Jonathan Ichikawa, who’s been doing an excellent job in the “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org, recently posted the “following comment”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Blog/Archives/cat_ethics.html about _Spider-Man 2_. (Warning spoilers ahead)
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I’ve been blogging lightly recently because I’ve been in the middle of changing computers, and moving house, and all that has taken time away from valuable blog-time. Oh, and I agreed to my _fifth_ (and last) invitation to do a paper at a conference this semester, which involves yet more writing. So I haven’t even had a chance to write a decent response to the playa-hatin’ in the thread below. Instead I’m going to kinda gripe about new computers.

Windows comes preloaded with all sorts of things you don’t want. The Cornell tech people do a pretty good job of removing most of these, though there’s still a bunch of features in Word that I have to remember to turn off before I start cursing at the computer. (I don’t blame the tech guys for not removing these – I bet some people actually like Word to futz with documents as soon as it senses a chance.) But the one genuinely great innovation Windows has made in the last few years is, quite surprisingly, not installed with the standard installation. The great innovation is “ClearType”:http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearTypeInfo.mspx.

Maybe there are some downsides to ClearType that I haven’t noticed yet. I guess it uses up some memory, but very little I think compared to the other junk Microsoft insists on inflicting. And I suspect it decreases quality of graphical (as opposed to textual) displays on some (but not all) monitors. But for reading text on flat-screen monitors (as I now do at the office) or even on conventional monitors (as I do at home) it’s an enormous improvement. I was getting a little upset with the poor quality of my new fancy display until I realised I didn’t have ClearType installed. With it the screen looks wonderful. If you are running Windows XP I highly recommend installing it.

When I was in Britain both “The Observer”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/0,12103,1033618,00.html and “Q Magazine”:http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/entertainment/bands/oasis/s/118/118205_definitely_maybe_the_best_british_album.html put out lists of the greatest British albums. At least at the top, the Observer got it right (Stone Roses) and Q got it spectacularly wrong (Definitely Maybe). Both lists were pretty weak on non-English acts, and on recent acts, but there’s interesting stuff on both lists.

Now while there are some facts about greatness in these parts (as I mentioned, _Stone Roses_ is simply better than _Definitely Maybe_) it’s arguable that in some cases there’s simply no fact of the matter. So consider the following rather lame little dialogue.

Alice: _Astral Weeks_ is a better album than _Sgt. Peppers_.
Suzy: No, _Sgt. Peppers_ is a better album than _Astral Weeks_.

There’s an intuitive sense in which although Alice and Suzy are disagreeing, neither is making a mistake. But can this intuition really be endorsed? After all, it is inconsistent to suppose both that _Astral Weeks_ is better than _Sgt. Peppers_ and that _Sgt. Peppers_ is better than _Astral Weeks_, and if not both of these claims are true, then one or both of the disputants is making a mistake – i.e. the one promoting a claim that isn’t _true_.

Crispin Wright’s paper at St Andrews was on just this question, but without the poppish sensibilities of my presentation. After some mucking about with attempts to resolve the dilemma here using intuitionist logic, Crispin chucked that and decided we should settle it using evaluator-sensitive semantics. For some claims, he held, whether they are true depends on what the relevant context _of evaluation_ is.

And for these claims, whether one is making a mistake in asserting them depends on what is true in the asserter’s context of evaluation. So as long as in Alice’s context _Astral Weeks_ really is better, and in Suzy’s _Sgt. Peppers_ really is better, neither need be making a mistake. But it is still the case that they are making inconsistent claims. For in Alice’s context, what Suzy says is false, and vice versa.

Now for those of you following events on this blog and related areas, this might seem like rather old news. “John MacFarlane”:http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/macfarlane/index.shtml has been promoting this kind of evaluator-relativism for what seems like months now, and is even writing a book on the subject. “Mark Richard”:http://ase.tufts.edu/philosophy/people/richard.shtml has a paper on it in _Philosophical Studies_ from back in June. And Andy Egan, John Hawthorne and I have a “long paper”:http://brian.weatherson.org/em.pdf coming out shortly in a volume on contextualism. This is starting to look like a bandwagon.

Actually I suspect these discussions of evaluator-sensitivity, or what is now often called _relativism_, will become philosophically central over the rest of the decade. For one thing anything that all the people mentioned above are working on is bound to be the focus of some attention. For another, I can always keep babbling on about it here until it either is (a) widely discussed or (b) this blog loses _all_ its readers. I note in passing that there are no papers written yet on why this is all a bad idea, so if any aspiring young philosopher wants a fresh shot at a field presumably full of first-pass errors waiting to be exposed, here’s your chance.

