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?
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
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.
----------
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.
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.
----------
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.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
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.
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.
"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.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Why epistemology, again
Just a reminder:
There are tons of things for which we have reasons. We have reasons to fear, reasons to hope, etc. These are reactions that are conceptually distinct from belief. So why think that the study of what reasons there are to believe things might help vindicate the study of what moral reasons we have to do things? Because unlike most of these areas, it's hard to pass off epistemic statements as being second rate from a cognitive point of view. If epistemic statements can't be true or false, then we would seem to be in a boatload of trouble. And what we really want is to distinguish between reasons to fear something and reasons to believe something, and say that reasons to act morally are more like the latter than the former.
At least, that's the idea. If reasons to believe are ultimately not true/false then all of our knowledge seems to be in trouble.
There are tons of things for which we have reasons. We have reasons to fear, reasons to hope, etc. These are reactions that are conceptually distinct from belief. So why think that the study of what reasons there are to believe things might help vindicate the study of what moral reasons we have to do things? Because unlike most of these areas, it's hard to pass off epistemic statements as being second rate from a cognitive point of view. If epistemic statements can't be true or false, then we would seem to be in a boatload of trouble. And what we really want is to distinguish between reasons to fear something and reasons to believe something, and say that reasons to act morally are more like the latter than the former.
At least, that's the idea. If reasons to believe are ultimately not true/false then all of our knowledge seems to be in trouble.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Anselm on Justice and Injustice
T: Remember also that we've already agreed that once justice has been lost, nothing but the obligation to justice remains in him beyond what he had before he received justice.
S: Right.
T: But before he had justice, he was not unjust and did not have injustice.
S: No.
T: Therefore, either there is no injustice in him and he is not unjust once justice has been lost, or else injustice and being unjust are nothing.
This is Anselm in "On the Fall of the Devil." I think that the point that he's making here is that you require principles of justice and morality in order to criticize one for failing to live up to those norms. When one completely lacks the norms of ethics, one can't be criticized for failing to live up to those norms.
I believe that this is related to the point I've made about things being epistemically optional. One cannot be criticized for failing to live up to the epistemic norms before one has accepted epistemic normativity in some way.
S: Right.
T: But before he had justice, he was not unjust and did not have injustice.
S: No.
T: Therefore, either there is no injustice in him and he is not unjust once justice has been lost, or else injustice and being unjust are nothing.
This is Anselm in "On the Fall of the Devil." I think that the point that he's making here is that you require principles of justice and morality in order to criticize one for failing to live up to those norms. When one completely lacks the norms of ethics, one can't be criticized for failing to live up to those norms.
I believe that this is related to the point I've made about things being epistemically optional. One cannot be criticized for failing to live up to the epistemic norms before one has accepted epistemic normativity in some way.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Another post on Enoch and Shechter
I don't think that I properly understood what Enoch and Shechter were trying to do until I started to think things through on my own. I was initially puzzled by their article(s). How could they hope to provide any sort of justification that itself goes beyond justification? OK, that sentence was incomprehensible, lemme try again. Here's what I thought that they were trying to do: provide a justification for a principle such as inference to the best explanation. What's wrong with that? Well, they also claim that inference to the best explanation (IBE) is basic, and isn't justified by anything else. You don't have to be that deep of a thinker to recognize a problem here: they want to justify something that itself is unjustifiable. What?!
In retrospect, I feel kind of stupid about this picture of their work. It's awfully simplistic. I always knew that this couldn't be quite what they were getting at, but I didn't know what they were aiming at either.
Here's what I think they're trying to do:
It's hopeless to try to justify the truly, truly basic beliefs. Some beliefs really are unjustified--for example, the first epistemic beliefs that you take on will be unjustifiable. After all, if all you have is a knowledge that epistemic realism is true (and so you are able to entertain the possibility that some given epistemic sentence is true) how are you able to evaluate the truth of some epistemic sentence? You have nothing available to justify it with, since you don't know of any other epistemic sentences that are true. On the other hand, this also means that you can't be rationally criticized for accepting this sentence as true, since the epistemic resources for challenging any belief-practice epistemically simply aren't available yet. So as far as the truly basic beliefs go--they're optional in a particular sense. Indeed, this is what I argue for in the first chapter. And so you can't expect this to help ethics at all, since ethics is not optional in this sense at all.
