I mentioned in passing in the “Kornblith post”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2009/07/16/kornblith-against-reliabilism/ that there were two distinct puzzles about bootstrapping, but I let the point slide fairly quickly. This post is a short clarification of the two puzzles, and then a request for further info. I meant to post this before the Kornblith post, but I seem to have got muddled about when I hit ‘Draft’ and when I hit ‘Publish’.

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Suppose a rational agent _S_ has some evidence _E_ that bears on _p_, and makes a judgment _J_ about how _E_ bears on _p_. The agent is aware of this judgment, so she could in principle use its existence in her reasoning. Here’s an informal version of the question I’ll discuss in this paper: How many pieces of evidence does the agent have that bear on p? Three options present themselves.

1. Two – Both _J_ and _E_.
2. One – _E_ subsumes whatever evidential force _J_ has.
3. One – _J_ subsumes whatever evidential force _E_ has.

This post is about option 3. I’ll call this option JSE, short for Judgments Screen Evidence. I’m first going to say what I mean by screening here, and then say why JSE is interesting. Ultimately I want to defend three claims about JSE.

1. JSE is sufficient to derive a number of claims that are distinctive of internalist epistemology of recent years (meaning approximately 2004 to the present day).
2. JSE is necessary to motivate at least some of these claims.
3. JSE is false.

This post will largely be about saying what JSE is, then some arguments for 1 and 2. I’ll leave 3 for a later post!

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In the April edition of _Analysis_, Hilary Kornblith proposes a reliabilist solution to the bootstrapping problem. I’m going to argue that Kornblith’s proposal, far from solving the bootstrapping problem, in fact makes the problem much harder for the reliabilist to solve. Indeed, I’m going to argue that Kornblith’s considerations give us a way to develop a quick reductio of a certain kind of reliabilism.

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A new announcement on the Arché website.

Arché/St Andrews has just signed a wide-ranging collaboration agreement with the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University.

The agreement provides fee-wavers for at least six students per year (three at St Andrews and three at Rutgers) and guarantees funding for the successful candidates.

There will be two Arché-Rutgers Conferences each year. These conferences will take place in St Andrews and be jointly organized by St-Andrews and Rutgers faculty, post-docs, and students.

Long-term, we foresee a great deal of collaboration between the two philosophy departments – with a steady flow of students, post-docs, and faculty moving between the two institutions.

This is a great development. I just spent 7 weeks at Arché, and it really is a fantastic place to do philosophy. So I’m very excited about the prospect of (yet more) Rutgers people being able to head over there on a regular basis. And I think having some Archéans around Rutgers will be educational for people from both St Andrews and Rutgers.

I’d like to take some credit for this deal, but in fact I had very little to do with it. Congratulations are due primarily, I gather, to Jason Stanley for doing most of the legwork to make a deal possible. But it looks like a deal that makes both universities considerably better off, and congratulations are really due to everyone on both sides who worked out the arrangement.

I’m in St Andrews for two more days, until the end of the “summer school”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/ss2009/. It’s been absurdly beautiful here the last couple of days, reminding me why I come here rather than “rainy old New York”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/nyregion/01rain.html. At least there is some good “food”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/dining/01truck.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all and “wine”:http://www.felixsalmon.com/004982.html to make up for it.

• The slides for my talk at the summer school are “here”:http://brian.weatherson.org/summerschool-BW.pdf (PDF). I tinkered a little bit with the slides before the presentation to take out some of the digressions, and still only covered the first 3 sections in the talk. (I had planned to get through 4 sections, but there were several good questions along the way that slowed things down. PS: The link I originally put up to the slides was broken; thanks to Michael Kremer in comments for pointing this out.)
• Continuing with the Arché theme, our colleagues at CSMN have “podcasts”:http://www.csmn.uio.no/podcast/ of some of their recent conference proceedings. The talks at the Arché summer school are being recorded, so they might go to podcast soon as well.
• There have been some changes at the Journal of Semantics recently, many of which will make the journal more interesting to people in philosophy department. One of my former colleagues, Zoltan Szabó, is now an associate editor, and two of my colleagues, François Recanati and Roger Schwarzschild, are on the advisory board. The journal aims to cover “all areas in the study of meaning, and particularly welcomes submissions using the best available methodologies in semantics, pragmatics, the syntax/semantics interface, cross-linguistic semantics, experimental studies of meaning (processing, acquisition, neurolinguistics), and semantically informed philosophy of language.” (my emphasis) There is more information “here”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/2Y4OTQxN/Journal_of_Semantics_2009.pdf (PDF).

