Much to be said about San Francisco, testimony, contextualism, value-laden epistemology, “horribly sad news from home”:http://theage.com.au/news/People/Friends-sing-to-Hesters-spirit/2005/03/28/1111862322895.html and the assorted things that happen over a week. But instead of saying any of them I’ll just make one small grammatical observation. I’m sure this is something that most of you know, and it is well-investigated by linguists, but it was news to me. It’s surprising, from some perspectives, that (1) is grammatical while (2) is not.

(1) John wants Mary to win.
(2) *John hopes Mary to win.

There’s a certain kind of philosophical program (one that no one really adopts but which many people seem to feel the pull of) that wants (hopes?) to have all studies into psychological states be redrawn as studies into the syntax and semantics of words for psychological states. Now I don’t think this is an entirely bad idea. It’s important to learn that not all mental states are reducible to beliefs and desires, for example, and linguistic analysis of e.g. the notion of intention can suggest grounds for anti-reductionism.

But it can also go too far. It would be a very bad mistake to conclude from the distinction between (1) and (2) that there are these two mental states, wanting and hoping, such that one of them is an attitude towards the world and one of them is an essentially first-personal attitude. Sometimes a grammatical rule is just a grammatical rule, and this is one of those times. Just how often this mistake is made is I think a fairly interesting question.

A while back I did “a small study”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/000576.html on placement rates of top PhD departments. At the time I left out NYU because they didn’t have a record. Now “they do have a record”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/placement/index.html, and it is pretty good – 100% of graduates in good jobs, around half of them in jobs that are clearly great jobs. It’s a very small sample, but something for PhD candidates to consider when deciding between universities. (Thanks to Ned Block for the link.)

A while back I did “a small study”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/000576.html on placement rates of top PhD departments. At the time I left out NYU because they didn’t have a record. Now “they do have a record”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/placement/index.html, and it is pretty good – 100% of graduates in good jobs, around half of them in jobs that are clearly great jobs. It’s a very small sample, but something for PhD candidates to consider when deciding between universities. (Thanks to Ned Block for the link.)

In the comments to “a thread a couple of entries down”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004260.html, Gideon Rosen makes the following point.

bq. Note that in most legal contexts, knowledge means “true belief” or perhaps “true confident belief”.

As noted in the thread, there are some exceptions to this (e.g. insane people, perhaps beliefs about the future) but it seems to be largely correct. He goes on to say.

bq. It never means knowledge in our sense.

I sort of agree. Relying on a philosophical analysis of ‘knowledge’ would get you laughed out of court in most cases where it mattered. But isn’t this a problem for epistemology? We’re meant to be analysing (or at least clarifying) the ordinary concept of knowledge. If in one of its most important uses, the law, the word ‘knows’ behaves totally differently to how we say it behaves, I think that’s a problem for epistemology. This looks like a project worth working on.

As also noted in the comments, Chris Green has “a paper on law and epistemology”:http://www.philosophy.ubc.ca/apa/current/papers/306.pdf on the program at the Pacific APA. Chris seems to take a different line to what I’m interested in – he uses some of the careful distinctions the law makes to try to adjudicate between different contemporary epistemological theories. I’m more interested in the idea that the law provides evidence that contemporary theories of knowledge are more radically mistaken, and that the law is right to say (as do some epistemologists, e.g. Hetherington and Sartwell) that knowledge is something like true confident belief.

In the comments to “a thread a couple of entries down”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004260.html, Gideon Rosen makes the following point.

bq. Note that in most legal contexts, knowledge means “true belief” or perhaps “true confident belief”.

As noted in the thread, there are some exceptions to this (e.g. insane people, perhaps beliefs about the future) but it seems to be largely correct. He goes on to say.

bq. It never means knowledge in our sense.

I sort of agree. Relying on a philosophical analysis of ‘knowledge’ would get you laughed out of court in most cases where it mattered. But isn’t this a problem for epistemology? We’re meant to be analysing (or at least clarifying) the ordinary concept of knowledge. If in one of its most important uses, the law, the word ‘knows’ behaves totally differently to how we say it behaves, I think that’s a problem for epistemology. This looks like a project worth working on.

As also noted in the comments, Chris Green has “a paper on law and epistemology”:http://www.philosophy.ubc.ca/apa/current/papers/306.pdf on the program at the Pacific APA. Chris seems to take a different line to what I’m interested in – he uses some of the careful distinctions the law makes to try to adjudicate between different contemporary epistemological theories. I’m more interested in the idea that the law provides evidence that contemporary theories of knowledge are more radically mistaken, and that the law is right to say (as do some epistemologists, e.g. Hetherington and Sartwell) that knowledge is something like true confident belief.

Phil Gaspar has sent along an update on the labour dispute affecting San Francisco hotels (and hence conferences held in San Francisco hotels) which I’ve reprinted under the fold.
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It’s easier than you think to define knowledge. Here’s the “Massachusetts Rules of Professional Conduct Definition”:http://www.mass.gov/obcbbo/rpc9.htm.

bq. (f) “Knowingly,” “known,” or “knows” denotes actual knowledge of the fact in question. A person’s knowledge may be inferred from circumstances.

All us epistemologists can sleep easy now. (As noted in previous post, I’m all of a sudden very interested in how “knows” is actually defined at law, but I don’t think this is going to help.)

Ishani was just talking with me about “Jennifer Lackey’s prize-winning paper”:http://www.philosophy.rutgers.edu/EVENTS/EPIS2005/PAPERS/Lackey.pdf and we noticed something odd about one of the core examples. Here’s the example, with the discussion after the fold.

bq. COMPULSIVELY TRUSTING: Bill is a compulsively trusting person with respect to the testimony of his neighbor, Jill, in whom he has an obsessive romantic interest. Not only does he always trust Jill when he has very good reason to believe her, he is incapable of distrusting her when he has very good reason to not believe her. For instance, even when he has available to him overwhelming evidence for believing that she is deliberately lying or being deceitful, Bill cannot come to believe this about Jill. Indeed, Bill is such that there is no amount of evidence that would convince him to not trust Jill. Yesterday, while taking his afternoon walk, Bill ran into Jill, and she told him that she had seen an orca whale while boating earlier that day. Bill, of course, readily accepted Jill’s testimony. It turns out that Jill did in fact see an orca whale on the boat trip in question, that she is very reliable with respect to her epistemic practices, both in general and in this particular instance, and that Bill has no reason to doubt the proffered testimony. Given his compulsively trusting nature with respect to Jill, however, even if he had had massive amounts of evidence available to him indicating, for instance, that Jill did not see an orca whale, that she is an unreliable epistemic agent, that she is an unreliable testifier, that orca whales do not live in this part of the country, and so on, Bill would have just as readily accepted Jill’s testimony.
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Richard Zach has posted the schedule for the LogBlog: Logic Education Session at the San Francisco APA/ASL meeting this Saturday that I, along with Richard, Michael Glanzberg, Andy Arana and Ted Sider will be part of. I can’t promise it will be laugh-a-minute stuff but it should be useful and informative. And it is a Good Thing to have more discussion of philosophical teaching at places philosophers gather en masse.

Richard Zach has posted the schedule for the LogBlog: Logic Education Session at the San Francisco APA/ASL meeting this Saturday that I, along with Richard, Michael Glanzberg, Andy Arana and Ted Sider will be part of. I can’t promise it will be laugh-a-minute stuff but it should be useful and informative. And it is a Good Thing to have more discussion of philosophical teaching at places philosophers gather en masse.