In chapter 7 of _The Philosophy of Philosophy_, Timothy Williamson argues against the idea that intuitions are a key part of philosophical evidence. Part of his argument is indirect. He thinks the motivation for taking intuitions to be central comes from accepting a principle he calls Evidence Neutrality, and that that principle is false. I rather suspect that isn’t the best reason to take intuitions to be philosophical evidence, but we’ll set that aside here. What we’ll focus on here is whether Evidence Neutrality is true. Here is the initial statement of Evidence Neutrality.

bq. Although the complete elimination of accidental mistakes and confusions is virtually impossible, we might hope that whether a proposition constitutes evidence is in principle uncontentiously decidable, in the sense that a community of inquirers can always in principle achieve common knowledge as to whether any given proposition constitutes evidence for the inquiry.

It seems to me that this is ambiguous between two readings.

• The weaker reading is that it is decidable, by consensus, which propositions are, in principle, evidentially relevant to an inquiry as to whether _p_.
• The stronger reading is that that is true, and it is also decidable, by consensus, in which epistemic direction each piece of evidence points .

I’m going to argue that one of the arguments against Evidence Neutrality, what we might call the argument from extremists, does not tell against the weaker version. I think (though this claim will eventually need defending) that if either version of Evidence Neutrality is metaphilosophically interesting, then the weaker version is interesting. So perhaps that’s all that we need to defend.

Evidence Neutrality (hereafter, EN) is a kind of dialectical conception of evidence (hereafter, DCE). What our evidence is just is what our interlocutors will allow as evidence. On the stronger reading, it is what our interlocutors will take to be evidence for our conclusions. On the weaker reading, it is what they’ll allow as evidence, though they may say one particular piece of evidence, a piece we take to be crucial, is not very strong. And the big question here is whether we should think of evidence dialectically.

It’s certainly true that evidence that is accepted by our interlocutors will be more persuasive in convincing interlocutors. But that’s no argument, at least no immediate argument, for a DCE. It might be that we have quite a lot of evidence that tells whether _p_, and our interlocutors are just mistaken about this. (Everyone makes mistakes.) Relatedly, some people may simply fail to be persuaded by arguments that are rationally persuasive. So we shouldn’t simply confuse which evidence is dialectically effective with which evidence is genuinely good. If we want to defend a DCE, we’ll have to argue for it more carefully than that.

The key point of the last paragraph is that some people will fail to be persuaded by genuinely good arguments. That suggests a problem; couldn’t we have evidence against a position, but just not evidence accepted by the partisans of that position? The simplest examples of this will be positions whose partisans are hostile to the very idea that evidence can tell in favour of anything at all. Here is how Wililamson converts such examples to arguments against EN.

bq. Some scepticism, like scepticism about reason, is so radical that it leaves too little unchallenged for what remains as shared evidence to be an appropriate basis for evaluating the claims under challenge.

The point here is not a new one. David Lewis makes a similar observation in _Logic for Equivocators_.

bq. The radical case for relevance [i.e. dialethism] should be dismissed just because the hypothesis it requires us to entertain is inconsistent. That may seem dogmatic. And it is: I am affirming the very thesis that Routley and Priest have called into question and – contrary to the rules of debate – I decline to defend it. Further, I concede that it is indefensible against their challenge. They have called so much into question that I have no foothold on undisputed ground. So much the worse for the demand that philosophers always must be ready to defend their theses under the rules of debate.

The point Williamson and Lewis make is clear enough. There are certain radical views that (a) we know to be mistaken, but (b) the nature of the position is such that it has, by its own lights, defences against the actual grounds for our knowledge that it is mistaken. Of course its lights are bad lights; our reasons are good reasons. But such positions have partisans. (This is clearer in Lewis’s case than in Williamson’s.) If our only evidence is the evidence they’ll let us share, we won’t have evidence against these positions. And that might suggest we don’t really know the positions are mistaken, contrary to assumption. (There is a fairly strong evidentialist assumption being made here, namely that if we don’t have evidence against such positions, we don’t know they are mistaken. It’s worth thinking through whether that assumption is right, but I won’t do it here.)