I’ve been meaning to post more over the last week, but I’ve been busy getting ready for my presentation to the “Arché Summer School”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/ss2009/.

• Speaking of summer schools, the “North American Summer School in Logic, Language and Information”:http://www.indiana.edu/~nasslli/ is returning after a 6 year hiatus. It will be at Indiana in 2010, and two of my esteemed colleagues are on the program committee. Anyone who is interested in presenting a course should get in touch with the organisers.
• I’ve tried to add a Twitter feed to the sidebar. It is meant to track @twtar, which is the Twitter account I opened for TAR. But the software I’m using seems slow and buggy, and I might remove that feed if things don’t improve soon.
• Speaking of the Arché Summer School, I’m about to head off to see “Jonathan Ichikawa”:http://jonathanichikawa.net/ talk about “thought experiments”:http://jonathanichikawa.net/files/summerschool.pdf. First of many fun talks this week I hope!

I’m about to head away for the weekend, so I won’t be responding to (or moderating) comments for the next few days unless I spend some of my vacation time on the internet. (That’s not to say I’ll actually be off the blog…)

• Sinan Dogramaci has “a paper”:http://www.sinandogramaci.net/Site/Sinan_Dogramaci_files/Unabridged,%20March%2017th.pdf forthcoming in Noûs using a similar kind of proof to the one I used in “Induction and Supposition”:http://brian.weatherson.org/IaS.pdf. So I’ve updated my paper to note that he was first! Sinan disagrees with me about where the proof fails. I think it fails when we try to make a statistical inference inside the scope of a supposition. He thinks it fails when we do ∀-introduction in a proof that includes non-deductive steps. So I’ve also extended the discussion in my paper of why I think I’ve diagnosed the error correctly. I don’t think I’ve got to the heart of what Sinan says, but I hope I’ve at least improved my paper.
• I have two posts up at the Arché Methodology Blog. One is on “thought experiments and fictions”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~armeth/2009/06/two-views-on-thought-experiments/, the other on whether philosophy is inductive or deductive
• Richard Dietz and Igor Douven are putting on a conference on “Conditionals and Conditionalization”:http://formalphilosophy.org/node/333 in Leuven on September 4-6.
• A new “European Journal for Philosophy of Science”:http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0906&L=philos-l&T=0&P=24272 is being established, though I’m not sure when it will start taking submissions.

Here is an interesting way of making explicit some of the tensions within an externalist account of evidence. I’m drawing here on some points Roger White made at the Arché Scepticism Conference, though I’m not sure Roger is perfectly happy with this way of putting things.

In what follows I’ll use ‘Pr’ for the evidential probability function (and hence assume that one exists), E(a) as a description for a’s evidence, Cr(p, a) for a’s credence in p, and Exp(X, a) as the expected value of random variable X according to probability function Pr conditioned on E(a). Then the following three statements are inconsistent. [There used to be a typo in the previous sentence, which Clayton noted in comments.]

1. If a is perfectly rational, then Cr(p, a) = Pr(p | E(a)).
2. If a is perfectly rational, then Cr(p, a) = Exp(Pr(p| E(a)), a).
3. It is possible for a to be perfectly rational, and for Pr(p | E(a)) to not equal Exp(Pr(p| E(a)), a).

The intuition behind 1 is that for a rational agent, credence is responsive to the evidence.

