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Sorry about the little server problem this morning. It was basically my fault, but I think it is fixed now and regular operations will resume.

I’ve been thinking a bit about dogmatism recently, largely because I think I should extend the rather compressed discussion of ‘externalism’ at the end of “Scepticism Rationalism and Externalism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/sre.pdf. So I’m writing, one stage at a time, a longish paper arguing that various recent attacks on dogmatism don’t do enough to show that it is false. The paper is a long way from written, but I thought I’d post the introductory sections in order to get some feedback.

bq. “In Defence of a Dogmatist”:http://brian.weatherson.org/dog1_3.pdf (sections 1-3)

The main points of these sections are to (a) argue that dogmatism is a distinctive kind of response of scepticism and (b) point out that the whole paper is a statement against interest because I’m not actually a dogmatist. Obviously (a) is a little more interesting to most people than (b). The argument for that goes by setting out what I take to be the complete form of the argument from sceptical hypotheses. This is sometimes put forward as a two premise argument, one closure premise and one premise about the unknowability of the falsity of BIV type hypotheses. I think it is a more compelling argument if the sceptic argues for the second premise rather than asserting it as an allegedly intuitive premise. In the paper I go over this a bit more slowly, but I think one very compelling form of argument is the following.

# If I know I have hands, then I’m in a position to know that I’m not a handless brain in a perfectly functioning vat (BIPV)
# If it could have turned out that I’m a handless BIPV, then I’m not in a position to know a priori that I’m not a handless BIPV
# It could have turned out that I’m a handless BIPV
# If it could have turned out that I’m a handless BIPV, then it could have turned out that I’m a handless BIPV with the same empirical evidence as my actual empirical evidence
# If I’m in a position to know a posteriori that I’m not a handless BIPV, then it could not have turned out that I’m a handless BIPV with the same empirical evidence as my actual empirical evidence
# So I don’t know that I have hands

Prima facie, every one of those premises is hard to deny I think. Dogmatism gives us a way to deny 5, and I think the strongest argument for dogmatism is that it lets us accept the other premises, or at least their counterparts in other sceptical arguments. As I say in section 2 of the paper, I think dogmatism is more plausible as a response to the inductive sceptic than the external world sceptic. But I’ll keep talking about external world scepticism in this blog post. (Roger White discusses the dogmatist response to inductive scepticism “here”:http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1180/induction.pdf.) Here are a few other thoughts about the argument.

* Premise 5 is a little confusing, but the contraposed form of it, which schematically says that if your evidence is consistent with _p_, then you don’t know that not _p_ a posteriori, seems very plausible.
* The argument isn’t obviously valid, but if we take it to be definitional that a posteriori knowledge is just knowledge that isn’t a priori, then it is classically valid. (It is also, I think, intuitionistically valid, though this is a little harder to show.)
* One nice consequence of setting out the argument this way is that we see exactly how semantic externalism is a response to the argument (it rejects premise 3) and how Williamson’s evidence externalism responds to the argument (it rejects premise 4).
* The argument undermines the appeal of contextualism _as a response to scepticism_. I don’t think this ‘appeal’ has been part of the core argument for contextualism for nearly a decade now, but this gives us a clear reason for saying why. Let us consider the relation that ‘knows’ picks out in an ordinary context. It’s still hard to say which of premises 1 through 5 are false, because 3 and 4 don’t involve ‘knows’, and 1, 2 and 5 follow from general principles that are plausible independent of BIV considerations, and it is hard to see how context change could cause us to change our mind about those principles.

So while I’m sure it could do with some fine-tuning, I think this is a pretty interesting form of the sceptical argument, and it makes the philosophical interest of dogmatism fairly clear.

“Carrie Jenkins”:http://archeans.blogspot.com/2006/03/arche-papers-online.html links to “the Arché papers page”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/pages/outcomes.html, which includes as a highlight a number of papers by Crispin Wright that were previously unavailable on the web.

From the Arché website I saw “the news”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/pages/news.html that Ross Cameron and Elizabeth Barnes have continuing lectureships at Leeds. Congratulations both! It seems every time I look up in the last little while one or more of Oxford, Bristol or Leeds is hiring a smart young philosopher. The immediate future of philosophy in England looks very promising indeed.

For all the TV Channels I get, there is often surprisingly little to watch, especially if you prefer TV to be Australian. So I was rather pleasantly surprised to see that “Fox College Sports”:http://msn.foxsports.com/tv/schedule?regionCategoryId=2621&date=2006-03-14&submit_button=Submit is broadcasting a bunch of the “Commonwealth Games”:http://www.melbourne2006.com.au/ from Melbourne. I’ll be out of town for various parts of that, but hopefully the DVR will pick up most of it.

For some unknown reason Fox seems to be opposed to broadcasting the swimming (odd since swimming is so connected to college sports in America) so the televisual highlights will be the “road events”:http://www.melbourne2006.com.au/Sports+and+Venues/Road+Events/. Some of the courses they’ve designed, especially for the “marathon”:http://www.melbourne2006.com.au/Sports+and+Venues/Road+Events/Marathon/ and “triathalon”:http://www.melbourne2006.com.au/Sports+and+Venues/Road+Events/Triathlon/ look great. Sitting in a streetside cafe in St Kilda or Port Melbourne watching world class (well, Commonwealth class) marathoners or triathelets go by on an early autumn afternoon in Melbourne seems like a nice constituent of the Good Life. Since I’m a bit far away for that I’ll have to settle for TV images from afterwards. The “cycling”:http://www.melbourne2006.com.au/Sports+and+Venues/Road+Events/Cycling+Road/ “courses”:http://www.melbourne2006.com.au/Sports+and+Venues/Road+Events/Cycling+Time+Trial/ are also nice for spectators, but I would have preferred that one of the races be held up in the Dandenongs both for the beauty of the visual images and for the extra competitive challenges.