I think, however, that this point goes by too fast. Remember that EN and DCE are claims about evidence. They aren’t claims about what we can do with evidence. To see the importance of this distinction, it’s worth recalling Lewis Carroll’s fable of Achilles and the Tortoise. (The points to follow are perhaps familiar from recent work of Paul Boghossian and Crispin Wright. And I’m indebted here to discussions with Crispin. But note that I’m expressly not committing myself to Boghossian’s views about the meanings of the logical connectives.)

Achilles knows _p_, and _p_ -> _q_. He wants to infer _q_. The tortoise says, wait a second, are you sure that’s a good inference? Achilles says he is sure. He’s sure, he says, that (p & (p -> q)) -> q. The tortoise thinks for a second, and then says that that does sound right. Let’s have that as another premise he says. Achilles happily agrees, and then proceeds to infer _q_. The tortoise is still not sure. He wants to know how Achilles is drawing that conclusion. Achilles says he’s sure that if (p & (p -> q)) & (p & (p -> q)) -> q then _q_. The tortoise agrees that looks true, and says it seems like a pretty good premise to have. Achilles tries again to infer _q_, and the tortoise is again worried about why he’s drawing that conclusion. The story continues for a surprising while, with Achilles adding more and more premises, and seemingly getting no closer to overcoming the Tortoise’s worries.

There’s a mundane lesson to be drawn from that, and an exciting lesson. The mundane lesson is that there is a distinction between premises and rules. Indeed, in every axiomatic formal system, we are given both axioms and rules to generate theorems from old axioms/theorems. In some simple systems the only rule might be modus ponens, the rule that Achilles was looking for. In other systems we might need a rule like necessitation, or universal-introduction. But we always need something more than just axioms.

The exciting lesson is that rules aren’t the kind of things that stand in need of rational justification. They are, to put it perhaps in Wittgensteinian terms, things that justify, rather than things that are justified. Here is how we might draw that conclusion. We can imagine the tortoise not as an unhelpful interlocutor, but as our own nagging doubts. Our own inner Descartes, if you like. If the rules have justifications, then we should be able to give them. And if we give them, we can add them as extra premises from which we reason. But this is the key mistake Achilles makes. At some point we need to stop adding premises, and start doing something with the premises. And that can’t always be supported by reasons. For imagine it could. That is, imagine the rule that let us go from A to B could be supported by evidence E. Then we can still ask, what’s the rule that lets us go from A and E to B? Still we’ll need a rule, and perhaps now we’ll be out of evidence. At some point a jump needs to be made without evidence.

So I conclude rules don’t need evidential justification. That’s not to say that all rules are created equally. There are normative standards governing rules, even though they are not supported by evidence. This makes their status quite delicate. As I read him, Gilbert Ryle introduced the idea of knowledge how directly to address this problem. Following rules can’t be simply propositional knowledge, because that leads to a regress. On the other hand, following rules is normatively, even rationally, evaluable. Ryle thought that if we recognise a category of know how, we can steer between these rocks; we can have something that’s a kind of knowledge, the exercise of which can be rational or irrational, but which doesn’t require evidence.

If it isn’t required that we be able to justify our use of rules to ourselves, it doesn’t seem like it should be required that we be able to justify them to our friends. And that in turn suggests that a dialectical conception of rules would be inappropriate. Who cares if our (rational) friends don’t like the rules we’re using? The only way we could make them like them is by offering reasons that our rules are good rules, and by hypothesis we don’t even need to be able to articulate such reasons to ourselves. Perhaps we don’t even need to have such reasons. So a dialectical conception of rules is bad, and more specifically, Rule Neutrality (understood along the same lines as Evidence Neutrality) is bad.

But note that once we ditch Rule Neutrality, we can respond to the extremists that Lewis and Williamson are worried about _without sacrificing Evidence Neutrality_. Here’s my evidence that dialethism is false. If dialethism is true, some contradiction is true. Taking that to be evidence doesn’t violate Evidence Neutrality, because it’s agreed on all sides. From that it follows, by a rule that I properly accept (i.e. reductio) that dialethism is false. Of course, the dialethists don’t buy that rule. But that’s not my problem, since I’m only committed to sharing evidence with them, not sharing rules. If I accepted the strong form of Evidence Neutrality, that might be a problem, because of course the dialethists don’t think this is evidence _against_ dialethism. On the weak form of Evidence Neutrality, that isn’t a problem either.

