There’s a lot of stuff in the literature right now on norms about assertion. One issue is whether asserting something you don’t know can ever be appropriate. Another issue is whether you might be criticisable for assertions of things you do know. Of course, some assertions of things you know are irrelevant, or unhelpful, but the issue here is whether this is the only kind of way in which an assertion of something you know can be criticised. Consider the following example.

S believes that p. S is self-aware, so she knows that she believes that p. Unfortunately, this belief is utterly crazy. S has a lot of evidence that ~p, which she is systematically ignoring. She asserts “I believe that p”. Is her utterance criticisable? If so, in what way? Is it criticizable _qua_ assertion?

Here’s an abstract version of one of the train puzzles I was describing a couple of posts below. What’s interesting here is whether these cases pose a problem for Fantl and McGrath’s principle (PC).

(PC) S is justified in believing that p only if S is rational to prefer as if p.

Let p be some (true) proposition about the date of a moderately famous historical event, and S a subject with a slightly fuzzy recollection that p is in fact true. (Assume S’s recollection is not Gettierised, her memory that p is caused by p in a perfectly acceptable way, but she could potentially doubt that p.) A is a bet that pays $1 if p is true, and leads to a loss determined by the formula below.

Now the complications start. Let q, r and t be three mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive propositions. Our subject S believes q, but all her evidence points towards r, although in fact t is true. Now here’s the formula for how much A costs if p is false.

If q is true, A costs $3
If r is true, A costs $200
If t is true, A costs $2

Assume (as seems reasonable) that given r, S does not find this a very good bet. But she does find it a good bet given q and given t. That is, she’s prepared to bet on p at 2 or 3 to 1, but not at 200 to 1, which is smart given her evidence. Since she thinks q is true, she takes the bet (and wins a dollar).

I think it’s plausible (not mandatory but plausible) to say that she is justified in the circumstances in believing p, but not rational in acting as she does as if p is true. That would be a counterexample to (PC). Moreover, since t is true so this bet is actually a low-stakes bet, we can believe this even if we think that whether one has a justified belief is sensitive to pragmatic matters.

I’m not actually committed to this being a counterexample, and in fact my own position on the example is a little more convoluted that I’d like. But I think it’s a tricky case which it’s worth getting clear about.

Any thoughts?

Here’s an abstract version of one of the train puzzles I was describing a couple of posts below. What’s interesting here is whether these cases pose a problem for Fantl and McGrath’s principle (PC).

(PC) S is justified in believing that p only if S is rational to prefer as if p.

Let p be some (true) proposition about the date of a moderately famous historical event, and S a subject with a slightly fuzzy recollection that p is in fact true. (Assume S’s recollection is not Gettierised, her memory that p is caused by p in a perfectly acceptable way, but she could potentially doubt that p.) A is a bet that pays $1 if p is true, and leads to a loss determined by the formula below.

Now the complications start. Let q, r and t be three mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive propositions. Our subject S believes q, but all her evidence points towards r, although in fact t is true. Now here’s the formula for how much A costs if p is false.

If q is true, A costs $3
If r is true, A costs $200
If t is true, A costs $2

Assume (as seems reasonable) that given r, S does not find this a very good bet. But she does find it a good bet given q and given t. That is, she’s prepared to bet on p at 2 or 3 to 1, but not at 200 to 1, which is smart given her evidence. Since she thinks q is true, she takes the bet (and wins a dollar).

I think it’s plausible (not mandatory but plausible) to say that she is justified in the circumstances in believing p, but not rational in acting as she does as if p is true. That would be a counterexample to (PC). Moreover, since t is true so this bet is actually a low-stakes bet, we can believe this even if we think that whether one has a justified belief is sensitive to pragmatic matters.

I’m not actually committed to this being a counterexample, and in fact my own position on the example is a little more convoluted that I’d like. But I think it’s a tricky case which it’s worth getting clear about.

Any thoughts?

I just finished a draft of a very long paper on pragmatic encroachment in epistemology.

bq. “Can we do without pragmatic encroachment?”:http://brian.weatherson.org/cwdwpe.pdf

The idea behind the paper is that once we have a suitably pragmatic understanding of belief, we don’t need to also have a pragmatic understanding of justification in order to have a suitably pragmatic theory of justified belief. Along the way there’s stuff about the preface paradox, closure principles, principles of practical implication and much more.