What about Enoch and Shechter? Are they simply trying to justify the unjustifiable basic beliefs? This would be silly. And we know that they are trying to provide justification ("How are Basic Belief-forming methods justified?" is the title of their article, after all). So the most plausible reading is that they're not actually trying to justify sentences that are unjustifiable (duh, right?).
So what does it mean to be a basic sentence? All it means is that it's a basic method. Here's an important quote: "We cannot justify our use of IBE by appealing to other belief-forming methods, since IBE is a basic rule. Thus, there is nothing in virtue of which we are justified in using IBE. Or so it may seem." I think that the idea in this sentence is that there are no methods--no other beliefs?--upon which IBE rests in order to gain justification. But justification is still possible, they argue, because pragmatic considerations can provide epistemic justifications. Then they give their account.
It remains unclear to me in virtue of what the pragmatic account doesn't deserve to be called a "belief-forming method" though. Because, if my understanding of them is correct, what they're saying is that a sentence like "a thinker who does not inquire about the world around him is intuitively doing something wrong" determines what has positive epistemic value. That is, what I think they're saying is that what is truly basic in epistemology is not the belief-forming methods, but rather certain projects that are "intrinsically indispensable"--certain projects have great, positive, epistemic value. Why not just say that there is a foundational belief-forming method: "You are justified in believing that which is indispensable to any of the following projects: explanatory, deliberative, etc." That seems just as much as a method as the other stuff. And if I've understood them correctly, this is much more clear then bringing in all these pragmatics.
You would still have to take this new, foundational principle for granted, but you're going to have to take something for granted (and you won't be able to be criticized for it--how could someone even begin to criticize you?)
I think that I still have worries about Enoch's argument that ethics gets in via this way of seeings things. But at least this makes way more sense to me than my first few readings.
In retrospect, I feel kind of stupid about this picture of their work. It's awfully simplistic. I always knew that this couldn't be quite what they were getting at, but I didn't know what they were aiming at either.
Here's what I think they're trying to do:
It's hopeless to try to justify the truly, truly basic beliefs. Some beliefs really are unjustified--for example, the first epistemic beliefs that you take on will be unjustifiable. After all, if all you have is a knowledge that epistemic realism is true (and so you are able to entertain the possibility that some given epistemic sentence is true) how are you able to evaluate the truth of some epistemic sentence? You have nothing available to justify it with, since you don't know of any other epistemic sentences that are true. On the other hand, this also means that you can't be rationally criticized for accepting this sentence as true, since the epistemic resources for challenging any belief-practice epistemically simply aren't available yet. So as far as the truly basic beliefs go--they're optional in a particular sense. Indeed, this is what I argue for in the first chapter. And so you can't expect this to help ethics at all, since ethics is not optional in this sense at all.
What about Enoch and Shechter? Are they simply trying to justify the unjustifiable basic beliefs? This would be silly. And we know that they are trying to provide justification ("How are Basic Belief-forming methods justified?" is the title of their article, after all). So the most plausible reading is that they're not actually trying to justify sentences that are unjustifiable (duh, right?).
So what does it mean to be a basic sentence? All it means is that it's a basic method. Here's an important quote: "We cannot justify our use of IBE by appealing to other belief-forming methods, since IBE is a basic rule. Thus, there is nothing in virtue of which we are justified in using IBE. Or so it may seem." I think that the idea in this sentence is that there are no methods--no other beliefs?--upon which IBE rests in order to gain justification. But justification is still possible, they argue, because pragmatic considerations can provide epistemic justifications. Then they give their account.
It remains unclear to me in virtue of what the pragmatic account doesn't deserve to be called a "belief-forming method" though. Because, if my understanding of them is correct, what they're saying is that a sentence like "a thinker who does not inquire about the world around him is intuitively doing something wrong" determines what has positive epistemic value. That is, what I think they're saying is that what is truly basic in epistemology is not the belief-forming methods, but rather certain projects that are "intrinsically indispensable"--certain projects have great, positive, epistemic value. Why not just say that there is a foundational belief-forming method: "You are justified in believing that which is indispensable to any of the following projects: explanatory, deliberative, etc." That seems just as much as a method as the other stuff. And if I've understood them correctly, this is much more clear then bringing in all these pragmatics.
