There’s lots of interesting comments in the thread on disagreement below. I’m about to head off to the SOFIA conference, but hopefully I’ll have a chance to dive into the debate when I’m back. In the meantime, here is the almost complete draft of the doxastic responsibility paper I’ve mentioned a few times here.

bq. “Deontology and Descartes’ Demon”:http://brian.weatherson.org/DatD.pdf

The paper tries to cover a lot of ground. Here are the key points.

* We need to distinguish the claims that beliefs are volitional from the claims that they are voluntary and that they are free. (The importance of this distinction is made clear in Ryle’s _Concept of Mind_, and it plays an important role in some contemporary moral psychology.)
* We also need to distinguish claims about whether belief formation is volitional/voluntary/free from claims about whether belief maintenance is volitional/voluntary/free.
* So there are six possible claims here, and if any of them are true that would imply that we have some level of responsibility for beliefs.
* Given that, whether belief formation is volitional isn’t particularly relevant to whether we have responsibility for beliefs.
* There are close parallels between belief formation/maintenance and other actions that are free (and perhaps voluntary) and beliefs, from which I conclude that the formation and maintenance of many beliefs is free (and perhaps voluntary).
* But some beliefs (esp perceptual beliefs) are formed unfreely, and at least in the short term are maintained unfreely.
* So while we have responsibility for some beliefs, we don’t have responsibility for all beliefs, and this matters for epistemology.
* This dichotomy opens up a defence of externalism from the new evil demon argument. The defence is similar to, though I think not quite identical with, the defence offered by externalists such as “Clayton Littlejohn”:http://www.geocities.com/cmlittlejohn/reldemfin.pdf (PDF).
* Although epistemic justification is a deontological concept, it should not be construed as being something like blamelessness; rather, having justified beliefs for which one is responsible is a respect in which one is praiseworthy.

Along the way, there are a few asides about will, self-control, evidence and other concepts, as well as a running commentary (mostly in footnotes) on the relevance of various Rylean observations to my argument and to various related works in moral psychology. So the paper is probably not as focussed as it might have been, but I hope it is fun anyway!

On a different note, but keeping with the theme of the blog in recent days, the final “Arché Vagueness Conference”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/vagueness/index.html will be held this June, and the call for papers is at the attached link. It’s a lot of fun being in St Andrews, especially when there’s all that daylight around the solstice, and it looks like the philosophy they’ll have on show will be absolutely first class.

Another conference, this time a little further afield…

Call for Papers

Eleventh Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK XI)
June 25-27, 2007
Brussels, Belgium, http://www.tark.be

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The website for the 2007 edition of the Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference is up now. This is a great conference – if you’re a philosopher in the market for summer conference-attending, you should probably send them a paper! The site is here.

Fourth Annual Formal Epistemology Workshops, FEW 2007

We are in the process of organizing the fourth annual formal epistemology workshop. The purpose of these workshops will be to bring together individuals, both faculty and graduate students, using mathematical methods in epistemology in small focused meetings. Topics treated will include but are not limited to:

* Ampliative inference (including inductive logic);
* Game theory and decision theory;
* Formal learning theory;
* Formal theories of coherence:
* Foundations of probability and statistics;
* Formal approaches to paradoxes of belief and/or action;
* Belief revision;
* Causal discovery.

Besides papers with respondents, each workshop will typically include short introductory tutorials (three or four topically related presentations) on formal methods. These tutorials will be oriented particularly to graduate students.

The fourth workshop is scheduled for 31 May – 3 June 2007 and will be held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

FEW 2007 SUBMISSION DEADLINES:
– Paper submissions (at least a 1/2 page abstract): By Monday, Feb. 26th.
– Notification: By Monday, March 30th.

Please send submissions by email to Branden Fitelson <branden@fitelson.org>.

Those interested in participating, either by presenting papers, responding, or providing tutorials, or in helping with organization, should contact one of the organizers listed below. Limited funds are available for graduate student travel. (A workshop web-site will shortly be set up. It will appear at the usual location: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~fitelson/few/.)

Richard Scheines <scheines@andrew.cmu.edu> CMU

Sahotra Sarkar <sarkar@mail.utexas.edu> UT-Austin

Branden Fitelson <branden@fitelson.org> UC-Berkeley

Recently several epistemologists, such as David Christensen, Adam Elga and Richard Feldman, have endorsed a fairly strong view about disagreement. Roughly, the idea is that if you believe p, and someone as smart as you and as well informed as you believes ~p, then you should replace your belief in p with either a suspension of judgment (in Feldman’s view), or a probability of p between their probability and your old probability (in Elga’s view).

I’m glossing over a lot of details here because I think there is a way to see that no view anything like this can be accepted. Many other epistemologists (Tom Kelly, Ralph Wedgwood) do not hold the Christensen-Elga-Feldman view. So by their own lights, Christensen et al should not believe their own view, because according to them they shouldn’t believe a proposition on which there is disagreement among peers, and this epistemological theory is a proposition on which there is disagreement among peers.