But you might think that disputes about the semantics for _greatest album_ claims is unlikely to catch fire, philosophically speaking. If that was all there was to it, I suspect you’d be right. But what makes this kind of semantic relativism interesting is its wide range of possible applications. Andy, John and I go through a bunch of areas where we think it is at least prima facie plausible, the most philosophically interesting being colour claims, although the epistemic modals that are the focus of the paper I think should also be interesting. And there’s a possibility for application to ethics, though I’m a bit scared of treading there for fear of ending up in a morass.

The real philosophical interest, however, will come from applications in epistemology. As far as I can tell, relativism has all of the benefits of contextualism with none of the costs. John MacFarlane has written “a paper just about applicability to knowledge claims”:http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/macfarlane/relknow.pdf and that will presumably be a major focus of his book. Mark Richard’s paper is also largely about knowledge claims, though the most detailed example concerns a special under-appreciated kind of comparative adjective. And Crispin Wright’s paper made an interesting point about knowledge as well. If the flurry of papers on contextualism about knowledge ascriptions is any indication, relativism about knowledge ascrpitions should be responsible for the deaths of several medium-sized forests.

One reason is that contextualism about knowledge isn’t _that_ interesting from the perspective of formal semantics. We know that there are context sensitive expressions in language. Whether ‘know’ in English is one of them is an interesting empirical question, but not one whose answer causes deep theoretical ripples. If relativism about knowledge ascriptions, or about anything else, is right we have a lot of work to do at the foundations of semantics in order to accommodate this fact. (That’s not to say there aren’t other interesting questions for philosophers of language that contextualism raises. There are, particularly about philosophical methodology. But they don’t really cut to the core the way the relativist claims do.)

And as I said there are all the problems for contextualism that relativism solves. Below the fold I’ve included a summary of these, most of which are presented in more detail in the papers I’ve already mentioned.
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One of the striking things about “Peacocke’s book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199270724/caoineorg-20?creative=125581&camp=2321&link_code=as1 is how attached he is to factorisation theories. Empirical knowledge can be factored into its empirical foundations and the rationally justified transitions from those foundations. Any necessary a posteriori truth can be factored into a necessary a priori bit and a contingent a posteriori bit. (Exactly as Sidelle says, though in this book at least Sidelle gets no citation. Perhaps there’s more on this in _Being Known_.) And moral knowledge can be factored into an a priori knowable moral bit and an a posteriori knowable non-moral bit. At this rate of factoring Peacocke could almost be Australian.

When I first read the section on moral knowledge I thought he was just repeating a theory that had been clearly refuted, and he just wasn’t keeping up with the literature. I was at best half-right. What I remembered as the refutation of this view wasn’t a paper I read, but a paper I heard “Sarah McGrath”:http://www.holycross.edu/departments/philosophy/website/mcgrath.html deliver. So Peacocke can’t be blamed for not having heard of this paper when he wrote his book. Sarah isn’t responding to Peacocke but to an earlier statement of a similar view by Judith Jarvis Thomson in “Moral Knowledge and Moral Objectivity”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0631192115/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20, and it possibly is poor form that Peacocke doesn’t cite Thomson here. (When you try and write a 270 page book on _absolutely everything_ some things are bound to get left out I guess.)

As I mentioned, I thought Sarah’s response to Thomson was pretty persuasive. I’ll first set out the kind of “principle-based” approach Peacocke wants to defend, and then why Sarah’s criticisms against it look persuasive, then investigate some moves Peacocke could make in response.

bq. (If you want the take-home version, it’s that Peacocke’s theory as it stands can’t really deal with the fact that moral claims stated in non-moral language tend to have exceptions, but maybe there’s an analogy with Gödel’s incompleteness results that helps him out here, not that he actually develops it. The analogy is well explored in Richard Holton’s “Principles and Particularisms”:http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/rholton/princpass.pdf which I highly recommend.)
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Brian Leiter recently reposted a post from last October on “The Relevance of Motives, or the Hermeneutics of Suspicion, or Ricoeur Meets Gettier”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/001520.html. I don’t really know that much about motives, hermeneutics, suspicion or Ricoeur, but I have a few opinions about Gettier so I thought I’d respond to those bits in his post. Brian claims, following Phillip Kitcher, that the lesson of the Gettier cases is that for a belief to constitute knowledge it must have the right kind of causal history. I think that if that’s the lesson of the Gettier cases, then they are much more conducive to scepticism than is usually appreciated. (I think Gettier intuitions just are sceptical intuitions, but no one believes me on this, so here I’ll just defend a conditional version of that claim.)

The following discussion owes _a lot_ to John Hawthorne. Most of the example is basically his, though I doubt he likes the way I use it. I haven’t got the book in front of me, though I think the example is covered in his book _Knowledge and Lotteries_. (Note that by blog standards that’s an adequate citation!)