It’s a little trickier to respond to the reasons sceptic, but I think it can be done, especially if we think about induction. So imagine that I see a lot of Fs that are all Gs, and I see them in a lot of different places etc. I conclude that I have good reason to believe the next F I see will be G. This is a direct inference; there is no mediating premise. If you don’t think so, try to imagine (a) what such a premise could be, and (b) how it could be justified? I think there aren’t good answers to this question, or at least that any answer is less certain than I am in the conclusion. So my frequent observation of green emeralds is sufficient evidence to conclude that I have a reason to believe something, and hence that reasons scepticism is false.

Summing up, I think that Williamson here has run together two similar, but importantly distinct, principles: Evidence Neutrality and Rule Neutrality. I think he’s right that if you accept both, you’ll have thrown away all hope of a good response to certain positions to which there are good responses. So we shouldn’t accept both of those principles. But if we accept that evidence is knowledge, as Williamson does, then we should think that all our evidence requires justification. And we shouldn’t think that our rules do. Since the acceptability of our evidence/rules to our (rational) interlocutors is grounded in this need for justification, it seems that our reason to accept Evidence Neutrality is not a reason to accept Rule Neutrality. So Rule Neutrality must go. And when it does, the argument from extremism against Evidence Neutrality goes too.

There’s a lot to say about rules, and I’ll say a very little about it tomorrow.

In the previous post I mentioned that Williamson clearly opposes in chapter 7 a broadly psychological conception of philosophical evidence. But it isn’t exactly clear just what his target is. At times he seems to be arguing against psychological evidence _ever_ being philosophically worthwhile. For example, consider the following batch of quotes.

bq. “For now I face the challenge of arguing from a psychological premise, that I believe or we are inclined to believe the Gettier proposition, to an epistemological conclusion, the Gettier proposition itself. That gap is not easily bridged.”

bq. “Since psychological evidence has no obvious bearing on many philosophical issues, judgment scepticism is also encouraged in ways that do not depend on the consequence fallacy.”

bq. “In explaining why we have intuitions, analytic philosophy has a preference for explanations that make those intuitions true over explanations that make them untrue, but the justification for that preference remains unclear”

In those quotes his opponent seems to hold the relatively weak view that psychological evidence can (sometimes) be useful evidence for philosophical conclusion. But other times he seems to take his opponent to be the person who holds the much stronger view that only intuitions are evidence. For instance, he says

bq. “One result [of EN] is the uneasy conception many contemporary analytic philosophers have of their own methodology. They think that, in philosophy, ultimately our evidence consists only of intuitions.”

I think it’s hard to believe that’s really a widespread view in philosophy. Does Singer’s argument for vegetarianism rest (even ultimately) on intuitions about the nutritional value of a vegetarian diet? Does the well-known argument from special relativity against presentism rest on intuitions about whether special relativity is true? Nevertheless, Williamson does attribute it to many (unnamed) philosophers. And yet some of Williamson’s arguments seem directed particularly against this position. For instance, he says

bq. “Taken far enough, the psychologisation of philosophical method becomes self-defeating”

And he cites approvingly Joel Pust’s conclusion that it is self-defeating to hold that

bq. “Aside from propositions describing the occurrence of her judgements, S is justified in believing only those propositions which are part of the best explanation of S’s making the judgements that she makes”

Probably Pust and Williamson are right here, but it hardly tells against anything but a strawman version of the psychological view of evidence. Finally, Williamson objects to a version of Reflective Equilibrium that just attempts to get our intuitions into equilibrium with the following argument.

bq. “The reflective equilibrium account, as usually understood, already assigns a proto-evidential role to at least one kind of non-psychological fact. For it treats philosophers as relying on logical relations between theories and intuitions, in particular their consistency and inconsistency.”