So when I’m out at the APA I’m meant to say a few words about blogging and philosophy. And I don’t have a great deal to say. For a while I was thinking about trying to run an analogy between philosophy blogging and philosophy conferences. The main point of this would be “See, this is why I’ve got nothing to say – imagine trying to do a talk about the interaction between philosophy and conference going.” Well I imagine some of you could say quite a bit about that, but I certainly couldn’t.

Anyway, I’m struggling even with this because I’m not sure I can make the analogies work. Some parts do fairly well.

* “Fake Barn Country”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Blog/ :: Brown grad student conference (and other grad student conferences)
* “Certain Doubts”:http://www.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/ :: Rutgers epistemology conference (and other topical conferences)
* TAR :: APA

What I mean by the last one is that in both there are occasional highlights, but with lots of dreck in between, and everyone shows up because everyone else shows up (the perfect Lewisian convention), and the discussion afterwards is usually more entertaining and informative than the headline papers. Well, that’s pretty unfair to APA conferences I guess, but maybe with a bit of dramatic licence I can make that particular pairing work. If I was being more reasonable/charitable to APA conferences I’d match the APA with the “Leiter Report”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/. (Of course the pre-group Leiter Report was the perfect match for the APA _Eastern_, but now it’s more like the Pacific.)

But are there blogs that are like the “Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference”:http://myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/nmarkos/BSPC/BSPC7/BSPC7.htm? Or are any conferences like the “vast”:http://claytonlittlejohn.blogspot.com/ “majority”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/ “of”:http://www.sapphosbreathing.com/ “great”:http://ideasofimperfection.blogspot.com/ “single”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/ “author”:http://www.logicandlanguage.net/ “blogs”:http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~easwaran/blog/? Maybe this won’t work as a storyline.

On some sort of principle, I don’t bet on sporting events. But for research purposes (seriously!) I was looking up the odds to win the division on “this site”:http://www.bet365.com/home/default.asp. And the NL odds are just crazy. The Cardinals are at 1.38 to win the _Central_. That would be about fair odds if the other teams had an 8 game head start. The only team I can really see getting close to them are the Brewers, who are at 12.00. If I were the gambling type (and I’m not), I’d have $100 on the Cards and $12 on the Brew Crew, for just about a guaranteed $26 – $32 return. In the NL East, the Braves are at 2.65. I’d say anyone who doesn’t believe the Braves will win the East again is an example of the inductive sceptic we talk about in epistemology classes as if they were a fictional character.

There is basically no positive return for me writing this, but if the Cubs or Astros win I bet I’ll never hear the end of it. So unlike the gambling strategy above, I seem to have settled on a lose-lose proposition. (And that’s why I don’t bet.) If the Mets or Phillies win I’ll be shocked (because induction is a good way to learn after all), but no more shocked than I was at seeing white swans I guess.

By the way, if the markets were liquid enough there would be arbitrage possibilities between Bet365 and “Tradesports”:http://tradesports.com/aav2/trading/tradingHTML.jsp?evID=44246&eventSelect=44246&updateList=true&showExpired=false#, especially on the Brewers Indians, but I suspect you can’t find enough traders to really take advantage of it.

(This post updated because I miscalculated which team had a sure win bet going. Another reason I don’t do this with real money…)

The weekly post for any sort of announcement to do with philosophy. The previous MMB, which contains several interesting announcements, is “here”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004693.html.

Why exactly do people underline large passages of _library_ books? Why, in particular, did one of the two people to previously borrow the book I’m currently working on underline large (and often random-seeming) passages _in pen_? It can’t be that much use for going back to. A notebook telling you which are the key pages/passages would do that, and the text that you’re meant to highlight is harder to read once it has pen lines all over it. If you really want to (a) remember a passage and (b) record it in a way that you can go back to, the answer is to type out the passages into a Word document. So this practice seems imprudent as well as inconsiderate.</rant>

Juan Comesana pointed me to “this discussion”:http://digg.com/science/Are_you_Living_in_a_Computer_Simulation__2 of Nick Bostrom’s “Simulation Argument”:http://www.simulation-argument.com/matrix.html at “digg.com”:http://digg.com/. I haven’t read through all of the comments, and I think Zeno’s paradox would prevent reading _all_ of them in any case. But they don’t seem to have got to “my reply”:http://brian.weatherson.org/sims.pdf, and I wouldn’t be a real blogger if I didn’t take this opportunity for self-promotion.

It’s been a while since I wrote it, but I think my reply holds up OK. If I was doing it now I’d make much more of the evidential internalism assumption in Bostrom’s argument. It is very intuitive at first that we have the same evidence as a BIV. I guess if it wasn’t I guess these sceptical arguments wouldn’t have the pull they actually do. But I don’t think that a purely phenomenal account of evidence actually has much to be said for it on reflection. It seems to be constitutive of the notion of evidence that evidence is a guide to the truth. So even if _our_ evidence is constituted by our phenomenal states (which I doubt), we shouldn’t think that a BIV’s evidence is constituted by _its_ phenomenal states, because its phenomenal states don’t give it any information about how the world is. So we don’t have the same evidence as a BIV, so nothing about its doxastic/epistemic state is relevant to our doxastic/epistemic state. And that’s even ignoring the worries about indifference that I set out (at interminable length) in “that paper”:http://brian.weatherson.org/sims.pdf and in “the paper on Elga’s indifference principle”:http://brian.weatherson.org/evil.pdf.