The paper doesn’t yet have any references, and most importantly doesn’t have a proper acknowledgements section. When it does many of the commentators on this blog will get thanked!

Although the paper started off life as an attempt to say something about Hawthorne and Stanley’s views about knowledge, I had to stick to justification here in order to have something of managable length. Perhaps knowledge will be the next project.

Comments, of course, more than welcome.

UPDATE: I seem to have fairly badly misinterpreted/misremembered (at the time of writing) parts of the paper by Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath that I’m in part responding to here. Until further notice, take anything I say in there about what they say with a tilde of salt.

SECOND UPDATE: I updated the PDF (as of 2.30pm, June 7) to remove at least some of the most blatant misinterpretations.

I just finished a draft of a very long paper on pragmatic encroachment in epistemology.

bq. “Can we do without pragmatic encroachment?”:http://brian.weatherson.org/cwdwpe.pdf

The idea behind the paper is that once we have a suitably pragmatic understanding of belief, we don’t need to also have a pragmatic understanding of justification in order to have a suitably pragmatic theory of justified belief. Along the way there’s stuff about the preface paradox, closure principles, principles of practical implication and much more.

The paper doesn’t yet have any references, and most importantly doesn’t have a proper acknowledgements section. When it does many of the commentators on this blog will get thanked!

Although the paper started off life as an attempt to say something about Hawthorne and Stanley’s views about knowledge, I had to stick to justification here in order to have something of managable length. Perhaps knowledge will be the next project.

Comments, of course, more than welcome.

UPDATE: I seem to have fairly badly misinterpreted/misremembered (at the time of writing) parts of the paper by Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath that I’m in part responding to here. Until further notice, take anything I say in there about what they say with a tilde of salt.

SECOND UPDATE: I updated the PDF (as of 2.30pm, June 7) to remove at least some of the most blatant misinterpretations.

I wrote a short paper on problems contextualism has with questions about knowledge. The problem concerns the following exchange.

A: Does S know that p?
B: No, he thinks p is true but he’s just guessing.

If contextualism (i.e. Lewis-Cohen-DeRose style speaker-contextualism) is true, then B’s answer is correct iff S doesn’t know _by A’s standards_. But intuitively B should answer according to whether S knows _by B’s standards_ or, perhaps, _by S’s standards_. Problem.

bq. “Questioning Contextualism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/qc2.pdf

The paper goes into more details about why this is exactly what contextualism predicts and why “single scoreboard” type responses don’t help as much as some might think they do. I don’t think the core examples are completely tight yet, but it’s a reasonable work-in-progress.

(The paper as it currently stands benefited a lot from conversations with “Ishani”:http://philosophy.syr.edu/maitra.html and “Tamar”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tsg3/.)

I wrote a short paper on problems contextualism has with questions about knowledge. The problem concerns the following exchange.

A: Does S know that p?
B: No, he thinks p is true but he’s just guessing.

If contextualism (i.e. Lewis-Cohen-DeRose style speaker-contextualism) is true, then B’s answer is correct iff S doesn’t know _by A’s standards_. But intuitively B should answer according to whether S knows _by B’s standards_ or, perhaps, _by S’s standards_. Problem.

bq. “Questioning Contextualism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/qc2.pdf

The paper goes into more details about why this is exactly what contextualism predicts and why “single scoreboard” type responses don’t help as much as some might think they do. I don’t think the core examples are completely tight yet, but it’s a reasonable work-in-progress.

(The paper as it currently stands benefited a lot from conversations with “Ishani”:http://philosophy.syr.edu/maitra.html and “Tamar”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tsg3/.)

Below the fold are six cases designed to tease out just how we think about the interaction of practical interests and epistemic justification. The main interest will be in looking at cases where agents have mistaken and/or unreasonable beliefs about their practical environment.
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The blog has obviously been fairly quiet recently, and the reader numbers are edging lower as a result. I hadn’t been having to do much work on the despamming front either, which made me think that perhaps the amount had let up. Apparently not. In the first 4 days of the month the blockers caught over 11000 attempts to visit by banned customers. The most aggressive was from the IP address 195.225.176.55, and I’d highly recommend banning him as soon as you can.

The “papers blog”:http://opp.weatherson.org/archives/004406.html has been updated. The entry today has a bit of a CT theme, with contributions from Chris Bertram and John Holbo. It would be even more CT-ish if I had finished off some of the things I’m working on before today…