Consider an agent S who doesn’t know what her evidence is. If Williamson is right, then we are in S’s position all of the time. Assuming S is in a position where different evidence would justify different credences in some proposition p, the following three things can’t be true of S.

• Confirmation Awareness: S knows what the rational response is to some class of possible evidential input, and her actual evidence is in that class.
• Credal Awareness: S knows what her credence in p is.
• Rationality Awareness: S knows that she is responding rationally to her evidence.

Williamson thinks that cases like S are common. In any such case, one of the three awareness claims must fail. Which is most likely to fail? That is, for realistic versions of S, which of these three claims is actually false? I think this is relevant for thinking about the possibility of modelling some familiar and interesting cases, such as Sleeping Beauty, in terms of unknown evidence.

Thinking this through is interesting because it affects what we want to say about the applicability of Williamsonian ideas to everyday cases. Consider, for instance, the following toy example, modelled closely on some examples of Williamson.

An agent is in state S1, or state S2, or state S3. Right now they regard each state as equally probable. They are about to get some evidence. When they get that evidence, then whatever state they are in, they won’t know they are not in the adjoining state, and obviously they won’t know they aren’t in the state they are in. But that’s all they won’t know. So if they are in S1, they’ll know they are in S1 or S2. If they are in S3, they will know they are in S2 or S3. And if they are in S2, they won’t get any usable information.

The agent is actually in S1. What should their credence be that they are in S1? Answer: 1/2. Their evidence is that they are in S1 or S2, conditionalising on that leads to a probability of 1/2 that they are in S1. But note, for all the agent knows, they are in S2. And if they are in S2, then their evidence is consistent with S3. In that case, conditionalising on their evidence should lead to a probability of 1/3 that they are in S1.

There is something odd about the case. The agent can’t know (a) that the right thing to do when (and only when) their evidence is S1 or S2 is to have credence 1/2 in S1, (b) that their credence in S1 or S2 is 1/2 and (c) that they are doing the right thing . If they knew (a), (b) and (c), they’d be able to deduce that their evidence was S1 or S2, and from that they’d be able to deduce that they are in S1. But they can’t know any such thing. So one of (a), (b) and (c) fails. In realistic models of this kind of situation, which of them actually fails.

It seems to me easy enough to think of cases where Confirmation Awareness holds. In cases where there are only a few possible evidential inputs, or in cases where the initial credal distribution over possible outcomes is quite straightforward (perhaps because we’re concerned with the behaviour of a chance device with known chances) it can be quite clear how to conditionalise on various pieces of evidence. So while Confirmation Awareness sometimes fails, I think it often holds.

There is a simple argument that Credal Awareness can’t fail, at least for instrumentally rational agents. The agent can just arrange for themselves to be offered bets on p at various odds, and they can look and see which ones they accept. So they’ll know which credence they have. I think that argument is too quick. At best what it shows is that an agent could get extra evidence about what their credence is, not that they already have that evidence. But the argument does show something. At least in cases where there is a big range of possible credences, we don’t have to get new evidence to know whether our credence in p is, say 1/2 or 1/3. So I think in realistic examples of Williamsonian cases, Credal Awareness succeeds.

So that leaves Rationality Awareness. I suspect a lot of the time, when we don’t know what our evidence is, we won’t know that we’re responding rationally to our actual evidence. To the extent that rationality just is a matter of responding rationally to evidence, we won’t know that we are rational. I think if we think of rationality this way though, as a matter of people appropriately in tune with the world through our evidence, it shouldn’t be too surprising that we can’t always tell we are rational. Sometimes responding rationally to evidence requires a little luck.

I wrote a blog post on the relationship between epistemology in philosophy and methodology in philosophy for the “Arché Methodology Project Blog”:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~armeth/2009/03/methodology-and-epistemology/. There are comments enabled over there, so I’ve turned them off here, but I encourage everyone to head over to the Arché site and jump into the debate.

As a few bloggers are noting, JC Beall‘s new book Spandrels of Truth is just out with OUP.  The main idea is that semantic paradox is a by-product (or spandrel) created by the introduction into our language of a transparent truth predicate.  Having talked with JC a lot about this material, and read drafts of the book, I think it’s well worth a read if you’re interested in this topic at all. 

(As a bonus, if you order with this discount form you can get 20% off.)

In “Conceptual Truth” (Proc Aris Soc Supp 80: 1-41), Timothy Williamson makes the following argument. The context is that he’s attacking Jackson’s argument that there must be some common doctrine held by people who use terms with the same meaning.

bq. Putnam’s insight is relevant far beyond the class of natural kind terms, as Burge observed (1986). Even where we cannot sensibly divide the linguistic community into experts and non-experts, the picture of a natural language as a cluster of causally interrelated but constitutively independent idiolects is still wrong, because it ignores the way in which individual speakers defer to the linguistic community as a whole. They use a word as a word of a public language, allowing its reference in their mouths to be fixed by its use over the whole community. Such verbal interactions between speakers can hold a linguistic practice together even in the absence of a common creed which they are all required to endorse.

Whatever its merits as an argument against Jackson, this seems to me to be a quite bad argument against the view of “natural language as a cluster of causally interrelated but constitutively independent idiolects”. The problem is that individuals may choose to defer to anyone at all. If Williamson’s argument is to work, the ‘linguistic community’ has to be the whole world, and there has to be just one natural language. But that’s crazy, so Williamson’s argument doesn’t work.

We’re all familiar with examples of common loan words like ‘Schadenfreude’. That looks like a case where speakers of English (or other languages) defer, to the extent they defer at all, to experts who are not English speakers. That is, they defer to Germans. But Germans aren’t part of the linguistic community of English speakers.