Consider a standard Gettier case, in fact Russell’s version of a Gettier case. Alice sees the clock on the green and it says 4.23. So she sets her clock (in fact the clock on her cell phone) to 4.23. The clock on the green is right, as it usually is, but right now it’s stopped, as it has been for exactly 12 hours now. So Alice has a justified true belief that it’s 4.23, but according to most philosophers she doesn’t know this.

(Even if the clock was working Alice wouldn’t know it was 4.23, since the margin of error of the clock on the green is probably a minute or two even when it’s working. Strictly speaking, she would only know it’s between 4.20 and 4.25. I’ll suppress this consideration throughout in what follows, because I don’t think it’s important, and it is potentially misleading.)

Now for the Hawthorne variations.

A minute later Bob asks Alice what the time is, and she looks at her phone and (truthfully) reports that it’s 4.24. So Bob forms the justified true belief that it’s 4.24, and sets his watch accordingly. Does he know this is the time?

A minute later Carol asks Bob what the time is, and he looks at his watch and (truthfully) reports that it’s 4.25. So Carol forms the justified true belief that it’s 4.25, and sets her PalmPilot accordingly. Does she know this is the time?

[You can see how this is going]

A minute later Zinedine asks Yael what the time is, and she looks at her iPod and (truthfully) reports that it’s 4.48. So Zinedine forms the justified true belief that it’s 4.48, and sets his laptop’s clock accordingly. Does he know this is the time?

I don’t know what it is for a belief to have the right causal history, but it seems to me that if Alice’s has the wrong causal history, then so does Bob’s and Carol’s and … and Yael’s and Zinedine’s. But it seems to me (and this is just a straight intuition report though I’ll say more about it below) that it would be a very sceptical attitude to regard Zinedine as not knowing what the time was in this situation.

On the other hand, we can push the intuition that Zinedine does not know. After talking to Bob Alice took a small nap on her office couch, and then went out of her office leaving her phone behind. She runs into Zinedine a minute after he spoke to Yael and asks him what the time is. (Alice doesn’t nap often, so she has really very little idea how long she’s been asleep.) Zinedine checks his computer and says it’s 4.49. Alice forms the justified true belief that it’s 4.49. Does she know this?

If Alice can get knowledge this way, it’s hard to see why she wouldn’t know what the time was just by checking her phone. After all, Zinedine’s computer is just tracking the time according to Alice’s phone. Well, maybe Alice _could_ find out the time when she wakes up by looking at her phone.

You can probably guess where the case is going now. Change the case so that Alice naps for only a few minutes, and wakes up at 4.28. Does she know what time it is then? Or change the case so that she (a) forgets the time as soon as she talks to Bob and (b) accidentally drops her phone into a nearby gorge. She quickly asks Bob the time, and he says it’s 4.24. Does she know now what the time is? If so stopped clocks can really quickly lead to knowledge.

There are a ton of variations on these cases, but I’ll spare you them. Instead I’ll just return to Zinedine’s case and note there are three options we can take.

First, we can be sceptical and say he doesn’t know what time it is. I think this is quite a sceptical attitude because it’s plausible, highly plausible in fact, that most things we take ourselves to know are grounded _somewhere_ in the distant past on something that’s at best an accidental truth. So this could easily lead to a generalised scepticism.

Second, we can say that although Alice didn’t know what the time was when she looked at the clock what time it was, Zinedine does know the time. The error gets ‘washed out’ as it were by passing through all these hands. There’s two non-problems with this position and one real problem.

The first non-problem is that it means somewhere X gets knowledge of p by testimony from Y even though Y doesn’t know that p. Some argue that violates a constitutive property of testimonial knowledge, but I think the arguments put forward by “Jennifer Lackey”:http://www.soci.niu.edu/~phildept/faculty/Lackey.html to the effect that testimony can be a generative epistemic source are convincing, so I don’t think there’s a special problem here.

The second non-problem is that there might look like being a slippery slope from Zinedine knowing what the time is to Carol or even Bob or even Alice knowing what the time is. But it is easy to say that this is just a regular Sorites series with a vague boundary.

The real problem is that it makes it suspiciously easy to get knowledge. If Alice truly justifiably believes that p, she might not know it. But if she tells lots of her friends that p, and they believe her and tell lots of their friends and so on, and eventually word gets back to Alice that p, she then comes to know that p. This seems unfortunate. (I don’t think this kind of consideration undermines Lackey’s argument, though I don’t have her paper in front of me so I can’t check.)

