A random thought on philosophy

Here's a good way of getting at the difference between bad philosophy and good philosophy. Bad philosophy strips away the insight from fundamental questions and leaves behind a stack of uninteresting details. Good philosophy, on the other hand, is able to take a stack of seemingly uninteresting details and reveal how they determine matters of fundamental interest.

This is silly.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/a-science-of-morality_b_567185.html

Why is this debate happening between a pop intellectual figure and a physicist? Why is Sam Harris attempting to do moral philosophy without any training or background, and why is he engaging with the philosophical thought of a physicist (however cogent) instead of the experts in moral philosophy? Would he consider calling a really-smart philosopher to discuss the implications of physics or neuroscience?

I can think of a couple of explanations for this:

1) Sam Harris thinks that philosophy is easy. So he can do it.
2) Sam Harris thinks that philosophers are stupid.
3) Sam Harris is completely ignorant of philosophy.

I have to admit, I'm a little bit confused by the fact that people take him seriously. Sam Harris seems like a fool, as far as I can tell, and it makes me wonder whether I'm just wrong in my evaluation of him. But if I'm not wrong, then some philosophers should put him in his place. Korsgaard, please?

Outlne of the main argument of "Self-Constitution"

As far as I can tell, this is Korsgaard's picture of things

1. "Every object and activity is defined by certain standards that are both constitutive of it and normative for it." (32) For activities, a standard is called a constitutive principle in the case that "if you are not guided by the principle, you are not performing the activity at all." (28)
2. "The function of an action is to constitute an agent." (82)
3. "The function of an action is to render one efficacious and autonomous" (83). This is because being efficacious and autonomous are constitutive standards for being an agent.
4. In addition, "It is essential [/constitutive] to the concept of agency that the agent be unified" (18) This is because "in order to be autonomous, it is essential that your movements be caused by you." (213)
5. In the case of humans, unifying one's agency (through deliberation) is work that needs to be done before any self-conscious action is possible.
6. Justice is how we unify our own agency, and so "Platonic justice is a constitutive principle of action." This is identical to the categorical imperative (213).
7. All of this assures that one will be inwardly just. But one who is inwardly just will be outwardly just as well, since reasons the kind of unity you need is a unity not just of your person, but a kind of unity that counts the reasons of everyone, ala Nagel.

Is epistemic anti-realism really the same thing as losing the authority of a system of norms? I know that this isn't obvious, and I haven't accepted it naively. The worry is that it isn't. That you can still accept a norm while independently questioning its metaphysical status--that these are just entirely different things.

I don't think that they are, though. As usual, I start with Epistemic Nihilism. If you think that there are no epistemic norms then it's hard to see why you should believe an argument for epistemic nihilism--that's my main argument. I think that nihilism can't help but make practical recommendations--you lose epistemology as a source of authority if there really are no epistemic norms. It's similar to saying that the teacher isn't a fount of reasons. It's the same with epistemic nihilism--epistemology isn't a fount of reasons. You don't actually have reason to believe anything. I take this case to be fairly strong.

And what about other forms of anti-realism? I think that this is a somewhat controversial claim, but that from the realist's perspective this isn't what epistemology means. Hmm...now that I write that I realize that there's something unclear there. Am I resting on the normativity of the meaning of epistemology? Am I saying that for the realist "epistemology" means something different than it does for the expressivist? A little bit. But if so this is kinda weird. The expressivist and the realist aren't even talking about the same domain? That doesn't sound right. Anyway, metaphysical status of norms should be independent of the identification of those norms, in the same way realists about numbers are talking about the same numbers as fictionalists.

So let me try that again. It's not about what epistemology means. It's rather about the reasons that the realist accepts. The realist doesn't accept the expressivist's reasons. Now, this isn't quite right either, because it's the same reasons for both--it's just the metaphysical status of those reasons that is in question.

OK, so let me try this one more time. The issue is whether the expressivist (or any other anti-realist) can give the realist reasons that the realist will respect. On the one hand, yes, they can. They can offer reasons to believe various things, and the realist will interpret them in a certain way, and they will interpret what they are doing in a different way. But all of this is only helpful to the extent that the realist is able to interpret the reason in a realist way. If she can't, then how can we expect her to respect it? It's not the sort of thing she recognizes as having force. Oy, this is problematic too because reasons aren't the sort of thing you choose to respect. I'm not sure. OK.

Parsimony and Burden of Proof

As I reread my thesis in preparation for my oral exam tomorrow, I'm particularly struck by a poorly thought out argument in the second chapter.

In short, the argument was that the burden of proof could be shifted away from the moral realist by noting there is an unavoidable arbitrariness in epistemology. The problem with this argument is that it doesn't really respond to the parsimony requirement, as provide a route for avoiding it. That wasn't the clearest sentence I've written in my life, so let me try again.

The problem for the Moral Realist is that parsimony requires that we don't believe that which we have no good reason to believe. And the response I offer, essentially, says that there are some cases in which parsimony isn't required. There's actually no parsimony requirement for our most basic beliefs.

Here are a couple concerns with this argument:

1) Does this mean that ANYTHING can avoid the parsimony requirement? Why only things like moral realism, treating our moral intuitions as ways of getting at moral facts?

Well, not anything. It's just that some epistemic beliefs/principles are prior to the parsimony requirement. They just happen to avoid it.

2) That's not going to cut it as a response. What if we took the parsimony requirement to be our first, most basic epistemic principle?

Then there's no room for epistemology, and you can't get going. You need to take some things on without having epistemic reason to if you're going to get anything at all.

3) What happens once we have the parsimony requirement? Don't we reflect on our prior principles and conclude that they turn out, in retrospect, to be problematic since we ought not believe them due to parsimony?

This is a pretty tough challenge, I think. One way to respond to it is to tweak the parsimony requirement so that it doesn't kill epistemology, and I actually think that this is pretty reasonable. It's overly simple to say that the parsimony requirement is that we simply never believe anything without having an epistemic reason. A fine way of putting it is that we don't believe extra things, and "extra" is glossed in the following way: non-elemental beliefs that we have no epistemic reason to believe.

Reading Gibbard, Chap 4

Chapter 4--Normative Psychology

"Competing Systems of Control"--He starts by thinking about "weakness of will" cases. In this section Gibbard distinguishes between animal control system and the normative control system. The normative control system is posited to be only a motivating force for humans, and to have a lot to do with language. A norm is a linguistically encoded precept. The normative control system has a lot to do with language, and that "a lot" has to do with coordination problems and planning problems. This is just supposed to be a good start, not the end of the story. But in this section we get conflicts between normative and animal control systems.

"Conflicts with Social Motivations"--In this section we get conflicts with social motivations and the normative control system. Above we didn't have conflicts between norms. This time we have conflicts between norms. But it's not symmetric. It's the difference between two psychological states, that of accepting a norm and that of being in the grip of a norm.

"Biological Adaptation"--Some scientific speculation. He admits that more solid investigation is needed, and he invites it. The biological function of a faculty for accepting and being governed by norms is coordination. The capacity to accept norms and being in their grip are both coordination systems, though the former is distinctly human, and depends on language.

"The Biology of Coordination"--"It is in the role of language in coordinating behavior and expectations, I shall be suggesting, that we can discern what is special about accepting norms."

"Internalizing Norms"--This term refers to what being in the grip of a norm and accepting a norm have in common. Animals are capable of internalizing norms. No decision involved, it's just built into their instincts. e.g. conversational distance. Sophisticated observers can formulate these norms, though usually those who respect the norms aren't able to even notice them. "What then might we mean here by a norm? By the norm itself I suggest, we should mean simply a prescription or imperative that gives the rule a sophisticated observer could formulate." To internalize a norm is to have a motivational tendency to act on that pattern.

"Accepting Norms"--"The state of accepting a norm is identified b its place in a syndrome of tendencies toward action and avowal. This has to do with the language-infused system of coordination peculiar to humans. We accept norms in the context of normative discusion, actual and imaginary. We take positions and thereby expose ourselves to deamnds for consistency.

"Acceptance, Action, Persuasion"
"Normative Discussion and Philosophy" [Skipped these sections.]

Reading, Gibbard, Chap 3

Chapter 3: Analysis Broached

"What is Appraised as Rational or Not"--in this section he argues that beliefs, actions and emotions can all be appraised as rational or not. Some say that only voluntary things can be rationally appraised, but Gibbard thinks that beliefs are a counter-example to this, and actions aren't entirely voluntary anyway (since they have to do with intentions, which aren't entirely voluntary, I think). So there's nothing against emotions being rationally appraised, which is what he really needs for his account. You might say that emotions are rationally appraised to the extent that they're based on beliefs that can be rationally appraised (as Hume argued), but Gibbard argues that these beliefs would have to be subconscious, and only make themselves present to the extent that the person gets angry, so you might as well just say that anger is rationally evaluated.