The theme again is that we need some evidence other than intuitions, something that should be common ground. (For reasons I’ll suggest in the next post, I’m not sure this is a good argument for that conclusion though.)

We haven’t got very far by trying to characterise what Williamson’s opponent says. Perhaps it is better to look at his positive proposal for what is evidence in philosophy. We get one statement of what that positive conclusion.

bq. “Our evidence in philosophy consists of facts, most of them non-psychological, to which we have appropriate epistemic access.”

That, in conjunction with the quotes above, suggests he is defending the following three theses.

1. Not all philosophical evidence is psychological.
2. Having _p_ be part of your evidence requires appropriate epistemic access to _p_.
3. The intuition that _p_, or the fact that one has that intuition, is weak evidence, perhaps no evidence at all, that _p_.

A position that denied all three of those would clearly be among the targets of Williamson’s chapter. But that would be crazy, since (1) is obviously true. But a position like the one I sketched at the end of the last post, which was neutral on (2) and denied (3), would still seem to be at odds with the bulk of what Williamson says, and I think is meant to be among the positions ruled out by the considerations he raises.

Now such a position does not seem especially related to the sceptical positions that are the targets of sections 3 and 4 of Williamson’s chapter 7. But that’s as things should be. The question of what our evidence is doesn’t immediately settle the question of what knowledge we have. Taking perceptual evidence to be psychological might be a precursor to defending external world scepticism. But it might also be a precursor to adopting indirect realism. Of course Williamson, by accepting knowledge as evidence, has effectively ruled out classical forms of indirect realism, where we know about the world on the basis of purely phenomenal evidence. But that shouldn’t be presupposed here I think. A position that holds that psychological states, or facts about them, are often crucial evidence for us is opposed to the core doctrines of Williamson’s chapter, even if it is also opposed to some of his other opponents.

Chapter 7 of Timothy Williamson’s “The Philosophy of Philosophy” is an extended argument against “psychologising” evidence in philosophy. Before we can evaluate those arguments, it would be useful to get clear on just what it is to psychologise evidence. In this post I’ll say a bit about what that amounts to, and in the next post look a bit more carefully at Williamson’s text to see just what position he is attributing to his opponent.

In some ways the debate Williamson is contributing to is among the oldest in modern philosophy. Consider the following two positions about perceptual evidence, each of which has found many partisans over the last few centuries.

• Perceptual Evidence is Psychological. My perceptual evidence consists in facts about the psychological states I am in when undergoing a perceptual experience. So, for instance, my perceptual evidence might include that I’m visually representing that there is a table in front of me.
• Perceptual Evidence is External. My perceptual evidence consists in facts that I perceive. So, for instance, my perceptual evidence might include that there indeed is a table in front of me.

The psychological theory has a number of advantages. It can explain how people having illusory perceptions can get the same kind of evidence (albeit of lower quality) as people having veridical experiences. It arguably staves off certain kinds of doubts about our evidence, at least to the extent that we have privileged access to our psychological states. It explains the fact (if it is a fact) that when we get evidence in favour of some proposition _p_ about the external world, we generally know what kind of evidence we have. It is unusual, that is, to get evidence that _p_, but not know whether that is visual evidence, or tactile evidence, or testimonial evidence, or whatever. If the evidence for _p_ just is the visual or tactile or testimonial experience, that is easily explained. And it offers the prospect of an easy theory of evidence possession; a point I’ll return to below.

But there’s one big cost of the psychological theory: it seems to promote scepticism. There is a long tradition, starting in the modern period with Descartes, of proponents of the psychological view wondering how to get from psychological evidence to knowledge of the external world. And there is another long tradition, culminating at the present with Williamson, of opponents of the psychological view using this worry as a reason to start with evidence in the external world, and avoid this sceptical doubt.

The debate here is not confined to perception. We can have a similar debate in testimony. Imagine I am told that _p_ by a trusted friend. I now have some evidence for _p_. What is it? One answer, similar in spirit to the psychological answer above, is that I’ve been told that _p_. Another answer, similar in spirit to the external answer, is _p_ itself. The latter answer might be favoured by a theorist of testimony who thinks that when I get testimony from a trustworthy source, I simply receive the warrant they have for believing _p_. (The two answers here aren’t quite equivalent to the positions known as reductionism and anti-reductionism in the epistemology of testimony. Someone might be an anti-reductionist and hold that the telling, rather than what’s told, is the evidence, by holding that we don’t need any extra grounds to infer, on the basis of that evidence, that _p_. I’ll say more about such inferential rules in later posts.)

