Friday, November 13, 2009

Summing up this week's thinking

This week I tried to bone up on general epistemology. Enoch claims that what justifies inference to the best explanation also justifies something like inference to what is indispensable for deliberation.

When I read Enoch, I came away with three complaints.

1. If you admit normative facts for the sake of deliberation, your explanations of the world will suffer. For example, you have to explain certain things about these normative facts. And maybe our best explanation of some phenomenon is that normative facts don't exist. So the projects of explaining and deliberating are in tension, then.
2. I didn't understand how his justification for inference to the best explanation was a good one. If it's not a good one, is there a better one, and does that better explanation include normative facts? Also, is it possible that we shouldn't try to justify inference to the best explanation, that it's a basic fact?
3. Is believing in normative facts really indispensable for deliberation?


In order to grapple with the second question, I started looking into what philosophers say about justification in general. There is a debate in epistemology about justification and its structure. Does justification ever run out? Do we have to simply accept so unjustified claims? Or maybe we don't, because there are certain statements that are justified without reference to some other belief. Or maybe all we need is a coherent world view, and our beliefs support each other.

Another issue is something that Enoch even brings up in his dissertation: his argument is only for the existence of some normative facts. But what if there are normative facts without there being moral facts? From what I can tell, some philosophers give accounts of knowledge and justification that are explicitly normative. In that case, all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, requires some normative claims. But does the fact that there are epistemic values imply that there are also moral values? Certainly not. Does it lower the cost of accepting moral facts, since we're already admitting some values into our ontology? Arguably yes. Though I think I can think of a pretty good argument (to be fair, I also think I saw it in Hartry Field) that this doesn't help us very much. Because if we are wary of including normative facts for reasons beyond absence of evidence, even if we're "forced" to accept normative facts for justification or knowledge's sake, that doesn't mean we have to be happy about it. And we still might try to minimize the appearance of more facts about the normative realm. (Though I sometimes wonder if we could just admit any old normative facts, and then have moral facts supervene on these any old normative facts.)

I'm emerging from the week excited and overwhelmed. There are big debates in epistemology, and I'm just starting to get exposed to it.

But how necessary is it for my project? It really depends where I go from here. I'm fairly convinced that Enoch's project runs into a bunch of problems, but they're interesting problems. I could try to give another argument that defends moral realism, trying to do what I think his argument can't do.

I'm also a bit frustrated that I can't bring this back to math yet. But hopefully, if I do find a way to defend moral realism that's novel and interesting, I can then turn to math and say "Does this work there?" Then hopefully I'll have something interesting to say about philosophy of math.

Already there's one difference between math and ethics that seems to make a big difference: math is thoroughly integrated into our scientific knowledge. But what I'm looking at now is whether (if not the ethical) the normative is equally as indispensable for the justification of our knowledge. That is, math is necessary for the expression of our knowledge, but values might be necessary for the justification of that knowledge. Whether one of those projects should be privileged is an interesting question as well (and that relates to my first objection towards Enoch).

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