"Rationality and Morality"--Gibbard makes several distinctions in this section in order to focus in on morality, and to give an analysis of the relationship between morality and rationality. First, he distinguishes subjective from objective morality. Subjective morality is what an agent should do given his beliefs and knowledge, and objective morality is what an agent should do if she had perfect knowledge, or something. Gibbard says that he sees no interest in objective morality, so he's only interested in the subjective stuff. Then he distinguishes between blameworthiness and morality, so that he's only giving an account of morality (which is forward looking, as opposed to blameworthiness, which is retrospective). As an account of blameworthiness he gives "iff it is rational for the agent to feel guilty over the act and for others to resent him for it." Instead, he gives an account for moral wrongness: "an act is wrong if and only if it violates standards for ruling out actions, such that if an agent in a normal frame of mind violated those standards because he was not substantially motivated to conform to them, he would be to blame." So it's an account of morality built out of the retrospective attitude of blame. Blame depends on standards of subjective wrongness and standards for responsibility, so Gibbard defines what a moral wrong is by blocking out one of the factors for blame (the standards for responsibility).

"The Norm-Expressivistic Analysis"--The previous section gave an analysis of morality, and here we get a provisional analysis of rationality. "Put roughly and cryptically, my hypothesis is that to think something rational is to accept norms that permit it." Accepting norms is a state of mind, so naturally basic. "An observer believes an action, belief, or attitude A of mine to be rational if and only if he accepts norms that permit A for my circumstances." We here get the idea that "moral norms are norms for the rationality of guilt and resentment."

"Second Thoughts"--He clarifies what he means by rationality, and I skimmed this section. Same with morality. He's interested not in what the terms mean, but rather with the particular meanings that he's associating with them. He's happy to call these terms something else.

"Structural Problems"--On this account, the question "Is it ever rational not to be moral" makes perfect sense. Likewise, we can understand perfectly well what it means to ask whether the "moral ought implies can." Another question also makes sense: "It morality of value?" The norm-expressivistic analysis gives us an interpretation of this question too: "Is it a good thing for norms for guilt and resentment to play a big role in our lives? Or might other kinds of motivation...bring many of the same benefits without the same costs." (See Nietzsche). All he's doing is showing how powerful and flexible his framework is, and trying to show you that it is a good analysis of what's been going on this whole time. "Familiar problems can be put in new form, as questions about the structure of well-founded sentiments."

Reading Gibbard, I

"The analysis is non-cognitivistic in the narrow sense that, according to it, to call a thing rational is not to state a matter of fact, either truly or falsely. None of this leaves normative language defective or second-rate. The analysis explains why we need normative language, and as it takes shape, it ascribes to rationality many of the features on which theories of normative fact insist. In many ways, normative judgments mimic factual judgments, and indeed factual judgments themselves rest on norms--norms for belief. Normative discussion is much like factual discussion, I shall be claiming, and just as indispensable."

I really need to keep this in mind when thinking about expressivism. Because of the 60s I tend to think of non-cognitivism as looking down on ethics and other normative talk, but it's really not doing that in today's age. What is at stake--the only thing at stake--is whether one can say of normative statements that they're true or false.

TMBG and Russel's Paradox

You've got to be very careful with these sorts of things, or you'll fall into Russel's Paradox.



"There's only one everything...You can put it in one pile." This comes dangerously close to saying that there is a set of everything, which would include all sets. The fact that this is a kid's song only makes things worse--corrupting the youth. They should be teaching ZFC-approved stuff to children.

Revising, rewriting, adding...

I definitely did not think I would still be doing this much work on it so close to the deadline, but here I am. Anyway, almost done; it's due tomorrow at 2 PM.

Reply to Critic, II Ctd.

I did a poor job of responding to this criticism last time, so let me try to handle it again. The reason why the criticism lands is because, in my account, I never explicate what is wrong with a paradoxical or self-defeating reason. Without such an account I leave myself wide open for misinterpretation, and I think that the objection that I considered last time is a kind of misinterpretation. So first I'll do the negative work and explain why that objection fails to land, and that will (hopefully) lead me into a positive account of what's wrong with paradoxical reasons.

Allow me to begin with the case of skepticism about the external world, a case that the objector raised. Here's the case that he raises. Suppose that we have some theory about the external world that implies that we have knowledge of that world. And then suppose that the evidence from our senses shows us that the evidence we have is compatible with us being fundamentally mistaken about our beliefs from the external world, and based on this tension we come to doubt that we have any knowledge of the external world. What's happened in this case is that we started without a belief in skepticism about our knowledge, and we end up with such a skeptical position. In between comes beliefs based on external world evidence; meaning, what got us to reject a belief that we have knowledge of the external world is a tension in our belief about the external world.

There seems to be nothing paradoxical about that. And the reason why there isn't anything paradoxical or self-defeating about that is because there's nothing that requires you to continue to believe something that motivated you to some further belief. To give another example, you might have an entire train of thought, the problems in each link of the chain motivating you to accept the next theoretical step, but that doesn't mean that you have to keep on believing the old theory, even though without it you wouldn't have made the progress that you made!

This is supposed to cause trouble for my argument about self-defeating reasons, since the argument seems to depend on the faulty premise that one must continue to believe something that was a motivating consideration.

This, however, is a bad analogy. In order to have the proper analogy you need to talk not about beliefs or knowledge that is discarded in the reasoning process, but rather reasons and norms. And once you focus on the actual reasons for skepticism that show up in the external world case, things become clarified. What is you reason for doubting that you have any knowledge of the external world in the above case? The reason is not your beliefs, but rather the tension in your beliefs. So you have a belief that you have a reason, something along the lines of "I ought not believe that I have knowledge of an area when my being completely wrong is consistent with the evidence." And there's nothing paradoxical about that at all.

Let's say that we wanted to construct a case that's really analogous--not fake analogous--to my case of rejecting epistemic norms for internal epistemic reasons. Many cases suggest themselves, and they're all pretty wacky. Suppose that the first rule of hockey was "There are no rules in hockey." Isn't this funny? Here's another one: a book that tells you on the first page, "Don't believe a single thing--including this sentence--that you read in this book." Isn't that odd? I've got one more: Suppose that you had a moral code, and one of the maxims in your moral theory is "To be moral is immoral." In all these cases you have the normative theory eating itself, more or less. And these all feel weird, precisely in the way that the external world/perception case does not.

OK, but this fails to ease our concerns, because we still haven't landed on precisely what is wrong with a self-defeating reason. Here's one suggestion of what I'm committed to (thanks to BN for the suggestion): "A thinker must be able to retain the reasons for her belief even after a change in view prompted by accepting that belief." Now, we need to be precise, because we're not interested in what the thinker concludes upon reflection after having made a judgment right now. What we're actually interested in is whether this counts as an epistemic reason to doubt epistemic realism at all. The suggestion is that my argument depends on the view that, in order for something to count as a reason, the thinker must not know that it won't disappear in the future.

If that's what I'm committed to, so be it. That would mean that I'm committed to what Thomas Nagel famously called "timeless reasons", which means that I'm committed to the view that reasons are timeless. This is a formal requirement on reasons, that requires something to be effective at all times in order for it to count as a reason at all. If that's all it takes to get epistemic realism, then fine.

But I'm not sure that I'm even committed to that, or at least nothing quite as strong as that. All I need is that, for a reason to be a reason at all, there's no way that it could be paradoxical in this sense, not that at no time in the future will this reason disappear. Now the challenge facing me is to get precise about what exactly is wrong with such a reason.

I'll start by making a distinction between formal and substantive considerations against a reason. A formal consideration against a reason is a consideration that counts against it counting as a reason at all. For example, in Nagel that a consideration is not consistent with a metaphysical conception of oneself as equally real across time counts against something being a reason at all. If it's not timeless, then it's not even a reason. A substantive consideration is a reason that stands in opposition to some reason, always countering it.

Let me begin by offering a formal account of why a self-defeating reason is not a reason. A reason must give us a clear directive on how to alter our behavior, and something that fails to do this does not count as a reason at all. According to this standard, a self-defeating fails as a reason because it offers no clear directive due to its self-defeating nature. Just as we do not know whether to believe the Cretan when he says that all Cretans are liars, we do not know whether any reason that resembles a Cretan in this way--it only counts in favor of something if it doesn't, it only doesn't count in favor of something if it does--counts as a reason at all.

Here's a substantive account of what's wrong with a self-defeating reason. Suppose that epistemology gave us an epistemic reason to doubt that epistemology gave us reasons at all. I'm assuming that this doesn't fail to count as a reason at all; suppose that it's a consideration against belief in epistemology. Here's something that seems generally true: you only have reason to promote X if all the propositions whose truth it presupposes are true. Now, what does it mean for a reason to presuppose a truth? By that, all I mean that if that proposition were false then there wouldn't be a reason. These are familiar; if it's not true that this property belongs to someone else then it wouldn't count as stealing and there wouldn't be a reason to avoid taking it for yourself. Anyway, what does a reason to doubt epistemic realism depend on? If it's an objective reason, then it depends on the truth of the proposition that there's are objective reasons. And so you have a direct contradiction in your epistemology: on the one hand you have a reason that there are no objective episteimc reasons, but you also think that its true that there are objective epistemic reasons. This explanation is completely general, it applies to any system of norms, and seems to make it impossible to make any progress on the issue.

Now, here's a good objection against this last paragraph: "A contradiction isn't exactly a great situation for epistemology either!" But now we're just running in circles. I AGREE that it's not good for epistemology to have contradicitons of any sort, but I just disagree that this can be construed into any clear epistemic reason. This provides a strong non-epistemic reason, perhaps, to reject epistemic realism. All that I'm saying is that epistemic realism is epistemically optional; it's up to you if you think that there's some non-epistemic reason for rejecting epistemic realism. Just don't pretend that this has anything to do with truth. It doesn't--otherwise it would be an epistemic reason!