I think no one should accept a view that will be unacceptable to them if they come to accept it. So I think no one should accept the Christensen-Elga-Feldman view. Indeed, I think the probabilistic version of it is incoherent because of a variant of the above argument. I’ve written up a short paper saying why.

bq. “Disagreeing about Disagreement”:http://brian.weatherson.org/DaD.pdf

As some of you will have noticed, WordPress creates a comments feed for every post on this blog. This is kind of neat, but a little impractical for most purposes. So I found where it is storing the comments feed for the entire blog. I’ve now made it available through the cute little button on the sidebar, or it is available “here”:http://tar.weatherson.org/comments/feed/.

One of the side effects of travelling so much is feeling guilty about my contributions to global warming. So I started doing a little research into buying carbon credits to offset my carbon contributions to the world. It seemed the best way to do so (in America) was through “Carbonfund”:http://www.carbonfund.org/site/, but my research here was fairly spotty. I’m normally leery about giving money to charities that aren’t that well established, but I think no charities on these lines are going to be well established. Do any readers have any suggestions?

Douglas Portmore has started a “journals wiki”:http://wikihost.org/wikis/philjinfo/ to keep track of how well different journals respond to submissions, i.e. the turnaround time, the usefulness of the comments etc. I’m a little worried that people will post their war stories, rather than the times they got a quick (or at least not slow) response from journals. I have a pretty good idea of what the median response time is at a few journals, so we’ll see how this data matches up.

Richard Moran told me about a really cool new resource, “LibriVox”:http://librivox.org/. They collect and distribute audio recordings of books and papers that are in the public domain. Here is their “philosophy”:http://librivox.org/newcatalog/search.php?genre=Philosophy catalog. It includes a few things we’d consider borderline philosophical at best, but it also includes some classics including McTaggert’s “_The Unreality of Time_”:http://librivox.org/unreality_of_time/. It is possible to volunteer to add recordings to the site. They say that _On Denoting_ is in progress. A good version of _Principia Ethica_ would be fun to hear, though the reader would need to get just the _right_ pitch on each of the emphasised words.

On a somewhat lower brow note, two college friends of mine have decided to regenerate their college radio show “Black Forest Radio”:http://www.blackforestradio.com/blog/ as a podcast. It’s not entirely unsafe for work, depending on what kind of workplace you have I guess. (Personally I work in a closed office, so spending the entire day watching cricinfo updates and listening to trashy Australian radio is work-safe. Not that I would ever do that.)

In the meantime, it’s about 60 degrees and sunny here, so I might go for a stroll up Cascadilla Gorge. My desktop has the forecasts for Ithaca and Melbourne, and it says their projected daily maximums are 3 degrees apart. Hopefully Melbourne gets as much rain with these temperatures as Ithaca is getting.

I’m finally back from a long trip away. It involved going via the APA and surviving “the fire”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2007/01/05/apa-hotel-fire/, but mostly I spent the time in Minneapolis. Happily, I didn’t travel anywhere I had to “learn a new language”:http://www.cnn.com/2007/TRAVEL/01/01/australia.slang.reut/index.html. Unhappily, I have about a million emails, papers, etc to get to now I’m back. But before all that, I wanted to mention a story that bears on my arguments for doxastic voluntarism.
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(Cross-posting from Long Words Bother Me.)

Today I have been mostly reading Dave Chalmers on Ontological Anti-Realism. (NB: Dave’s paper is a draft, not a finished product. Still, since it’s in the public domain, I thought it might be helpful to make a comment here since I think the point is important.)

A couple of quibbles then the biggie.

Quibble 1: I think it’s inviting trouble to describe anything as ‘the’ basic question of metaontology, ethics, or metaethics (p. 1). Other basic questions of metaethics, for instance, besides Dave’s (‘Are there objective answers to the basic questions of ethics?’) will plausibly include: ‘What is the best methodology for ethics?’ and/or ‘How – if at all – do we know ethical truths?’. And many people might think that the basic questions of ethics, besides ‘What is right?’, include ‘What is good?’, ‘What ought I to do?’ and/or ‘What is the force of ethical reasons for action?’.

Quibble 2: Those who hold that ‘commonsense’ and ‘correct’ ontology coincide in cognitive significance aren’t thereby forced to be deflationary about correct ontology (p. 9). They might instead be inflationary about commonsense ontology, holding that it has the cognitive significance of – and is sensitive to the commitments of – correct ontology. (Or at least, I don’t see why this option is off the table.)

The big one: Dave’s ‘ontological realism’ (section 5) consists in attributing the following properties to all ontological existence assertions:
1. objectivity, which amounts to lack of sensitivity (regarding content or truth-value) to context (speaker’s or evaluator’s)
and 2: determinacy (having truth-value true or false).
His ‘anti-realism’ is defined as the denial of realism in this sense.

My worry about this is that ‘objectivity’ as Dave defines it is orthogonal to the question of mind-independence, which I suspect is what most of those who take themselves to be ontological realists because they think ontological claims are ‘objective’ will be thinking of. By Dave’s lights, one can count as a realist about ontology despite thinking that There are Fs is true iff, and in virtue of the truth of, Someone believes at some time that there are Fs. But I think this position is pretty clearly anti-realist in at least one good (and commonplace) sense.

Moreover, I’m not sure that I know of a good (and/or commonplace) usage of ‘realism’ which goes along with determinacy of truth-value and lack of sensivity to context. No-one would say we are in danger of counting as anti-realists about physical space, say, just because we believe spatial language is full of indexicals and therefore not all spatial assertions are ‘objective’ in Dave’s sense.