obliterated, we have abandoned the rule-based conception of epistemic rationality. After all, any theory whatsoever can be rephrased as a rule-based theory, provided we let rules be nothing more than functions from situations to evaluations of actions in that situation, and the most we expect of agents is complaince with that ‘rule’. The rule-based conception wasn’t meant to be this trivial!

One natural move here, one taken by David Christensen, is to say that agents like S face a dilemma. S should believe p, in virtue of 1, and should not believe p, in virtue of 2. But Christensen, like others moved by the intuition we started with, doesn’t think this is a ‘pure’ dilemma. Rather, he thinks that although S will do something irrational whatever she does, it is worse for her to hold on to her belief in p than to scrap it. Lasonen-Aarnio argues against this possibility, and it is here I want to quibble with her.

As Lasonen-Aarnio sets things up, S faces two rules.

* **Rule 1** – With evidence E, believe p!
* **Rule 2** – With evidence that E is not good evidence for p, don’t believe p!

But these rules don’t imply that it is better to comply with Rule 2 than with Rule 1. That needs further explanation.

Lasonen-Aarnio assumes that the further explanation will consist of a third rule, one that instructs agents to comply with Rule 2 rather than Rule 1 when given a choice. And on the strong conception of a rule-based conception of epistemology that we started with, she has to be right. Moreover, I think the intuition she’s contesting, the one that says S should give up the belief in p, really doesn’t look that plausible without this very strong conception of epistemology as rule-based.

If we drop this way of thinking about the rule-based conception of epistemology, there is a way out. Let’s say there is an extra normative fact that it is better to comply with Rule 2 rather than Rule 1. (Or, for that matter, that it is better to comply with Rule 1 than Rule 2. I’m really most interested here in the general issue of whether there can be impure dilemmas, not which way this particular one should be resolved.) That normative fact is not explained by, or grounded in, the existence of an epistemic rule. It’s true that the normative fact can be converted into a rule, in much the way that we generated the über-rule above. But that conversion would be misleading, for the distinction between following and complying is not intuitively relevant here.

This is a very general point about impure dilemmas. It is very plausible that the moral worth of an action depends on the action being done for the right reasons. If we’re sympathetic to moral rules, we’ll say that this means that the action is done by a person following, and not merely complying with, the moral rule. Following Nomy Arpaly and Julia Markovits, I don’t think it is important that the agent recognise the rule as a moral rule, or perhaps even as any kind of rule. But that doesn’t undermine the importance of the following/complying distinction, since an agent can genuinely follow a rule without thinking of it as a moral rule. An agent might refuse to lie out of respect for her interlocutors, even if she mistakenly believes (perhaps on general consequentialist grounds) that there is nothing particularly wrong with lying. In that case I think she is genuinely following, not merely complying with, a rule against lying.

In cases of moral dilemmas, there will be some undefeated moral rule that the agent breaks no matter what she does. In some of these, there will be a less bad choice to make. An agent faced with a choice between lying and breaking a promise might do wrong either way, but it may be worse to break the promise. (This isn’t because promise-breaking is always worse than lying; I’m just making an assumption about the particular case.) Now we could say that in such a situation there is a rule saying it is worse to break the rule against promise-breaking than the rule against lying. But this would be a misleading way of speaking, since intuitively there isn’t a difference between following and merely complying with this meta-rule. Or, if there is a difference, it is that ‘mere’ compliance is better. Someone who keeps the promise out of respect for the promisee is merely complying with the meta-rule. But that’s better than either of the obvious ways of following the meta-rule. Someone who lies rather than breaks a promise because it maximises their moral value is excessively self-concerned. And someone who thinks that they should minimise how disrespectful they are to others is treating the person they are lying to too much as a means. It’s better to simply follow the rule against promise-breaking, and comply with the meta-rule. And that’s to say the meta-rule isn’t really a rule in the relevant sense; it’s simply a normative fact that in this circumstance, one action is worse than another.

The same story holds, without the attendant moralising, in the epistemic case. It could be perfectly rational to merely comply with a meta-rule, while following the underlying rules. That position allows for impure epistemic dilemmas, at the cost of giving up a fully rule-based conception of epistemology. I don’t think that’s in conflict with what Lasonen-Aarnio says. Indeed, it helps her overall project I think.

On first reading her paper, one might worry that Lasonen-Aarnio’s arguments overgeneralised; that if they worked they would show that there was no such thing as an impure dilemma. And that seems like an implausible result, at least to me. But in fact she doesn’t ‘prove’ any such thing. Rather, her conclusion is that the thoroughly rule-based conception of epistemology is incompatible with impure dilemmas. Since the best versions of normative internalism in epistemology seem to end up committed to a thoroughly rule-based conception, and to impure dilemmas, her argument is (as she says) a strong argument for normative externalism in epistemology.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the arbitrariness of the boundaries around philosophy. This is part of my general concern with trying to think historically (or sociologically) about contemporary philosophy.

I think it’s beyond dispute that there are, as a matter of fact, some boundaries. For instance, work in sports analytics isn’t part of philosophy. I wouldn’t publish a straightforward study in sports analytics in a philosophy journal, and I wouldn’t hire someone to an open philosophy position if all their work was in sports analytics. And I think just about everyone in the profession shares these dispositions.

In saying all this, there are a number of things I’m not saying.

1. I’m not saying that philosophy is irrelevant to sports analytics. Indeed, some of the biggest debates in sports analytics have been influenced by familiar epistemological arguments.
2. I’m not saying that sports analytics is irrelevant to philosophy. If someone wanted to use a case study from recent debates in sports analytics to make a point in social epistemology, that could be great philosophy. (I’m sort of tempted to write such a paper myself.) But something can be relevant to philosophy without being philosophy. (As a corrollary to that, I’m not saying that there couldn’t be any point to a course on sports analytics in a philosophy department. Perhaps if it was a great case study, more philosophers would need to learn the background to the case.)
3. I’m not saying there could not be something like philosophy of sports analytics. I don’t know what such a thing would be – it feels like it reduces to familiar applied epistemology – but someone could try it.
4. I’m not saying work in sports analytics is no good. Indeed, I think some of it is great.
5. I’m not saying sports analytics doesn’t belong in the academy. As a matter of fact, there isn’t anywhere it happily lives. But if David Romer and others succeed in making it part of economics, or Brayden King makes it part of management studies, I’ll be really happy.
6. And I’m not saying there is some special thing that philosophy timelessly or essentially is that excludes sports analytics. Indeed, the rest of this post is going to be sort of an argument against this view.

But even with all those negative points made, I think it is still pretty clear that philosophy as it is currently constituted does actually exclude sports analytics.

That’s all background to a couple of questions I would be interested in hearing people’s thoughts about.

1. What are the most closely related pairs of fields you know about such that one of the pair is in philosophy (in the above sense), and the other is not?
2. What fields are most distant from philosophy as it is currently practiced, but you think could easily have been in philosophy in a different history?

My answers are below the fold.
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