In short, the example brought by the objector fails. I might rely on the formal requirement on reasons, argued for by Nagel, that reasons are always timeless. I might say that there's an even more minimal formal requirement. Or I might say that there's a substantive impasse that's necessarily brought by internal anti-realist reasons. I don't really care which one the reader likes, but I have three solid responses to the objection.

Revising

Here are the three things that I need to improve in chapter one:

1) Response to objection that alleges that one can still remove the burden of epistemic norms for an objective reason, that is lack of coherence of the system. (See two post ago)

2) Response to objection that alleges that there's nothing wrong with the "self-defeating" reasons (see one post ago).

3) Elaboration on how these issues effect the expressivist and constructivist. (I might punt on this one, I'm not sure I know enough about these positions to take an authoritative stance on them, but we'll see how the week goes.)

BN didn't have too many substantial objections to Chapter Two. That chapter needs a bit of cleaning up here and there, and its role needs to be clarified a bit in the structure of the thesis as a whole, but it's not a top priority.

The main section I need to work on in Chapter Three is the final argument, that alleges that there's nothing wrong with lacking an explanation for how moral intuitions line up with the moral truth. This section just needs development so that my point becomes more clear.

Finally, the framing of the entire thing needs a bit--but not much--work.

Reply to critics, II

Still focusing on Chapter 1, here's another objection, that I think lands a little bit harder on my argument than the previous objection I considered.

OBJECTION: "You argue, perhaps correctly, that any reason for epistemic anti-realism would either be a reason external to epistemology, or internal to epistemology. You then argue that an external epistemic reasons makes no sense, and that an internal epistemic reason doesn't make any sense either. External epistemic reasons would have to be epistemic reasons that don't draw on epistemology, so I'll give you that one. But internal reasons seem OK to me. You say that such reasons would be paradoxical or self-defeating in nature, since they would be reasons that say "Don't listen to me!" or "What I say doesn't really matter."

But let's give this a closer look. It seems as if you're assuming that a thinker must be able to retain the reasons for her belief even after a change in view prompted by accepting that belief. And that doesn't seem to be generally true.

Consider the case of skepticism about the external world. Suppose you think that you have a theory about how perception works--light bounces off stuff, hits eyes, gets processed--and suppose that same theory tells you that you could be dreaming. You also think that this fact undermines your claims to knowledge of the external world. Now, once you no longer believe that you know what the external world is like, you've also lost your grounds for accepting the particular theory of perception. But that doesn't undermine the skeptical position. So: it looks as if it's not generally required for you to retain your reasons for belief even after the change accepting that belief prompts."

REPLY: This is a complicated case that the objector raises, and we owe it to him to go through it carefully and slowly. I think that doing so reveals that the objection fails to hit the mark.

Let's start by saying what it would take to ruin my argument. In order to ruin my argument, you would have to show that internal epistemic reasons can give us reason to reject epistemic norms. I've claimed that they can't, because self-defeating norms fail to give one a reason to believe something. But this objection alleges that this is not true, and that such a reason, though "self-defeating" in some uninteresting sense, are capable of telling you "reject epistemology!" or "don't believe epistemic realism!" So this is what we need to consider.

The objection alleges that my argument goes like this...

(1) A thinker must be able to retain the reasons for her belief even after a change in view prompted by accepting that belief
(2) Therefore, if a person has a reason to reject epistemic realism, then they must still have such a reason even AFTER rejecting epistemic realism
(3) This, however, is impossible.
(4) So we can project back and say that a person never had an epistemic reason after all.

...and that (1) is false. So let's first consider whether (1) is really false, and then we'll consider whether the objector has got my argument right.

Is (1) false? Well, we would have to show that a person need not retain a belief after a change prompted by accepting that belief. The example brought is from perception, so let's deal with that case. Suppose you have a theory of perception that tells you how you gain perceptual knowledge, and something in your theory of perception tells you that you have reason to doubt perception--your understanding of perception entails that everything could seem the same to you if you were dreaming--and so you reject...well, now let's be careful. What are you rejecting? Are you rejecting your theory of perception, or are you rejecting the belief that your observations are trustworthy? The objector needs the former, but the skeptical argument needs the latter.

I think, personally, that the perceptual case is awfully confused as raised by the objector. Why not focus on an easier case? You have a book that urges you to believe many things. One of the things that the book urges your to believe is the following sentence: "Do not believe anything written in this book." The objector wants to say that we have no problem understanding what this means. After all, the book tells us to reject everything written in it, so if we trust the book then we should reject everything written in it. Only after do we realize that--Surprise!--our reason was undermined. This seems strange. Imagine if you were told, "Believe that p, though you won't have any reason to believe that p five minutes from now." This seems odd.

This reminds me of the discussion in "Possibility of Altruism" of a person plotting against oneself. There are a lot of examples that go against what the objector alleges. Here.

In short, I think it's far from clear that (1) is false, and the example marshaled by the objector certainly doesn't prove that.

But let's say that the objector is correct, and that (1) ought to be rejected. Is it true that my argument relies on this premise? I'm going to think about this a little bit more. I'll continue this train of thought tomorrow. But I think that this is enough to remove the objection from my argument.

ON SECOND THOUGHT: The above response was confused. I think that a proper reply will show that there's a difference here between beliefs and reasons, and I'll argue for that tomorrow.

Reply to critics, I

Maybe someday I'll be a world-famous philosopher and have an opportunity to reply to critics who find my work deeply engaging and paradigm-shifting. For now, my critic is my advisor who is pretty skeptical of my arguments. So here's my attempt to respond to the concerns that he raises. He attacks my central line of argument in the first chapter, which is really pretty crucial to my argument.

OBJECTION: "You say that there can be no internal epistemic reasons to reject epistemology, because any reasons would be self-defeating or paradoxical. Any such reasons, you claim, would be akin to a person who says 'Don't believe what I am saying!'

But here's one way someone might resist this argument, and I don't think that it appeals to any particularly epistemic norms. A system of norms must provide some guidance; if it doesn't, accepting that system does not allow one to guide one's behavior or belief-formation. Hence, incoherent systems are thereby shown to be such that one can't adopt them."

REPLY: This certainly seems to make sense--what good to us is some incoherent system?--but I want to move carefully through this point. Let's first consider if the objector is alleging that some norm requires us to reject epistemic realism, or if the believer is under some sort of obligation to reject epistemic realism.

Here's one thing that this objection could be saying: we have epistemic reason to reject any system of norms that is incoherent. The fact that a system of norms is incoherent gives us an epistemic reason to believe that it is false. This, I think, is a fairly weak objection. I think that there is something very confusing about obeying a norm that loses its force as soon as you believe it. (The reader does object to my contention that we can't follow paradoxical norms, but I'll take that up later). Anyway, that's not what this objection was claiming to do--it was suggesting that we don't have to rely on epistemic norms in order to reject epistemic realism, since it's incoherent.

I'll attack another straw man, as long as I'm at it: one might say that there's a requirement that goes above and beyond epistemology such that it can pass judgement on epistemology from outside it. That is, perhaps the norm(s) of coherence, that state that we have reason to reject any system of norms that is incoherent, stands outside epistemology and is prior to it. This, however, would merely place some other set of norms above epistemology. Of course, this is possible, but two things should be noted. First, the objector is usually motivated by a kind of queasiness about norms-realism in general, and it's unclear why he would feel more comfortable with accepting one system of norms governing belief rather than some other. Further, by assumption I am considered "epistemology" to cover all norms governing belief that are truth-related. (There's a debate in epistemology about the value or aim of epistemology, but we all know that epistemic reasons are more truth-related in some regard than any other system of norms governing belief, and it's that sense that I want to invoke here). So, according to my defintions and usage of epistemology, such an objection would actually concede epistemic realism to me.

Perhaps the objector might mean that there are non-epistemic (even for my usage) norms that give us reason not to accept epistemology as real. And I concede this in the thesis. Incoherence gives us a strong, non-epistemic reason to reject a system of norms, for they are of no practical use to us whatsoever. How are we supposed to be guided by norms if they're incoherent?

The objector, however, does not rest. He still claims that he has an objection. But I've exhausted the possibilities while considering that there is some sort of norm that the objector wishes the believer to respond to. Such a norm would either have to be epistemic or non-epistemic; if epistemic, I object on the grounds that such a norm would be paradoxical and self-defeating; if non-epistemic, I concede the point. What else could the objector mean?

Allow me to put some words in the objector's mouth. He writes, "A system of norms must provide some guidance; if it doesn't, accepting that system does not allow one to guide one's behavior or belief-formation. Hence, incoherent systems are thereby shown to be such that one can't adopt them."

Perhaps, then, what he means is that it is constitutive of a system of norms that they be able to guide belief or action. Anything system that is incoherent fails to be a system of norms. And so epistemology, if it is incoherent, fails to be a system of norms.

This is an interesting objection, but I don't think it's a very good one. Here's why I'm not swayed by this objection. Somebody smart once said that in philosophy there are only two kinds of replies to objections: "Who says?!" and "So what?!" First, I'll concede that part of what it means to be a system of norms is that it is able to guide belief or action. The question is, what's the cut-off between saying that a system of norms fails to guide belief-formation WELL, and that a system of norms fails to guide belief-formation AT ALL? If the idea of a system of norms that tells you to both do something and not to do it seems like a problem for you, then why is it only that MASSIVE tensions do the trick. After all, it's a fairly common occurrence where one norm of etiquette tell you not to do something, and another tells you to do that very thing. That doesn't mean that we can't accept that system of norms anymore. But if the idea was that an inconsistent system can't count as a normative system, then why don't we reject etiquette at the first sign of trouble? The reason, I think, is because inner tensions and conflicts are the signs of a bad system, one that doesn't help us very much. But this just means that we're offering a non-epistemic reason to reject a system of norms.