Both answers here are possible, but it is much more plausible to take the evidence to be the telling rather than what’s told. So we can use that as a relatively clear example of what happens when we take evidence to be something that supports an external world proposition _p_, rather than _p_ itself. One consequence is that in reporting inferences, we can replace testimonial knowledge with knowledge that the testimony was made without making the inference worse. So imagine we know that if Celtic win today, they’re champions, and we’re told by a trusted friend that Celtic did indeed win. Then we might make either of the following inferences.

An inference from facts about football

1. If Celtic won, they are champions.
2. Celtic won.
3. So, Celtic are champions.

An inference from facts about testimony

1. If Celtic won, they are champions.
2. My friend said that Celtic won.
3. So, Celtic are champions.

The first is valid, while the second is not. But we are interested here in inferences, not implications, so that’s no disqualifying mark against the second inference. For the second has a virtue not shared by the first, namely that its premises are more secure. So it looks like the two inferences are equally good. And that suggests that the second inference really is just making explicit the inference that’s underlying the first.

We’ve now said enough to set up the interesting debate about philosophical evidence. Often we say things like _Intuitively, that’s a cause of that_, or _Intuitively, that’s wrong_ and so on in philosophy. What kind of evidence are we appealing to here?
Continue reading →

Some papers and stuff happening around the web.

• Errol Lord on non-indexical relativism
• Kenny Easwaran on the a priority of computer proofs
• An updated version of my Attitudes and Relativism
• A PDF version of the new version of Deontology and Descartes’ Demon
• Slides from a lecture on Intuitions and Philosophical Evidence

The theme of the lecture was that the case Williamson makes in _The Philosophy of Philosophy_ against evidence being psychological states isn’t as strong as it might at first appear. I’ll be spelling out the themes of that in several blog posts over the next few days.

*Update*: I should add that many of the ideas in the lecture on evidence, and in the upcoming posts, came from conversations here at Arch{e’}, and especially a reading group on _The Philosophy of Philosophy_. The meeting on chapter 7 of the book, which I’m mostly writing about here, was led by “Daniele Sgaravatti”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/members/member?id=sgaravatti, and his comments were especially useful.

The Inter-University Workshop on Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the “University of Zaragoza”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Zaragoza features work by and on an important philosopher. The workshop in May next year will be on my (once again) colleague Ernie Sosa, and I imagine it will be very good. Here’s the actual announcement.

bq. The XIXth edition of the Inter-University Workshop on Philosophy and Cognitive Science will be held on May 18 and 19, of 2009, in Zaragoza, Spain, organized by the Department of Philosophy of the University of Zaragoza. The invited speaker will be Ernest Sosa, Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. In recent years Interuniversity Workshop invited speakers have been: A. Clark, M. Davies, D. Dennett, J. Fodor, F. Dretske, R. Millikan, T. Burge, J. Searle, J. Kim, C. Peacocke, F. Recanati, B. Stroud, J. McDowell, N. Block, and P. Carruthers. Professor Sosa’s published or forthcoming work takes up a broad range of issues in epistemology, such as foundationalism/coherentism, internalism/externalism, reliabilism, contextualism, skepticism, the Pyrrhonian problematic and the problem of easy knowledge, epistemic normativity, intuitions and their place in philosophy, epistemic agency, epistemic virtue or competence, the epistemology of disagreement, testimony and social epistemology, the nature of knowledge, and the value of knowledge. The Organizing Committee invites contributions based on topics related to that work. (Some of it is available for downloading at “his website”:http://web.mac.com/ernestsosa/Site/Welcome.html.) Extended drafts (not less than 2000 words) should be sent to the coordinator of the workshop, “Jesús Ezquerro”:mailto:jesus.ezquerro@ehu.es, before February, 27, 2009 (e-mail only). Authors of accepted papers will have their accommodation, but not travel, expenses covered.