You would still have to take this new, foundational principle for granted, but you're going to have to take something for granted (and you won't be able to be criticized for it--how could someone even begin to criticize you?)
I think that I still have worries about Enoch's argument that ethics gets in via this way of seeings things. But at least this makes way more sense to me than my first few readings.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Intrinsic indispensability of epistemology
I borrow the phrase "intrinsic indispensability" from Enoch, and I use it in a much more limited capacity than he does.
As Cuneo points out, there is no non-question-begging way to argue against epistemic nihlism (and let's pretend middle positions between nihlism and realism don't exist for this post, to make my life slightly easier) and for epistemic realism. Why? Because if epistemic nihlism is true then there are no arguments, evidence or reasons to believe anything. Hence, any argument against epistemic nihlism would beg the question against epistemic nihlism, simply by presupposing that there is anything such as an argument, or anything such as categorical reasons to believe anything.
So one can't argue against epistemic nihlism. Rather, one simply has to reject it for no epistemic reason. Your rejection of epistemic nihlism has to be because you want to, not because you have a good reason to. I think that this is a fairly secure conclusion.
Now, if you are embracing epistemic realism (because I'm pretending nihlism and realism are the only options) what exactly are you embracing without justification? Presumably, that epistemology can be true/false, some epistemic statements are true, and that they're true in a non-reductive way. But if this is all we embrace, we're still going to be lost, because we don't know which epistemic statements are true or false. This is more than a problem of epistemic access, but it's a built in problem; how can we justify belief in statements concerning what counts as good evidence or justification before we've determined the truth of ANY statements about what counts as good evidence or justification? There seems to be no good way to get started in the epistemic enterprise. So if one is going to reject epistemic nihlism and embrace epistemic realism, it's not enough to just embrace some kind of abstract realism, but one must also take certain epistemic beliefs for granted. (Unless you want to advocate the view that epistemic realism is true, and we just don't know anything about epistemology. This seems bad.)
I wonder if this is part of the answer to the challenge of epistemic access that exists parallel to epistemology in ethics. This is how epistemology gets started, and there's no corresponding story about ethics to be told.
As Cuneo points out, there is no non-question-begging way to argue against epistemic nihlism (and let's pretend middle positions between nihlism and realism don't exist for this post, to make my life slightly easier) and for epistemic realism. Why? Because if epistemic nihlism is true then there are no arguments, evidence or reasons to believe anything. Hence, any argument against epistemic nihlism would beg the question against epistemic nihlism, simply by presupposing that there is anything such as an argument, or anything such as categorical reasons to believe anything.
So one can't argue against epistemic nihlism. Rather, one simply has to reject it for no epistemic reason. Your rejection of epistemic nihlism has to be because you want to, not because you have a good reason to. I think that this is a fairly secure conclusion.
Now, if you are embracing epistemic realism (because I'm pretending nihlism and realism are the only options) what exactly are you embracing without justification? Presumably, that epistemology can be true/false, some epistemic statements are true, and that they're true in a non-reductive way. But if this is all we embrace, we're still going to be lost, because we don't know which epistemic statements are true or false. This is more than a problem of epistemic access, but it's a built in problem; how can we justify belief in statements concerning what counts as good evidence or justification before we've determined the truth of ANY statements about what counts as good evidence or justification? There seems to be no good way to get started in the epistemic enterprise. So if one is going to reject epistemic nihlism and embrace epistemic realism, it's not enough to just embrace some kind of abstract realism, but one must also take certain epistemic beliefs for granted. (Unless you want to advocate the view that epistemic realism is true, and we just don't know anything about epistemology. This seems bad.)
I wonder if this is part of the answer to the challenge of epistemic access that exists parallel to epistemology in ethics. This is how epistemology gets started, and there's no corresponding story about ethics to be told.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Being more precise
We might even agree with Cuneo that disagreements such as "It is rationally permissible to cling to religious beliefs in the face of contrary evidence provided by our best science" is a first-order epistemic sentence. But note that it is a general, as opposed to a particular one. If we were to say, instead, "We're justified in believing that evolution is false because the Bible says so" the sentence is no longer plausibly viewed as an epistemic sentence. Rather, it's a scientific or religious sentence, but if this is an epistemic sentence than ALL sentences are epistemic, since from any plain old descriptive sentence "There's a tree over there" we can get a normative claim such as "I know that there's a tree over there" or "I'm justified in the belief that there's a tree over there." The point is that when it comes down to specifics and particulars it's hard to see how you could have a first-order epistemic sentence.