Let me put the point again: The question is whether coherence is definitional of something counting as a system of norms. I'd concede that guiding behavior is definitional of something counting as a system of norms, but I don't think that coherence is. That is because coherence, I think, has to do with how well a system guides behavior. But how do you tell the difference between whether a system is just failing to guide belief well, or whether it's failing to guide anything at all? This is a really tough question. (Part of the problem is that meaning is normative in some sense as well, which is an interesting twist, I think...)

I don't think it matters much. There's a good way to reply to claims that something is constitutive of something else, and that's because such an argument usually only succeeds in hiding normativity, not eliminating it. Here's how it works in this case: suppose that it's constitutive of a system of norms that it be coherent. So epistemology fails as a system of norms, and so I reject it. Fine. Call a system of norms that fails to be coherent a nystum of sorms (or whatever). It turns out epistemology is a nystem of sorms, not a system of norms. I claim that this is fine for epistemology, though, and I continue to appeal to these things as reasons for my beliefs. Then you say "Why, that's stupid, those don't count as anything that could guide your belief" and I say, "Why not?" And it's precisely at this point that you have to give me a reason of some sort or another.

In short: I chased down the objection so that it can't be giving me any normative reason to reject epistemic realism. Then, I considered the idea that it fails to count as a system of norms as a matter of meaning, but then I showed how this is just hiding a norm of belief at some other level, and I decided that this line of objection doesn't sway me. You need objective normativity guiding belief somewhere in the equation.

But there's a more challenging objection that the objector raises against me. This one alleges that there's nothing wrong with a reason being "paradoxical" or "self-defeating" in the sense in which I use it. Such a norm is only self-defeating in the sense that it defeats its own system, but that this is a perfectly understandable thing to say. I will consider that in my next post, coming in 25 hours (religious norms are guiding my action in this case).

Draft finished

Anyone who's interested in reading a draft, I've got one.

Taking Great Philosophers Out of Context: Wittgenstein Edition

"Doubt itself rests only on what is beyond doubt."

-Wittgenstein, "On Certainty"

That, together with Putnam's quote, could be taken to stand for most of what I argue, I think.

Chapter Three

I'm actually just starting this one. Here's the introduction, anyway:

In the first chapter I argued that there are no possible epistemic reasons to doubt epistemic realism. The second chapter argued that being an epistemic realist involves a degree of arbitrariness. Despite this potential arbitrariness, the vast majority of people are committed to pretty much the same epistemology. The moral realist, however, can take advantage of this potential for unobjectionable arbitrariness by choosing an epistemology that is sympathetic towards his realism. This only allows the realist to get his foot in the door, however, since the anti-realist objects that there are tensions internal to the realist’s epistemology. Presumably, the moral realist is not willing to dissociate himself from most of the world by radically revising his epistemic principles to line up with his realism. This means that his only available option is to disarm the anti-realist objections so that the tension internal to his epistemology is eliminated.

In this thesis I am not up to the task of defending moral realism against all the anti-realist objections. Instead, I will focus on one powerful anti-realist objection, the reliability challenge. This objection alleges that the moral realist is unable to explain how it is that so many of his moral beliefs turn out to be true. I focus on this objection for two reasons. First, it is considered by many to be the most disturbing objection to moral realism. Second, because I believe that reflecting on how the objection might apply to epistemology can help us gain perspective on the problem.

I will conclude this chapter, and the thesis, hoping to have convinced the reader of two things. First, that my approach towards a defense of moral realism is a promising one for the realist. Second, that continued reflection on epistemology is capable of yielding considerable insight on ethics.

Also, I changed my layout

About a week ago I spent a half hour changing my layout. Aint it pretty?

Hashing out the third chapter

Now we're two down, one to go. This one is going to be particularly difficult, since I basically need to write it on the fly. In other words, the first two chapters are ideas that I've had for a while, written down in various versions and refined over the course of weeks and months. The content of this third chapter...not so much. Tomorrow's the day, though, and before I call it a night I want to think a bit about where this chapter's going.

I concluded the previous chapter by stating that what remains for the moral realist is to show that his view doesn't conflict with the rest of our/his epistemology. One of the anti-realist argumens that he faces is the reliability challenge. Properly adjusted, however, and a similar argument applies to epistemology.

So, here's the plan of the final chapter: Start by discussing what remains for the moral realist to do. Establish a properly adjusted parity argument for epistemology and ethics. Outline different responses from realists that have come so far, showing that they weren't always answering the right question (ala Enoch), and then offer my own perspective. I'm a bit nervous about offering my own perspective, since my own perspective hasnt been written down clearly ever, but my idea is that we can swallow our pride and just admit that there is a sort of miracle going on here. But the sort of crazy coincidence that we have to assume is fairly limited--it's that our intuitions aren't that far off. You have to do that if you're going to have any knowledge anyway, since a certain kind of skeptical concern is always possible. In a way, my argument is that this is that this is the input that produces the realist output; the input is the faith that our intuitions aren't wildly divergent with the way that the world actually is.

Chapter Two...

...is almost done. Here's the introduction:

In the previous chapter I argued that belief in epistemic realism is epistemically optional. From this point on, I will assume that there are objective facts corresponding to what epistemic reasons we have. In this chapter I will discuss the search for these facts. My focus will be on the question, how do we know which epistemic facts to accept? How do we know that Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) is a good principle of belief-formation, and that Inference to the Worst Explanation (IWE) is not? Presumably, we need some further epistemic principle to guide us. What, then, guides us towards that further principle?

I will argue that there is an ineliminable arbitrariness in our epistemic theories. The point can be put in the following way: it might be that—given a fixed set of epistemic principles and norms—all of one’s beliefs will turn out to be justified. Nevertheless, there is no way to provide a reason to accept any particular one of these fixed sets of principles and norms. There are always some elements of a theory that are the result of arbitrary choice, and I will call these aspects the “elemental aspects” of an epistemic theory. I call them “elemental” because commitment to them determines the composition of one’s epistemic theory by way of eliminating degrees of freedom. Choice of elemental aspects of one’s epistemology, however, is ungoverned by epistemology.

If epistemology is somewhat arbitrary, what constraints are there on any given set of principles? Is there nothing wrong with believing IWE? The answer is that there is something wrong with believing IWE, but only within some fixed epistemology. Given a certain epistemology, one’s epistemic principles need to obey one’s own internal standards and norms. What explains what is problematic about IWE is that it conflicts with the internal standards that most of us share.

The upshot of this discussion for moral realism is that since there is a degree of arbitrariness in choice of epistemology, there is nothing objectionable with taking on an epistemology that is sympathetic to moral beliefs, as long as it does not conflict with the rest of one’s epistemic principles and beliefs. Of course, this doesn’t remove the responsibility from the moral realist of disarming the anti-realist objections to his view. But the moral realist needs to do that anyway. Once one looks at things in this way, one recognizes that this is all that the moral realist needs to do. The burden of proof, I will argue, is decisively shifted away from the realist.

One more restatement

I'm trying to get this as crisp as possible in my mind:

Chapter 1: You can't eliminate epistemic normativity through reason.
Chapter 2: There are unjustified epistemic beliefs, so why not build moral realism into them.
Chapter 3: The reliability challenge against moral realism is just the reliability challenge against epistemology, and answering both involves nothing but the faith that we're not massively deceived.

Putnam says...

"The elimination of the normative is attempted mental suicide." (1982)

Chapter One

I just finished a full draft of my first chapter. Here's the introduction:

I believe that there can be no epistemic reason for believing or rejecting epistemic realism. As a consequence, belief in realism is epistemically optional and it is impossible to criticize someone on epistemic grounds for being an realist. My primary goal in this chapter is to defend this claim. Here’s my plan of attack: I begin by presenting epistemic realism and anti-realism. Anti-realists typically believe that they have objections to epistemic realism; indeed, this is what motivates their views. I will argue that the anti-realists are wrong to believe that there are reasons to reject epistemic realism, because it is impossible to have such a reason.
I then discuss an argument offered by Terence Cuneo in his book, “The Normative Web.” He argues for moral realism, on the grounds that any objection against moral realism applies with equal strength to epistemic realism. Drawing on the conclusions I reach in the earlier parts of the chapter, I will argue that since there are no reasons for or against epistemic realism, Cuneo’s argument is flawed.
Epistemic realists shouldn’t get too excited, though, since I will also argue there aren’t any good epistemic reasons for the realist view. What this means is that belief in epistemic realism is epistemically optional. Most beliefs are governed by epistemic norms; epistemic realism isn’t. It is above the epistemic fray, so to speak.

Introduction to Chapter 2, or, What makes my thesis too ambitious?

In the previous chapter I argued that it is not possible to give an epistemic reason in favor of Epistemic Anti-Realism. One way of putting the difficulty we encountered is in the following way: one is either challenging Epistemic Realism from within or without epistemology. The challenge can’t come from outside of epistemology, because there are no reasons to believe that are prior to epistemology. On the other hand, I argued that there is no way for the challenge to come from within epistemology either. This is because one is never able to challenge the legitimacy of a system of norms—an external accusation—from within that system of norms. There is something else that one can do, but this is a challenge for epistemology, not a challenge against it.