I’m in St Andrews now, visiting Arche, and while it’s been a lot of fun, and very rewarding intellectually, it’s been hard work! I’d hoped it would be a relaxing break with lots of blogging, but that hasn’t quite worked out. Anyway, here are three things I’ve been working on.

• I’ve updated “Deontology and Descartes’ Demon”:http://brian.weatherson.org/DDD.doc (Warning: Word Doc) to (a) take account of some objections that were made, and (b) get it into the right form for the Journal of Philosophy. The latter was hard work: they won’t let you use contractions and I can’t write without them! The former was more fun.
• I’ve written five lectures on probability in philosophy – “1”:http://brian.weatherson.org/PL1.pdf, “2-3”:http://brian.weatherson.org/PL2.pdf, “4-5”:http://brian.weatherson.org/PL4.pdf, and given four of them. I don’t have all my books/papers here, so some of the references to what other people say was from memory. So if I’ve misrepresented you, my apologies in advance. (I mostly got around this shortcoming by not talking about particular people much at all, just making sweeping generalisations about what lots of people think. So there are a few things that could be given better citations.)
• Various people (most notably Crispin Wright and David Chalmers) have been pressing me on one of the core assumptions in “Moderate Rationalism and Bayesian Scepticism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/MRaBS.pdf, namely that you can’t learn p by getting evidence that decreases its probability. I’d like to have a good response to their worries, and if I did so I’d be putting it here. The worries are specifically about cases where p is a disjunction, and the evidence raises the probability of one disjunct, but decreases the probability of the other. Hopefully soon I’ll have thought of something clever to say here, but for now I don’t have much to say of any use.

This week I’ll be at the “Language and Law”:http://www.csmn.uio.no/events/2008/lang_law.xml workshop at the University of Oslo, and I’m hoping to have lots of interesting things to report back from that.

(Guest Post by “Amie Thomasson”:http://www.as.miami.edu/phi/thomasson/index.htm.)

In Ordinary Objects, (OUP 2007) I argue—based on general considerations about reference and existence claims, as well as particular claims about the semantics of ‘object’—that there are problems with trying to formulate ‘deep’ ontological debates, considered as debates about what things or objects exist.

In his recent (5/21/08) NDPR review, Terry Horgan raises what he calls a “daunting regress problem” for the view about reference this argument is supposed to be based on:

bq. …if every singular or general term of our language that successfully refers is governed by frame-level application and co-application conditions that deploy some presupposed category or categories, then terms referring to those very categories must themselves be governed by frame-level application and co-application conditions that deploy some further, yet more general, presupposed category or categories — and so on, ad infinitum. But such an infinite regress of categories, with each category governed by frame-level application and co-application conditions involving yet more general categories, would seem to leave all the terms in our language without reference-grounding

Since many people have emailed me wondering how I reply, I wanted to post a brief response—many thanks to Brian for letting me post it here.

In fact, it’s not a reply so much as a clarification that is needed, since the ‘regress problem’ is based on a misunderstanding of my position. My view isn’t that, for any term to refer, it must be associated with a more general category or sort (or that, as Horgan puts it, that ‘any meaningful existence claim involves implicit restriction of the quantifier by some sortal that is more general than any predicate deployed in the claim itself’). My point was that the reference of nominative terms is only determinate to the extent that they’re associated with application conditions (and co-application conditions), and existence questions are to be addressed by determining whether the application conditions are fulfilled. The conditions might come via association with some fairly high-level category (e.g. of ‘dog’ with ‘animal’), but there’s no requirement that there always be a more general one (‘animal’, e.g., may just have its own application conditions).

The problem I raise in _Ordinary Objects_ for posing ‘deep ontological’ questions such as ‘how many things/objects there are’ is not (as Horgan seems to interpret it) that ‘thing’ and ‘object’ are highest categories (so that we can’t associate them with a higher one). Instead, the problem is that on the serious ontologist’s use, ‘thing’ and ‘object’ aren’t proper sortal or categorial terms at all—they don’t come with application and coapplication conditions that could make existence questions posed using them answerable. (If they are used in ways that do come with application and coapplication conditions, ontological disputes posed using these terms turn out to be merely verbal).