My futher claim is that the kind of disagreement that we should find interesting is first-order particular disagreements. This is the kind of lasting disagreement that we find striking in ethics.
This is still wrong, because I'm abusing the particular/general distinction, but I think that there is something here.
My futher claim is that the kind of disagreement that we should find interesting is first-order particular disagreements. This is the kind of lasting disagreement that we find striking in ethics.
This is still wrong, because I'm abusing the particular/general distinction, but I think that there is something here.
Summing up the previous post in a few sentences
What I began expressing in the previous post was the following picture:
There are some statements that are first-order ethical statements. There are also second-order statements about ethical concepts. There are also some second-order statements about epistemic concepts. But I'm tempted to think that there are no first-order epistemic statements. This is because the first-order sentences about what to believe don't seem to me to really be about epistemology, but the purely epistemic sentences seem to me to be second-order.
My reason for thinking in this way is from Cuneo's example of religious disagreement. It seems to me that if that's an instance of epistemic disagreement, then it's because what these people are really arguing about is the second-order issue itself, directly. Otherwise, it's not really an epistemic disagreement, because if that was considered an epistemic disagreement then ANY disagreement would be an epistemic disagreement, since every disagreement is epistemic in the way that religious disagreement is. Why? Because all disagreements can be translated into epistemic terms, since all disagreements are concerned with what is rational to believe, or what one ought to believe. In other words, they're all arguments.
There are some statements that are first-order ethical statements. There are also second-order statements about ethical concepts. There are also some second-order statements about epistemic concepts. But I'm tempted to think that there are no first-order epistemic statements. This is because the first-order sentences about what to believe don't seem to me to really be about epistemology, but the purely epistemic sentences seem to me to be second-order.
My reason for thinking in this way is from Cuneo's example of religious disagreement. It seems to me that if that's an instance of epistemic disagreement, then it's because what these people are really arguing about is the second-order issue itself, directly. Otherwise, it's not really an epistemic disagreement, because if that was considered an epistemic disagreement then ANY disagreement would be an epistemic disagreement, since every disagreement is epistemic in the way that religious disagreement is. Why? Because all disagreements can be translated into epistemic terms, since all disagreements are concerned with what is rational to believe, or what one ought to believe. In other words, they're all arguments.
Inching towards this argument
I keep on thinking I have an argument here, then thinking that I don't. I'm going to try and get this down on here, and maybe it'll make it easier for me to get it on the actual page later tonight.
Let's begin with moral disagreement. There's an argument from disagreement against moral realism. In short, it says that the kind of disagreement that we find in ethics is unable to be resolved rationally. However, the argument goes, when disagreement has this quality it's indicative that there is no fact of the matter that the two parties are disagreeing about.
Cuneo argues that epistemic realism faces the same challenge. What's the evidence? Consider religious disagreement. The disagreement there is deep in the same way that ethical disagreement is deep. That is, there seems to be no way to resolve this disagreement rationally. Now, Cuneo suggests that this disagreement about religious issues is really itself actually about epistemology, not religion:
Cuneo's argument is that the religious disagreement is actually epistemic disagreement. He explains that the disagreement is between those who believe that one ought to believe in the authority of holy books over all other evidence, or that "rationality fundamentally consists in obedience to God and religious authorities" and those who maintain "non-theistic epistemological pieties [who] reject all this. According to these views, obedience of disobedience to God plays no role in explaining why we succeed or fail to understand the world aright."
It's hard to buy this claim. It would seem that if this is what it takes to be an epistemic disagreement, every cognitive disagreement at all could be translated into an epistemic one. After all, isn't a disagreement between two scientists who (as they did in the past) wondered whether the evidence supports the existence of black holes be a disagreement over two detailed epistemic accounts of how to deal with empirical evidence? Of course, Cuneo might respond that this just strengthens the point: epistemic disagreement is everywhere.