My motivation remains a desire to investigate the plausibility of Moral Realism, and the discussion towards the end of the last chapter applied the earlier discussion to an attempt to ground Moral Realism in Epistemic Realism. I argued that such accounts fail in a systematic way.

In this chapter my discussion will follow a similar pattern. As in the last chapter, I will investigate a foundational, basic question in epistemology. My concern will be whether the arbitrary can be completely eliminated from Epistemology, even from an Epistemic Realist’s perspective. I will enter into this difficult discussion through a paper by David Enoch and Joshua Shechter, “How are Basic Belief-Forming Methods Justified?” Engaging with their ideas has been very helpful in developing my own, and I believe that it will ease us into a consideration of whether the arbitrary can be eliminated from epistemology. I will argue that they fail to eliminate the arbitrary from epistemology, and for good reason—the arbitrary cannot be completely eliminated from the Epistemic Realist’s picture of epistemology.

There are two pressing concerns that I think deserve to be raised against this account. The first concern is that this picture predicts far too much disagreement between otherwise competent believers. How is there so much consensus? I will give an account of the restraints that believers face that can explain the consensus. A second concern follows quickly after this one: how is it possible for an Epistemic Realist to recognize that there is a degree of arbitrariness in our epistemology, that some things that we accept truly are basic? This is a serious question, and I wish to grapple with it at length in my final chapter.

If this argument is right, then here’s the picture that we emerge with: if we accept Epistemic Realism there is a certain arbitrariness in our epistemic beliefs that emerges. Nothing, epistemically speaking, can count either for or against our most basic epistemic beliefs. Quickly our epistemic beliefs pile up, and the way to understand the constraints on our epistemology is that epistemic beliefs pile up and can come in conflict with each other, forcing us to choose between competing principles.

Given this understanding, I will argue that the Moral Realist’s best option is to conceive of moral beliefs as justified by some epistemic principle that he might take as basic. There is nothing in epistemology that governs these basic choices, and so the Moral Realist cannot be epistemically criticized for this decision, as long as his Realism doesn’t conflict with any of his other principles. Of course, Anti-Realists contend that Realism does conflict with many other epistemic principles, and Realism cannot be defended without eliminating these objections. But such an approach gives the Realist a precise way to shift the burden of proof onto the Anti-Realist, something Realists often talk about imprecisely.

Finally, before beginning I need to make a confession: I am not up to the task of completely answering the questions that I am raising. The questions that I raise, I believe, are some of the deepest that can be asked, and answering them completely would involve a remarkable philosophical achievement. I don’t believe that I can do that, and I especially don’t think that I can do that in this space. So I will do my best, but even if I don’t succeed completely I will consider my project a success if I can convince the reader that an approach similar to mine is the right one for the Moral Realist.

I will fail in my thesis

To think that I could succeed in my thesis would be to have hubris beyond belief. Given my intellectual and other limitations, here's all that I can hope to do:

* Succeed in an unambitious project
* Fail in an ambitious project

I started thinking I was going to succeed in an unambitious project, yet here I am defending moral realism, grappling with Epistemic Realism!

Here's the only way that I can save myself from obvious failure: I need to hedge. I need to say something like, "This is a good way for the Moral Realist" instead of saying "I think that this is true." Expect a significant hedge, acknowledgment that I'm not up to the task of really defending all of the issues that I raise, to be an important theme in the introductory matter in my thesis.

One more outline! Nothing new here.

Chapter One: Epistemic Realism
1.1 What is Epistemic Realism and Anti-Realism?
1.2 There can be no reason to believe Anti-Realism.
1.3 There can be no (good) reason to believe Realism.
1.4 Cuneo's "Companions in Guilt" argument relies on the possibility of reasons to believe Anti-Realism, and therefore the argument is undermined

Chapter Two: Basic Epistemic Beliefs
2.1 Eliminating the arbitrary for epistemology: Intro through Enoch and Shechter
2.2 Enoch and Shechter fail to eliminate the arbitrary from epistemology.
2.3 No matter what you say about the structure of justification, the arbitrary cannot be completely removed from epistemology.
2.4 An account of how the arbitrariness of epistemology is minimized.
2.5 Enoch's "Defense of Robust Meta-Ethical Realism" fails to cohere with the rest of a standard epistemology.
2.6 Since there is a built in arbitrariness to epistemology, the challenge for the Moral Realist is to show that Realism fits in well with the rest of his beliefs.

Chapter Three: The Objections to Moral Realism
3.1 A new parity argument.
3.2 Focusing on a specific argument: the epistemological challenge for ethics and epistemology.
3.3 Most efforts to deal with this objection to Moral Realism fail.
3.4 Focusing on the challenge this objection provides to epistemology shows us how best to deal with the objection. The way is to reject it as a skeptical concern, on par with Evil Demons, the Matrix and Brains in a Vat.

People whose arguments mine resembles/is worse than

People who make arguments similar to mine:

1. Boghossian (Objective Reasons)
2. Dworkin (Objectivity and Truth)
3. Michael Lynch (not as well known as the others)
4. Wittgenstein, maybe?
5. Plantinga (Naturalism Defeated-style argument)

People who deal with the same issue, but who I think I disagree with:

1. Hartry Field
2. Gibbard
3. Sharon Street
4. Blackburn (though I can't find where he talks about epistemology directly. Somewhere in essays on quasi-realism, I suppose and will take another look).

What I'm arguing against

Here's exactly what I'm arguing against (lightly edited by me):

As human beings we are capable of viewing ourselves and our values from two very different standpoints. On the one hand is what I'll call (borrowing Kantian language), the practical standpoint...When I occupy the practical standpoint I think that judgments about normative reasons are true. On the other hand is what I'll call the theoretical standpoint. When we occupy this point of view on ourselves and our values I understand my normative judgments as being shaped by such causes as my upbringing, cultural background and inherited psychological tendencies."

This is Sharon Street (who studied under Korsgaard who in turn was very influenced by Nagel's discussion of the Objective and Subjective standpoints). From this distinction between the practical and the theoretical, Street argues that if we're moral realists we won't be able to reconcile these two standpoints, and since we do need to reconcile these two standpoints, so much the worse for moral realism.

My thesis, in a nutshell, is to deny that the theoretical standpoint looks as she describes it. I start by noting that the theoretical standpoint is guided by norms as well. We, essentially, have to take an inner perspective when it comes to thinking about the theoretical standpoint, because the outer perspective is completely ungoverned. So as long as we're thinking and reasoning we're taking an inner view (like the one that she says is characteristic of the practical standpoint) in the theoretical standpoint. And this means that there's room for the practical standpoint in the theoretical world.

After I argue that there is such room, I have to argue that epistemology does something else for us, which is that it helps point to ways that ethics doesn't conflict internally with the world of belief and theory. But that's something else.

The Master Argument

1. We have some beliefs that are necessarily neither justified nor unjustified.
1.1 A belief in Epistemic Realism cannot possibly be justified, and cannot possibly be unjustified.
1.11 That is, nothing could possibly count either for or against it.
1.12 Any justification of epistemic realism would beg the question against the nihilist, and any justification of epistemic nihilism would be self-defeating.
1.13 Since epistemology is a normative domain, Normative Realism follows from Epistemic Realism.
1.2 Our basic beliefs about what counts as justification, are like Epistemic Realism in this regard.
1.21 Anything may count as a basic belief
1.211 There's no significant difference if we talk about coherentism here. First, because the decision to believe in coherentism isn't basic--if we favor it over foundationalism, we favor it for some reason. Perhaps we don't take on beliefs as basic, though, and instead I should talk of taking coherent sets of beliefs as basic. Fine; that doesn't alter the problem significantly. Restated we would simply say "One must start with one set of beliefs, and there's no way to tell us which one to start with."
1.22 One might build an entire epistemology that looks entirely different from our own, and there would be nothing wrong with that. Nothing could possibly be wrong with that.
1.23 This includes an epistemology that allows one to believe in contradictions, or that doesn't require our beliefs to cohere.
1.24 If you do require your beliefs to cohere, then as you build up your epistemology various beliefs might come into tension. These pressures help form coherent belief systems. This is why we don't believe in ghosts, though we can imagine an epistemology that does require us to believe in ghosts.
1.241 There is legitimate epistemic disagreement, and it's a disagreement about what to take as basic.
1.3 Epistemology is what we use to recognize true features of the world.
1.31 Epistemology is how we discover facts about the world.
1.32 If Epistemology is false then we have no knowledge, since justification is part of knowledge.
1.33 What it means to believe in Epistemic Realism is that there are epistemic truths.

2. There is nothing wrong with someone who has a principle that supports Moral Realism as basic.
2.1 [Continue to fill in! Need way more detail to make this plausible.]

3. Given the above, parity arguments between moral and epistemic realism systematically fail.
4. Given the above, an argument like Enoch's is basically irrelevant, and likely to fail.

5. There is a different kind of parity argument that often works, one that deals with moral beliefs that are at the same level as moral realism. This is where we should focus our attention, because this is the real threat to moral realism. But since much of epistemology is implicated, the task is easier.