I hope readers of the review will also look back to the argument in the book&0150;while there might be problems to find there, the ‘regress problem’ isn’t one of them, since it rests on a misunderstanding of the argument.

I’m currently in St Andrews at the start of my (annual) visiting fellowship here. Due to a combination of spotty email access, travelling a bit, and some pressing deadlines, I’ve been behind on answering email, maintaining this blog (sorry for those whose comments sat in moderation for so long) and writing here. I hope now that things have settled down a bit, at least the first two of those three will be dealt with on a regular basis.

It’s interesting to see who does, and doesn’t, get covered in any detail on Wikipedia. To take some important Sydney-based examples, compare the entries for “David Armstrong”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Malet_Armstrong, “John Mackie”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._L._Mackie, and “David Stove”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Stove. I doubt even Stove would have claimed he was ten times more important than Mackie and Armstrong combined, yet for some reason his entry is ten times the length of theirs put together. It would be worthwhile for someone noble to sit down and extend the Mackie and Armstrong entries, to say nothing of many other worthwhile philosophers.

I was in Barnes and Noble the other day flicking through the new books, and I saw this book by a local religious figure, Timothy Keller called “The Reason for God”:http://books.google.com/books?id=OJqcGAAACAAJ&dq=Keller+the+reason+for+God&ei=A5AwSP-hL4y6ygS77ZjLAw. It’s meant to be a response to all sorts of arguments for religious scepticism. I was only skimming, as you do in bookstores, and most of the points seemed fairly familiar, but I was struck by the following short passage on arguments from disagreement.

bq. The noted religion scholar John Hick has written that once you become aware that there are many other equally intelligent and good people in the world who hold differente beliefs from you and that you will not be able to convince them otherwise, then it is arrogant for you to continue to try to convert them or to hold your view to be the superior truth.

bq. Once again there is an inherent contradiction. Most people in the world don’t hold to John Hick’s view that all religions are equally valid, and many of them are equallty good and intelligent as he is, and unlikely to change their views. This would make the statement “all religious claims to have a better view of things are arrogant and wrong” to be, on its own terms, arrogant and wrong.

This seems related to my argument against Equal Weight (EW) views on disagreement, views that say you should give equal weight to your own judgment and the judgment of epistemic peers. I argue in “this unpublished note”:http://brian.weatherson.org/DaD.pdf that such views are self-defeating, because given the fact that not everyone you should regard as an epistemic peer has the EW view, holding it implies that you shouldn’t hold it. So I was worried I’d been gazumped in print.

On closer reading this seems not to be the case. I was deriving a problem by applying EW to an epistemic principle. Keller seems to be making one of the following two arguments, the first of which seems pretty bad to me, the second a little better.

The first argument seems to be that since most people don’t have some kind of ‘balanced’ view about religion, assigning some credence to different theistic views and some credence to atheistic views, taking others’ judgment seriously requires that you don’t do this either. But I don’t think this is plausible as a refutation. People who put forward the EW position are well aware that they might end up with a position different, at least in its credal weighting, to everyone else, and I don’t see why the fact that they do so is an objection.

The second argument, and this is more interesting, seems to be that we get an odd result if we apply the EW principle itself to the position that lots of other folks, theists and atheists alike, are our epistemic peers. You only get an argument for religious agnositicism from EW if you assume that lots of other people, both theists and atheists, are your peers. But those other people don’t seem to regard you (the agnostic) as an epistemic peer in the relevant sense. So by EW you should not give full credence to the assumption that they are peers.

This does seem like an interesting point to me. It isn’t at all obvious whether it is possible to use EW to derive any interesting agnostic conclusions without some strong assumptions about peerhood. And it isn’t clear that holding on to those assumptions is consistent with EW. So it isn’t clear what the real world consequences of EW exactly are.

Perhaps Keller goes too far in saying, given the reasons he adduces, that EW is inconsistent. But he might have raised an interesting kind of self-defeat challenge.