I think that there's a distinction that should be made at this point: some confusions are philosophical, and others are not. If you are reading this...hell, no one is reading this. But suppose that someone was reading this. That person might, at this point have all sorts of alarms going off: "Oh no," this hypothetical reader says, "he's going to try to distinguish between philosophy and the rest of knowledge. This is going to be a mess." Yes, it is going to be a mess. But here we go anyway. Some disagreement or confusion is philosophical in nature. This disagreement has all the qualities that we claim ethical disagreement to have--it seems to be rationally unresolvable, as evidenced by a long history of open problems where little progress has been made.
(And of course there has been philosophical progress, but there are still many problems where progress hasn't been made, and it's not like that's a controversial statement. What might be annoying to some is that I call this philosophical disagreement, since I might besmirch some issues that have had success. Fine, I'll pick another thing to call it later. For now, philosophical disagreement.)
It's not that shocking that there is this sort of disagreement with these sorts of philosophical problems. These specifically are the hardest, deepest, most fundamental problems that we know of. That's part of the reason why we study them. So it's no great shocker that we disagree in philosophy, and it's not at all like disagreement about which flavor of ice cream is best. The latter has unresolvable conflict because there's no objective matter of fact about which ice cream is the best. In philosophy the reason why there is this sort of disagreement is because philosophical problems are specifically the hardest, most fundamental problems that seem to push at the limits of human knowledge.
Now, I think that religious disagreement of the sort that Cuneo talks about is properly philosophical. This is because the disagreements he is talking about are about the very nature of knowledge and justification: what does it mean to be justified? What does it mean to be rational? I don't need to give an account of the "philosophical" in order to claim that these are paridigmatically philosophical questions.
But this, I think, isn't the case when it comes to ethics. When it comes to ethics I think that there are plenty of non-philosophical questions that can be asked that are properly ethical. "Abortion is evil" Obviously, the meaning of a sentence depends to an extent on the meaning of the words in it, so what it means to be evil will matter when we determine the meaning of this sentence. But the sentence isn't ABOUT good and evil. The sentence is about abortion. OK, OK, OK, hypothetical reader. Yes, that's the sort of stupid thing you expect a really stupid undergrad to make. But is there a more precise way to put this weird intuition that I have? Is there anything here at all?
Let me try again. We know that there are certain typically philosophical questions, and among these we're used to the fact that there is disagreement. Now, I'm going to use an argument here that I'm just ripping off of Justin Clarke-Doane. Consider the disagreement about abortion. Now, the two people disagreeing might be deluding themselves by thinking that they can disagree about abortion with each other without the disagreement coming down to a disagreement about what is good/evil, and that in order to really take this argument down to it's rational roots they would need to advocate a theory of morality. That's fine. But that's not what's in their heads. What's in their heads is that they're disagreeing about abortion and whether you can do it or not. I take this to be a non-philosophical ethical disagreement. Again, they're not having a fight about the theory of good.
This, I think, is a difference between ethics and epistemology. People don't have non-philosophical disagreements about epistemology, but they do have non-philosophical disagreements about ethics. But it's the non-philosophical disagreements that indicate that something weird is going on, because, as I noted, we expect deep and difficult disagreement in philosophy. What's weird about ethics is that there's disagreement that has nothing to do with the theory of good, and this indicates that maybe people are just talking about something completely non-objective.
To elaborate a bit: "Believing what the Torah says is justified." "No, it's not." What is this sentence about? Is it about the Torah? No, I think it's about the nature of justification. Note also that belief in the nature of justification, the second-order stuff, that's not normative even though it's epistemic in a sense. Statements about the nature of justification aren't normative even though justification is a normative concept. I think that's another way of putting the point. They're not having a normative disagreement when they're having a philosophical one; it's not even really an argument about epistemology. It's an argument about philosophy. So maybe I should define philosophy as the second-order claims about epistemology, though maybe I should just dump "philosophical disagreements" for "second-order."
If this is so, then I think that this is a reason why the argument from disagreement applies to ethics in a way that it doesn't apply to epistemology. I'm going to sit with this point for a bit now, and see how I feel about it. Maybe I can make it stronger.