Ruminations on normative realism

One of the things that I came to appreciate over this project is that the real debate over moral realism is happening at a deeper level than I thought it was. I thought that debates about realism were primarily debates about ontology, but they're not. They're debates about frameworks and concepts primarily, and questions of ontology or metaphysics follow.

Everybody agrees that norms and values are an important part of human life and experience. The only question is what role do they play. Are they expressions of our deepest held plans and expectations? Or should we see them as law-making, ruling over ourselves and others?

The realist says that the best way to understand the role that norms play is most similar to the role that facts of any sort play. When someone accepts a norm, when they're doing is recognizing a feature of reality. The challenges to normative realism are challenges that this is not the right model for understanding moral realism. This challenge is fairly limited, when you think about it. A philosophical account that fails to explain the importance of morality in practice is worse off for it. The question is a fairly limited one: what is the proper model through which to understand our relationship with normativity.

This eases some of the pressure off both realism and anti-realism. On the one hand, anti-realism has nothing to do with being immoral, or saying that nothing matters (except in the technical sense, in which nothing objectively matters, or something like this). On the other hand, it eases some of the pressure off of realism, since realism should not be seen as the view that there are moral objects floating around in space that we access with our MoralVision that was given to us by God at Sinai. Or, at least, this is a point of contention. The anti-realist contends that the realist is committed to having an unexplainable MoralVision (just as bad as laser vision or the ability to fly). But the moral realist can defend his view by showing that the fact-model of understanding normativity doesn't need to be committed to all these things. It's primarily a question of how to model, justify and conceptualize human experience, and ontology and metaphysics only come in as a side-effect. But the goal is the former, not the latter.

So, can the moral realist meet this challenge? Well, can the epistemic realist meet this challenge? In order to really answer this one needs a theory of reasons and an epistemology of normative knowledge. But I think the point is that this is redundant; knowledge is normative. So you can't provide an argument against epitsemic realism, and it's worth giving an account of how that debate goes. I think that ultimately the only way to understand a challenge against normative realism generally is an urging to give up normativity. We lose our concepts, our ability to talk conceptually, when we give up normativity. So you need to keep norms, or you can't take anything seriously.

The question is not "What's out there?", at least not primarily. The question is how should we understand our lives, and I think that this requires norms.

In other words, maybe progress in this debate can be made by reflecting on how a discussion between a normative skeptic and a realist would go, and this can be aided by considering epistemic norms, because this is where things start to get crazy. Having reflected in this way, moral norms don't seem so bad. And this can be shown in the epistemic picture. Maybe. I'm losing the train of thought here. Lunch time, though.

Free association rant on epistemology

So there's this well known argument against moral realism that focuses on moral epistemology. Mackie presents one version of it, and he puts it like this: the moral realist is going to have to be an intuitionist, and intuitionism is spooky and mysterious and we have reason to doubt that such a capacity to grasp moral truths exists, and so moral realism is false. Why is the moral realist going to have to end up with intuitionism?

Here's one way of telling the story: there's no way to justify our moral beliefs. The idea is that we justify our beliefs through empirical observation or deduction, and ethical beliefs seem to be neither. Of course, if this is the challenge then it seems to take on all of our a priori knowledge (and Mackie notes this). The challenge then becomes an attempt to provide an empirical foundation for those a priori beliefs, probably deflating them so that they're no longer really a priori, but just particularly abstract parts of our empirical theory (ala Quine).

If this is the challenge, then moral realists think that they have an answer. For example, Shafer-Landau offers a moral epistemology. Sayre-McCord offers one. Scanlon does too. The realist will probably want to employ a coherentist theory of justification, since a foundationalist picture seems to force one to rely on non-obvious intuitions (or not, whatever). This will involve a lot of bickering, point scoring about what justification is and how it applies to ethics. Fine.

But this probably doesn't satisfy anyone who's worried about the prospects for moral knowledge. We want a story about how our moral knowledge matches up with the world. After all, our empirical knowledge certainly does.

As Enoch points out, there's a version of the argument that seems to get closer to what's bothering people (and Sharon Street's Darwinian Dilemma is very close to it). It turns out to be a version of Field's improvement of Beneceraff's argument against mathematical realism. It goes like this: suppose that there are moral facts that we know. Then a lot of the time when we have moral beliefs, they turn out to be true. There is a correlation between our beliefs and the truth. The question is, what explains this correlation? It seems to be a mysterious fact. (Field's improvement reminds me of Blackburn's improvement of Mackie's metaphysical side of the argument from queerness, the supervenience problem. I wonder if this suggests that they rise and fall together?)

Some sort of coherentist (or internalist) theory of justification won't help much here. This is because (following Enoch) your moral beliefs will not cohere (or will be defeated) by your belief that there is no reliability to your moral beliefs. The reason why this argument is an improvement is because it gives up on justification. "You want to tell me that justification might not be about the connection between the truth and the belief? Fine, you can have justification. But I still want what we have with our empirical beliefs, which is some sort of story of how my brain matches up with that truth."

Now, how could this be answered? This is what pushes realists to intuitionism, and pushes naturalists to evolutionary arguments (see Enoch, Copp, Alston, and SB who is working on her dissertation here at Harvard, here's the link to her current draft). And we can give a similar story for anything with practical consequences. The story will roughly go like this: if we didn't have a reliable rational faculty for forming intuitions about math/logic/ethics/epistemology(/religion?) then this would have nasty consequences for a biological creature. And so we have good reason to think that our intuitions are pretty reliable (but not too reliable! otherwise we lose our crucial capacity for being totally misguided by intuitions).

What is one to make of these biological arguments? Is evolution really of any help here? Let me focus on concerns about epistemic realism. We're supposed to use our epistemic faculties to determine that evolution is true, and once we have that as our pivot point we're supposed to understand that evolution being true supports our belief that our epistemic faculties are reliable. This seems odd, and the reason it seems odd to me sounds similar to an argument made by Alvin Plantinga. If we have knowledge of evolutionary theory, it seems that we have such knowledge only if we have justification, evidence and the other normative stuff of epistemology. So how could that offer us any more support for our confidence in epistemology?

(It also seems odd for purely biological reasons. There are all sorts of reasons that organisms end up the way that they do, and the idea that all of an organisms are reliable isn't something that you can just toss off. You need evidence. Do we know that it's not due to random drift? Can we show that there is any advantage in reliably representing the world in belief? How would that experiment work?)

How about another method of attack: let's be expressivists about normativity. In short, I think that this just means that we should agree that we don't take our knowledge or beliefs very seriously. This is my opinion as of this moment--I haven't studied others with enough depth to really make this intelligently, but it just seems to me that the common criticism of expressivism is right--it's either realism or nihilism, and you've gotta take one or the other. In this case, either you are part of the human world or you're part of the animal world, and you can make that choice, but let's not kid ourselves about what it means to choose to be human.

(Another option: deny that begging the question is bad. See Boghossion. This discussion could go in Chapter 1.)

I'm not going to solve this question, because this is one of the perennial questions in philosophy. This would be a refutation of skepticism, if it could be done.

Here's what one can start to say: if there are epistemic facts, then this is how moral facts could look like. We start by taking certain things for granted--because we're biological creatures, our environment effects us in some way but we really don't have any idea what the effect was (similar to the problem of talking about before the Big Bang). And then we simply build off of them. We might start with a foundationalist principle that guides our justification, or we might end up with a coherentist one, and this is a matter for debate. But the point is that this is how it would have to work.

And, then, what can one say to the normative skeptic? Nothing really. One doesn't have to accept epistemic realism--in fact, there's nothing that could possibly justify epistemic realism, and this is exactly what the normative skeptic would want. So it's better not to think about half answers, or even to worry about it at all.

All the objections can do is make it unpleasant for you to be a normative realist.

Hmm..I think i'm out of steam. I guess that I'll try some other argument, then write this one up tonight in a fit of caffeine. I wonder if there is any more perspective that I could offer. How does this move the discussion forward? I don't think that it does. Well, maybe it does. I think what it shows is that I really do need to reread the stuff on epistemic expressivism.

Could our account help deal with the epistemic access/reliability problem for ethics?

I think it might. I don't have time to go through the idea carefully now, but here's the idea. I'll begin by quoting Cuneo:

"The fourth argument in the antirealist repertoire can be stated briefly. This argument starts with the observation that we don't have any explanatorily informative story about how we could gain epistemic access to moral facts. That is, we do not have any informative account of how facts about what morally ought to be the case impinge on our cognitive faculties so as to produce the corresponding states of knowledge. And it is difficult to imagine what type of story could be told. In light of this failure, it is best to conclude that there is no explanation available. But on the assumption that, if moral facts were to exist, then some explanation would be available, it follows that moral facts do not exist."

"I think that it should be admitted that this argument poses a serious challenge to moral realism. But I take it to be fairly plain that the argument poses an equally serious challenge to epistemic realism. For if it is the normative nature of moral facts that is supposed to debar us from an informative story about how we grasp them, then the same holds for epistemic facts. And if it is the lack of an informative story of how we grasp moral facts that implies that we ought not to admit them into our ontology then the same holds for epistemic facts. Considerations of the same sort counsel against the acceptance of the existence of both moral and epistemic facts."

The first hint that there is something strange here is that what's being asked for is an epistemology for epistemic realism. And I think that the story that I've been telling can tell the story of how we come to know epistemic facts--if epistemic realism is taken, etc.--and that this might be able to help moral realism in the same way. But I need to think more seriously about this and the other arguments.