The intuition behind 2 is that for a rational agent, their credences match up with what they think their credences ought to be. If 2 fails, then rational agents will find themselves taking bets that they (rationally!) judge that they should not take. Roger’s paper at the conference did a really good job of bringing out how odd this option is.

The intuition behind 3 is that not all perfectly rational agents know what their evidence is. So if p is part of a’s evidence, but a does not know that p is part of their evidence, then Pr(p | E(a)) will be 1, although Exp(Pr(p| E(a)), a) will be less than 1. I believe Williamson has some more dramatic violations of this principle in intuitive models, but all we need is one violation to get the example going.

Given that the 3 are inconsistent, we have an interesting paradox on our hands. I think, despite its plausibility, that the thing to give up is 2. Credences should be responsive to evidence. If you don’t know what your evidence is, you can’t know that you’re being responsive to evidence, i.e. being rational. It might be that all of the possible errors are on one side of the correct position. In that case, your best estimate of what you should do will diverge from what you should do. So anyone who thinks evidence isn’t always luminous will think that we will have oddities like the oddities used to motivate 2. So I think we have to learn to live with its failures.

Everyone at the conference seemed to assume that that’s also what Williamson would agree, and say that 2 is what should be given up. I’m not actually sure, as a matter of Williamson interpretation, that that’s correct. Williamson denies that we can interpret evidential probabilities in terms of credences of a hypothetically rational agent. It might be that he would give up both 1 and 2, and deny that there is any simple relationship between rational credence and evidential probability. Or he might accept that Exp(Pr(p| E(a)), a) is a better guide to rational credence than Pr(p | E(a)).

Whatever way we look at it though, I think that this is an interesting little paradox, and one of several reasons I liked the conference at the weekend was that I realised it existed.

Inspired by some things Stewart Cohen and Jonathan Vogel said at the weekend’s scepticism conference, I’ve written a short note on the intersection of inductive reasoning and suppositional reasoning.

bq. “Induction and Supposition”:http://brian.weatherson.org/IaS.pdf (PDF)

Here’s the first paragraph, which gives you a flavour of what I’m arguing against.

bq. Here’s a fairly quick argument that there is contingent a priori knowledge. Assume there are some ampliative inference rules. Since the alternative appears to be inductive scepticism, this seems like a safe enough assumption. Such a rule will, since it is ampliative, licence some particular inference From A infer B where A does not entail B. That’s just what it is for the rule to be ampliative. Now run that rule inside suppositional reasoning. In particular, first assume A, then via this rule infer B. Now do a step of →-introduction, inferring A → B and discharging the assumption A. Since A does not entail B, this will be contingent, and since it rests on a sound inference with no (undischarged) assumptions, it is a priori knowledge.

It has been a while since we’ve had a links post.

• The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy has started up a “Friends of the Stanford Encyclopaedia Society”:https://leibniz.stanford.edu/friends/. Membership is very cheap, and with it you get access to professionally styled PDFs of SEP articles. And, of course, you’re supporting a good cause.
• There has been a lot of philosophical interest happening over at Crooked Timber recently. I wanted to particularly note “Daniel’s post on throwing eggs at BNP leaders”:http://crookedtimber.org/2009/06/12/the-bnp-and-the-egging-laffer-curve/. Whatever you think of the conclusion, and I think I’m a lot more happy with throwing eggs at fascists than most of the commentators are, the post makes some very insightful points about the role of authority in political discourse. A lot of philosophers have extremely simplistic views about the dynamics of authority in modern societies, and thinking hard about cases like this one is one way to have less simplistic views.
• Robbie Williams has an “excellent paper”:http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/%7Ephljrgw/wip/scoring.pdf (PDF) on generalising Joyce’s accuracy argument for probabilism to non-classical contexts. Among other things, the paper has a very nice demonstration of what’s going on in the classical version of the argument. But I’m really excited about the non-classical parts. There is going to be some really interesting work on non-classical probability theory over the next few years.
• Finally, “Cosma Shalizi on Bayesian statistics”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/612.html, via Brad DeLong.