Note that even if this is also a non-problem, it suggests we have to at best qualify Kitcher’s claim that knowledge requires the right kind of causal history. For on its most natural reading, that would imply Zinedine does not know that p. There might be a technical sense of ‘right causal history’ on which his belief has the right causal history, but it isn’t the most natural one.

So the third option is simply to say that Alice knows what the time is. This is counterintuitive, but I think the intuitions here are sceptical intuitions here we are better off without. As far as I can tell, this position has only two costs, and they are significantly smaller than the costs of the other options.

The first cost is that it really is very counter-intuitive to say that Alice comes to know what time it is from looking at the stopped clock. But it’s even more counter-intuitive I think to say that Zinedine doesn’t know, or that knowledge is generated through this chain of questions-and-answers.

The second cost is that we could potentially give the same kind of argument for the claim that knowledge doesn’t even require justification. It’s very tempting to try and outsmart that argument, but I don’t think I’ll try that here.

At first I thought this was a bad typo, but perhaps it’s just a quirk of American English that I hadn’t noticed before.

bq. Though few would argue that children should be protected from exposure to Internet pornography, COPA, the law designed to protect them has been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. (“NewsFactor Network”:http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_title=Supreme-Court–First-Amendment-Covers-Online-Porn&story_id=25722.)

In my idiolect, _argue that p_ means put forward arguments in support of the truth of _p_. Here it seems (unless I’m really misinterpreting the paragraph) to mean something like dispute that _p_. Is that what the phrase means in American?

One of the things Peacocke wants to do in “his book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521892430/caoineorg-20?creative=125581&camp=2321&link_code=as1 is distinguish his _moderate_ rationalism from Gödel’s _extreme_ rationalism.

Gödel thought we had a special faculty of insight into a priori domains, and that was how substantive a priori knowledge was possible. Peacocke, to his credit, doesn’t have any time for these mysterious faculties. But also, to his credit, he wants to directly address the arguments Gödel actually provides. In particular, he wants to address the argument Gödel raises against Carnap that careful reflection on, say, mathematics can reveal a priori truths that are not logical consequences of our previous discoveries/stipulations.

Gödel, if I remember correctly, was particularly interested in two cases of this. The first had to do with the “Gödel sentences” used in the incompleteness proof. The second had to do with set theory, and in particular axioms we might use to settle one way or the other the continuum hypothesis.

Peacocke thinks the kind of phenomena Gödel discusses, careful reflection leading to a priori discoveries, is real. But he thinks an account of a priori truth in terms of what it takes to possess certain concepts can account for it. And he goes through several instances of the phenomena showing how to do just this. But he doesn’t get to the two cases I mentioned above, which seem both the strongest for Gödel and the cases which he was most interested in.

To be fair he does discuss something like the incompleteness result in discussing the (allegedly a priori knowable) proposition _Every number has finitely many predecessors_. So maybe we can see how he’d handle the incompleteness cases. (Maybe.) But there’s no discussion of set theory at all, and I really have no idea how his approach would generalise to discussions of the continuum hypothesis. And this seems an unfortunate oversight in a discussion of Gödel.

Blog Stats for June

Visitors: 7932
Visitors who visited at least 10 times: 628
Visitors who visited at least 20 times: 308
Visitors who visited at least 30 times: 210
Number of visits: 23584
Number of pages viewed: 44262
Number of hits: 62433

These are all courtesy of “awstats”:http://awstats.sourceforge.net/. I don’t know exactly what the pages viewed/hits distinction is, though from their “glossary”:http://awstats.sourceforge.net/docs/awstats_glossary.html it seems that hits can include pictures and other files that aren’t pages.

Given how much I was away in June, I think that’s a lot of frequent visitors. We’ll see if it picks up in July with frequent blogging, or goes down with self-indulgent posting 🙂

Blog Stats for June

Visitors: 7932
Visitors who visited at least 10 times: 628
Visitors who visited at least 20 times: 308
Visitors who visited at least 30 times: 210
Number of visits: 23584
Number of pages viewed: 44262
Number of hits: 62433

These are all courtesy of “awstats”:http://awstats.sourceforge.net/. I don’t know exactly what the pages viewed/hits distinction is, though from their “glossary”:http://awstats.sourceforge.net/docs/awstats_glossary.html it seems that hits can include pictures and other files that aren’t pages.

Given how much I was away in June, I think that’s a lot of frequent visitors. We’ll see if it picks up in July with frequent blogging, or goes down with self-indulgent posting 🙂

p=. !http://tar.weatherson.org/potmaaya.jpg 150×200!

Normally my self-indulgent posts lead to sputterings of criticism in the comments board, but what we’ve seen so far should be nothing on what’ll happen if I let my Gilbert and George fascination grow out of hand…