Sources relevant to discussions of moral realism and burden of proof

Scanlon (Locke Lectures)
Brink
Cuneo
Richard Joyce

To be updated as I go along.

A shift in Frege's thoughts about epistemology and ethics?

"Like ethics, logic can also be called a normative science. How must I think in order to reach the goal, truth? We expect logic to give us the answer to this question, but we do not demand of it that it should go into what is peculiar to each branch of knowledge and its subject matter. On the contrary, the task we assign logic is only that of saying what holds with the utmost generality for all thinking, whatever its subject matter. We must assume that the rules for our thinking and for our holding something to be true are prescribed by the laws of truth....Logic is the science of the most general laws of truth."

Frege, Logic. In contrast to (Early) Wittgenstein's specification of logic as dealing entirely with tautologies, it seems to me that it doesn't hurt to think of Frege as just an epistemic realist, someone who thinks that there really are general norms about what to believe. In this essay, Frege seems to be putting these two sorts of norms on the same page. But look at this quote from "Thought."

"The word 'law' is used in two senses. When we speak of moral or civil laws we mean prescriptions , which ought to be obeyed but with which actual occurrences are not always in conformity. Laws of nature are general features of what happens in nature, and occurrences in nature are always in accordance with them. It is rather in this sense that I speak of laws of truth...I assign to logic the task of discovering the laws of truth, not the laws of taking things to be true or thinking."

The second essay is later by about 20 years. He does think that laws governing thought follow from the laws of logic, but that these are quite separate. Here's another passage from Thought:

"From the laws of truth there follow prescriptions about asserting, thinking, judging, inferring. And we may very well speak of laws of thought in this way too. But there is at once a danger here of confusing things. People may very well interpret the expression 'law of thought' by analogy with 'law of nature' and then have in mind general features of thinking as a mental occurrence..."

His point is that he doesn't want someone to think that logic should be identified with those things that guide thought, because that would eliminate the objectivity of logic, giving it a psychologistic explanation. But how should we understand him here, then? If logic itself does not contain norms governing thought, and is rather a part of our description of the most general features of the universe, how do we end up with norms from logic? There seems to be an is/ought gap here.

Something I've learned in this process

I never learn anything--not really--by reading philosophers. Rather, they can help me think through things, but there is nothing to be gained only from reading. That's like listening to someone else think through things, but they can't do that for you. I only make progress when I try to think through the issues, and then they can have a conversation with me.

From Scanlon: "Why should this challenge be so difficult? Samuel Scheffler has suggested one possible answer. What 'lies at the heart of consequentialism' he says is 'a fundamental and familiar conception of rationality that we accept and operate withint a very wide range of contexts.' This is what he calls 'maximizing rationality.' 'The core of this conception of rationality is the idea that if one accepts the desirability of a certain goal being achieved and if one has a choice between two options one of which is certain to accomplish the goal better than the other then it is, ceteris paribus, rational to choose the former over the latter.'"

In context, this is a disscussion about a well-known objection to deontological ethical views. The accusation is that there is a maximizing principle of rationality, that if one accepts something as a goal then one should maximize the occurrence of that goal and minimize anything that obstructs that goal. And Scanlon offers a response to it. So goes that discussion.

But I'm interested in something else, and that is the intuitions that crop up in this discussion. I think that there are clearly some times when being moral requires us to confer value on states of affairs, and this is what drives the "paradox of deontology." (Scanlon resists the idea that we always accept some goal whenever we accept some reason or confer value on some action). But there clearly is a real sense of some things being morally right that does involve a maximizing rationality. The idea that you should do something a little bit wrong in order to do something very good has great currency in ethics for a lot of people. Maybe it's wrong to lie most of the time, but when a human life is at stake the equation changes. It then becomes right to do the bad thing in order to do a great deal more good.

Let's talk about epistemology. Is there anything like this? Sorta. There is a sense in which, when taking a third person perspective on the matter, you can say "we should invest in science education because more good will come out of that, even though in doing so we'll take away resources from math. Even though we value people having knowledge, we will be able to maximize the potential for knowledge by focusing on science education." That works.

How strong is the parallel to ethics, though? Here's something that doesn't seem to me as if it should work in epistemology: Say that it's empirically true that a person will do a better job at believing true things and disbelieving false things if they believe that there is a secret ghost that is in their brains and gets very very upset at them whenever they have a false belief. The myth keeps these kids on their toes. Now, should we apply the maximizing rationale here, and say that there's a fine epistemic trade-off going on: we've given up one false belief for the benefit of far many more true beliefs? This seems very very wrong.

I think that the ethical parallel is much more plausible. We very well might teach a person that they should be willing to harm one person, as long as the good they can do outweighs the bad that they've done. This is the burden of consequentialist theories. But my point here is not that consequentialism is true in a way that it's not for epistemology (I have no idea). My point is that there certainly are some cases when it would be right to do something bad for the benefit of doing far more good. But in the epistemic case my sense is that we can never justify believing some falsity for the sake of believing far more many truths.

Now, this might just mean that having true belief isn't really a goal of epistemology. But really? It sure seems like a crucial goal of epistemology is ensuring that believers have true beliefs.

What could explain this difference between epistemology and ethics, the difficulty of applying a maximizing rationality to epistemology?

Either the maximizing rationality isn't really a rational requirement, epistemology doesn't involve commitment to some epistemic goals or aims, or something besides the state of affairs of having true beliefs is the aim of epistemology. I think it means that we're not taking on any goals in epistemology, unlike the case in ethics where sometimes we do value states of affairs. Epistemology is not about the value in certain states of affairs--I think that's what this means. Does this relate to the other ways in which epistemology is unlike ethics? Not sure. Sure hope so, cuz I need 20 more pages.

A short list of philosophers that grapple with epistemic and moral norms together

Scanlon
Putnam
Korsgaard
Gibbard
Cuneo
Enoch
Sayre-McCord
Shafer-Landau
Parfit
Aristotle (sorta...epistemic virtues show up in Nichomachean Ethics)
Hartry Field
Frege
Kant
Alton
Dancy
Tim Williamson (Introduction especially)
Sharon Street (Darwinian Dilemma and Evolution [Draft])

To be updated as I continue thinking...

Gibbard

"What, then, of Putnam's claim that norms infuse facts? With this I fully agree: the beliefs I am calling factual depend on epistemic norms--on norms for belief. That we continue to hold the beliefs we do depends on our thinking it makes sense to do so. It would be incoherent, then, to dismiss all normative judgments as merely subjective, while accepting some factual beliefs as firmly and objectively grounded. From the point of view of their justification, they are on a par; factual beliefs and normative judgments stand or fall together.

None of this means that epistemic norms themselves are facts, or that factual judgments themselves are normative. The justificaiton of factual beliefs is a normative matter, but that does not turn factual beliefs into normative judgments. There remains the challenge to say what the difference is. I have suggested a simple linguistic test: a notion is normative if we can paraphrase it in terms of what it makes sense to do, to think or to feel. Later I try for a more systematic account..."

I talked with BN today and he advocated a view like Gibbard's. Without having studied him, I have to say that I feel the attraction.

Man, should've read Shafer-Landau a while ago

"We can be helped to see this by comparing ethics not to philosophy as a whole but to one of its close philosphical cousins. In my opinion, moral facts are sui generis, but they are most similar to another kind of normative fact--epistemic facts. Epistemic facts concern what we ought to believe, provided that our beliefs are aimed at the truth. Once one understands the concept of logical validity, then if confronted with a modus ponens argument one ought to blieve that it is logically valid. This is a true epistemic principle."

Also, "The epistemic principle [the causal test] is problematic because it invokes an entity--a good reason--whose existence is not itself scientifically confirmable. It's like saying that God sustains a universe that contains no supernatural beings. There's a kind of internal incoherence here: the claim discounts the existence of the kind of thing that is presupposed by the claim itself."

I think that my line of argument from the first chapter is starting to become even more focused. It goes like this: realists realize that epistemology offers some sort of help, but investigation into epistemology reveals much about why certain arguments don't apply to it. If moral truths are going to gain help from epistemology it's only because they can escape in this way, by being taken as basic.

Note to past Me

Keep on reading! It's really really important to never stop reading at any point in this writing process. When you're stuck, it's the ideas of others that push you through. Don't try to tackle things on your own!

Another way of putting my failure to cope with math, and why epistemology has been more helpful

Math is helpful because mathematical realism is similar to ethical realism, because there are similar issues involved with all sorts of realism. I originally mistook that for an actual resemblance between ethics and math. This resemblance actually exists between ethics and epistemology, though.

Ideas that haven't really fit into this story yet

1. So far I haven't fit in the idea that epistemology governs actions as well as beliefs into this story.

2. There are other important differences between ethics and epistemology. A maximizing rationality seems wildly implausible in one, and not so wild in the other. One is focused on theory more than action.

3. A very different, longer project, would talk about the primacy of practical reason. Note that at the very beginning of our story about theoretical reason is a choice. Maybe it's not right to represent that as a choice, but then what can we say when there are two options and no norms pushing one way or the other? Ah, but there are norms, they're just not epistemic ones? Then what kind are they? If they're practical norms or considerations of some other kind, then standing above objective, theoretical reasons are some other sort of reasons. Isn't that strange.