Now it might be argued that really English speakers are only deferring to other English speakers. After all, ‘Schadenfreude’ is a loanword that has been incorporated into English. But I don’t think this response can be maintained. For one thing, the first English speakers who started using ‘Schadenfreude’ did not defer to other English speakers. For another, the kind of pattern we see here, namely borrowing words from other languages, can happen all the time, and on an ad hoc basis. An individual speaker may choose to defer to English speakers, or Bengali speakers, or Latin speakers, or speakers of any other kind of language, on a moment to moment basis. If Ishani and I find it convenient to adopt some term from Bengali into the language we use to talk to one another, we can, and we are under no obligation to use that term the way that other English speakers do.

If Williamson’s argument against idiolects, and for public languages in a more traditional sense, is going to work, there needs to be a linguistic community that goes with each language. And speakers must be required, in virtue of speaking that language, to defer to it. But this isn’t how language works. We can choose to defer to whoever we want at any time. Or to not defer if we insist on using a term idiosyncratically.

It’s true, and important, that the meanings of terms in my mouth is determined in part by the usage of experts, other language users and so on. But this isn’t inconsistent with the picture of overlapping idiolects. I could well choose to have the meaning of ‘sofa’, or ‘Schadenfreude’, in my language determined by the usage pattern of a broader group. What would be a problem for the idiolect view is if I was required, in virtue of speaking the language of some community, to defer to that very community. But I’m not. And unless Williamson wants to say there is really only one linguistic community, consisting of the whole world, and one public language, which we all speak fragments of, I don’t see how facts about deference can help sustain the traditional picture of public languages.

I just upgraded the version of WordPress that is powering TAR. I hope this doesn’t lead to crashes anywhere, either for viewers or for writers, but if it does, let me know.

“Brian Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/which-are-the-highest-quality-general-philosophy-journals-in-english.html has “a poll”:http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/cgi-perl/civs/vote.pl?id=E_066e4bb39f0a75cf&akey=141acf26d5d7be80 on what the top general philosophy journals in English are. The “general” condition rules out quite a few top journals (e.g., Ethics, BJPS, etc.) so it’s pretty much the usual suspects at the top.

When I ran a similar poll it was interesting to get demographic data on the respondents. It turned out that Americans who I surveyed ranked Nous more or less top, while British respondents ranked Mind more highly. It would be especially interesting to see the relative prestige of Philosophical Quarterly (one of my favourite journals) and Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.

I don’t know if everyone knows about the blog attached to the Arché Methdology Project. The link to it is

• Arché Methdology Blog

There has been some fascinating posts, and comments threads already on it. (It’s the only blog whose comments thread I subscribe to, because the comments are usually insightful.) And with term starting up again, it should be extremely lively.

Update: link fixed.

“Ross Cameron”:http://metaphysicalvalues.blogspot.com/2009/03/leeds-metaphysicians-sweep-oxford.html reports,

Some fantastic news for the Leeds metaphysicians: Jason Turner has won the the Younger Scholar Prize in Metaphysics, for his paper ‘Ontological Nihilism‘! This was after a record number of submissions. Well done Jason!

And the joint runners-up are Robbie Williams and Elizabeth Barnes for their paper ‘A Theory of Metaphysical Indeterminacy‘ and me for my ‘Truthmaking for Presentists‘. So a clean sweep for Leeds!

These three papers will all be appearing in a forthcoming volume of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics.

Well done to the Leedsters! And I would be remiss to not note that the winners are all recent graduates of my two employers, Rutgers and St Andrews. So well done to Rutgers and St Andrews as well.

As “Brian Leiter writes”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/deciding-betwee.html, many students are currently getting offers to PhD and MA programs. Several students will have multiple offers, and will have very important choices to make in the next few weeks. I want to largely echo what Brian says about the dangers of various departments, and just add a few cents worth of comments.

The best advice Brian gives is right at the end. He says, “The way for a prospective student to discover [exceptional departments for graduate study] is to talk to lots of current students.” I agree. The single best thing any student can do between now and when they have to choose a program is to talk as much as they can to current students at the departments they’ve been accepted to. There are really three reasons for this.

One thing is that, as Brian says, there are a lot of factors that make a big difference to how well grad school will go, but which you really can’t tell on paper. The only way to tell how much it improves your education to have philosophers X, Y and Z in the department is to talk to students of X, Y and Z.

Second, departments change a lot, and quickly, in important informal respects. The morale of the department, the levels of infighting, the sense of ownership that students have of the department, can all change on the basis of events that may seem relatively trivial to outsiders. If your professors say “I was at school S six years ago, and it was terrible for these reasons…”, they may well be correct about how things were then, but incorrect about how things are now. Having up-to-date information is vital, and current students are the best source for this.

Finally, no matter where you study, you’ll end up spending a lot of time with other graduate students. You’ll probably end up learning as much from conversations with other graduate students as with the faculty. So you want to get a sense of how much you’ll enjoy, both informally and professionally, having these graduate students as your colleagues for the next several years. You’ll be colleagues with the current first years for four or more years, so get to know them a bit, see how much you want to be their colleagues, and see how much you’ll learn from them.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll be in a much better position to make a decision than anyone who could advise you. That’s because you’ll know more about how the grad programs are actually currently running, and what the grad students who are currently there are like. I think Rutgers will do pretty well by this measure, since the program seems to be running very well, and the students are unbelievable. But I don’t know what the relevant comparisons are like, in particular I have no idea how good students are at all our peer departments, and I suspect there are very few people who do. If you’re a prospective graduate student then at this stage, there’s no substitute for spending as much time as possible at various departments, and especially with current students.