4. Korsgaard has her own arguments against moral realism that I haven't read yet.

5. Maybe belief really is just action. Haven't read Stalnaker yet. But that would just mean that there's nothing weird about practical reaosn in the first plac,e no? ANyway, havne't read it yet.

More?

What's the obvious thing to say, and what could I be saying that's not obvious?

Here's an obvious story to tell: Consider any old thing that you know. It's justified. Well, you follow justification up the chain, and you end up stuck with something that's gotta be basic. Well, what's our justification for believing that? Either it's experience (not a belief), a priori knowledge, or we just take it as basic (and then we had better figure out some way of distinguishing those beliefs from others). In response to the familiar regress problem we might have to deal with arguments against this way of understanding justification, but we may feel that our picture of justification has got to be foundationalist. And maybe the beliefs that we take as basic are the really really obvious ones. And then we argue that moral realism or something is really really obvious in the same way.

This is a simplistic story. And it wouldn't be write to ascribe this to anyone. But, for the sake of my own thought process, lemme ascribe it to someone who doesn't deserve this kind of simplistic treatment. We'll call him E. E tells a sort of similar story. All of our beliefs are generated by some basic belief-forming principles. How are these basic belief-forming principles (such as IBE) justified? This goes just one step above the previous analysis of the tree of justification. Meaning, take whatever our basic beliefs are, and say that we're not taking them as basic. Maybe because we're relying on experience directly, or maybe because we're relying on a priori knowledge. But that means that we have some method for forming beliefs, that takes experience or a priori intuitions and results in justified beliefs. These methods themselves need justification, though, and so now we're really left up the creek without a paddle. No matter what your solution, now you have the problem of those who simply accepted certain beliefs as basic. So how do you distinguish between the good basic beliefs and the bad ones? You tell a story about which basic methods are justified and which methods are not.

This could not provide ultimate justification, of course. Any first year philosophy student can see that this would only shift our problem to another method, another principle and another unjustified belief. I think that this is pretty obvious, that there is no ultimate ground, only relative grounds, and epistemic regress is unavoidable.

E's answer seems to be just to provide some belief that justifies IBE instead of IWE. That's great, and maybe we should take that as primitive instead of IBE, but how does that help, ultimately?

I think the answer is that it doesn't. So now I want to explain where there is room for someone to say something a bit different.
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One point to note is that the idea that we could be justified from top to bottom in all our beliefs is necessarily false. I argue this by pointing out the epistemic realism--a view whose falsity would result in there being no justified beliefs at all--cannot be justified. I then argue that whatever our most basic beliefs are, they similarly cannot be justified--after all, how would you justify them without some epistemic principles, and I am denying you even those at this point.

Then I argue that this doesn't spell doom at all for our cognitive enterprise, because these beliefs that cannot be justified are also not unjustified, that is, it's not like we think that they're wrong. It's just that there can be no reasons, either for or against.

Now, where does ethics fit into this picture? The typical picture is that moral realism might gain justification some where down the line. But, given this picture, the most promising thing to attempt is to formulate some sort of principle that can serve as the most basic ones, the kinds that can't be criticized for being unjustified since we don't have the epistemic resources to do so.

This needs care, for two reasons. One, there's a problem with taking particular beliefs as basic. I don't know what it is, but there is such a problem. Another is that epistemic principles can conflict and be unstable.

So, in sum, this is the picture I'm providing. Epistemology is an a priori endeavor, where we necessarily start by taking certain things for granted. These things that we take for granted are similar to intuitions, in the sense that the only reason we believe them is because they're obvious and available to us, and not because we think that there's a reason that they're true. In fact, at the very foundations we can't have reason to think that things are true, and so there's no way to criticize our taking certain things for granted. This means that, very quickly if we choose well, we start getting a system of epistemology, of what's justified and what's unjustified, what should we believe and what we shouldn't. And this is all for free, more or less, from those first things. We choose things when we can't be criticized for not choosing them (when they don't conflict). We get a lot, but we're sloppy and it's complicated, so we're still fighting over it. But the pressures of cooperation and living together force us to refine our system over time, and we've got it pretty down in practice.

(Note that my arguments show, I think, that if our most basic item of cognitive commitment is normative, we're gonna be in trouble, because eventually theoretical reason runs out of the resources from which to defend itself with. This is natural and untroubling.)

The question is, have we left things out of our picture? Maybe we left ethics out. Maybe we left religion out. Did we screw up? How could we tell if a basic belief doesn't work out? After all, at the very start of our cognitive adventures we have no epistemic principles, and no way to criticize you for believing anything at all. So what's to stop you from taking something as basic? Nothing possibly could. Well, should we just pack up and go home? No. We have to make decisions, and this is something that we might prefer to avoid, but it's not something that we can. (With a nod to that piece that I like by David Lewis) at a certain point we just pick between competing systems, and that's all we can do. So we can add a belief to our basic set and then note the troubles that occur, and then decide whether it's worth giving up the conflicting beliefs or the basic one.

How does this work out with ethics? We need to see if there are any conflicts with the rest of our beliefs. Well, there are, and these are the arguments for anti-realism in ethics.

But here comes epistemology and theoretical reason again to add an interesting twist. We started by trying to find a place for the moral norms governing practical reason inside theoretical reason. And then we noted that the foundations of theoretical reason are such that there are a number of blank spaces. And then we noted that ethics could be plugged in, but that it conflicts with much of the rest of our picture. Here comes an interesting suggestion: maybe our theoretical picture of the world sucks. How could that be? Suppose that we had an epistemic principle that said something like "Never ever believe anything without justification." That principle is self-defeating, since it would undermine our basic principles (that presumably lead to this principle) and epistemic realism itself! So that would suck. Maybe there are other epistemic principles that are behind our objections of moral realism that are simply not being sufficiently reflective to note that they're self-defeating.

How could this be? There are these arguments against moral realism. Do they actually also apply to epistemic realism?

Now, a note: epistemic realism is a VERY different belief than moral realism. From the perspective of theoretical reason, it's basically rock bottom, and that's what the above arguments show. So to argue that we could prove moral realism by parity arguments...that's just not going to fly. Another problem is that none of these arguments could actually be considerations counting AGAINST epistemic realism. It's unclear what they would be capable of showing at all in a discussion of epistemic realism (yes, they could show epistemic expressivism, but then you're in the peculiar position of defending expressivism against arguments that it falls into nihilism in order to defend moral realism?)

At best, here's what we could hope for: these arguments show us that we have permission to take moral realism as a basic principle, or something. This would involve clearing up the confusions about what ethics and epitemology require. And then we would have permission to take it as primitive.

So this is the lesson of Enoch combined with the lesson of Cuneo: Enoch tells us that if we could take ethics as basic that would rock. The lesson of Cuneo is, maybe ethics isn't all that much worse that epistemology.

Intuitionism and Epistemology

There is a certain sense in which I'm defending a kind of intuitionism about epistemology. On the account I've been writing about, what plays the role of an intuition are epistemically optional beliefs. They are intuitions in the sense that they are our most obvious beliefs, but there is a reason why they are our most obvious beliefs: because they are our most basic beliefs, and so they play a central role in our webs of belief, so to speak. What this means is that a principle like IBE (if it's basic) is not believed because we have reason to think that it's true, but rather out of a pure intuition--that is, we make an epistemicially optional choice to believe in it. Same with epistemic realism: it's a pure choice, made for no reason having to do with the truth. This is what an intuition could be.

Then there is a sense in which we might be able to defend a corresponding kind of moral intuitionism, at least in theory. Now, epistemic realism is at the very very foundations of our theoretical world, and moral realism plays no such role. But perhaps there is some belief that we may take as basic that does not interfere with out our other basic epistemic principles. This would make it epistemically optional, and then there would be a sense in which belief in certain ethical principles is an intuition.

This is one way of reading Enoch, I think. I think that there are two problems with Enoch. The first is that the I'm not sure why we should take as basic the pragmatic principle--it doesn't seem to get us anywhere. Second, is that unless you deal with all the arguments against moral realism first, the argument is implausible because your moral principle will conflict with your epistemic principles about explanation (for example).

But perhaps the following is a programme:
1. Show that ethics does not conflict with our other epistemic beliefs
2. Then you can take some ethical principle as basic.
3. Then you believe in ethics and can't be blamed for it.

That might just be another way of formulating the question that isn't helpful. But I'm tired, and that's all for tonight.

Belief and Reasons

Scanlon p.36:

"Even if it is true that in order to believe something one must take there to be a reason for thinking it true (so there can be no such thing as believing something simply becuase one would like it to be true)..."

Note: There can be no reason for believing in epistemic realism. Unless we're going to say that the true logic of a denial of epistemic nihilism doesn't resemble it's surface appearance in some strange way (a Wittgensteinian move or something), we're stuck with a regular old belief that we can't have reason to think is true. So if that's not belief, then we have no foundation for knowledge.

Theoretical and Practical Rationality

I understand that some believe that practical rationality is autonomous from theoretical rationality, and that the search for moral realism is a lost cause because it's an attempt to build up practical rationality from theoretical rationality. I sorta understand that. What I don't even sorta understand is why we would try to philosophize about practical rationality, if that is the case. Isn't that the attempt to bring our theoretical reasoning abilities to bear on practical rationality? Yes, to understand something is not to inhabit it, but then how is that different from the original attempt to do moral philosophy from the standpoint of the theoretical reasoner? I'm confused.