Note that if Cuneo were to read this, he's likely say "this person is massively misguided." Partly because in his version of the argument from disagreement the only role that first-order disagreement has is to indicate the presence of second-order dsiagreement. But I find this confusing: it doesn't seem to me part of any of the other versions of the argument from disagreement that I've read, and in fact it seems odd. Second-order disagreement about concepts is normal, to an extent. What's at issue in the argument from disagreement is what the best explanation of unresolvable conflict is, and the claim is that the best explanation of this is that there is no factual disagreement at all--and this seems true even if there is complete second-order agreement (we might all agree what it means when we talk about best flavor but still have unresolvable conflict here, no?). So I remain a bit puzzled with tihs, and I'm not sure what to do with it.
Let's begin with moral disagreement. There's an argument from disagreement against moral realism. In short, it says that the kind of disagreement that we find in ethics is unable to be resolved rationally. However, the argument goes, when disagreement has this quality it's indicative that there is no fact of the matter that the two parties are disagreeing about.
Cuneo argues that epistemic realism faces the same challenge. What's the evidence? Consider religious disagreement. The disagreement there is deep in the same way that ethical disagreement is deep. That is, there seems to be no way to resolve this disagreement rationally. Now, Cuneo suggests that this disagreement about religious issues is really itself actually about epistemology, not religion:
"since the predicate 'epistemic rationality' in [the context of religious debate] is probably best understood as one that stands for a constellation of thicker epistemic concepts such as wisdom, understanding, judiciousness, epistemic humility, epistemic honesty, and objectivity, the disagreement in question is plausibly viewed as being concerned with whether religious beliefs exhibit these thicker epistemic merits."
Cuneo's argument is that the religious disagreement is actually epistemic disagreement. He explains that the disagreement is between those who believe that one ought to believe in the authority of holy books over all other evidence, or that "rationality fundamentally consists in obedience to God and religious authorities" and those who maintain "non-theistic epistemological pieties [who] reject all this. According to these views, obedience of disobedience to God plays no role in explaining why we succeed or fail to understand the world aright."
It's hard to buy this claim. It would seem that if this is what it takes to be an epistemic disagreement, every cognitive disagreement at all could be translated into an epistemic one. After all, isn't a disagreement between two scientists who (as they did in the past) wondered whether the evidence supports the existence of black holes be a disagreement over two detailed epistemic accounts of how to deal with empirical evidence? Of course, Cuneo might respond that this just strengthens the point: epistemic disagreement is everywhere.
I think that there's a distinction that should be made at this point: some confusions are philosophical, and others are not. If you are reading this...hell, no one is reading this. But suppose that someone was reading this. That person might, at this point have all sorts of alarms going off: "Oh no," this hypothetical reader says, "he's going to try to distinguish between philosophy and the rest of knowledge. This is going to be a mess." Yes, it is going to be a mess. But here we go anyway. Some disagreement or confusion is philosophical in nature. This disagreement has all the qualities that we claim ethical disagreement to have--it seems to be rationally unresolvable, as evidenced by a long history of open problems where little progress has been made.
(And of course there has been philosophical progress, but there are still many problems where progress hasn't been made, and it's not like that's a controversial statement. What might be annoying to some is that I call this philosophical disagreement, since I might besmirch some issues that have had success. Fine, I'll pick another thing to call it later. For now, philosophical disagreement.)
It's not that shocking that there is this sort of disagreement with these sorts of philosophical problems. These specifically are the hardest, deepest, most fundamental problems that we know of. That's part of the reason why we study them. So it's no great shocker that we disagree in philosophy, and it's not at all like disagreement about which flavor of ice cream is best. The latter has unresolvable conflict because there's no objective matter of fact about which ice cream is the best. In philosophy the reason why there is this sort of disagreement is because philosophical problems are specifically the hardest, most fundamental problems that seem to push at the limits of human knowledge.
Now, I think that religious disagreement of the sort that Cuneo talks about is properly philosophical. This is because the disagreements he is talking about are about the very nature of knowledge and justification: what does it mean to be justified? What does it mean to be rational? I don't need to give an account of the "philosophical" in order to claim that these are paridigmatically philosophical questions.
But this, I think, isn't the case when it comes to ethics. When it comes to ethics I think that there are plenty of non-philosophical questions that can be asked that are properly ethical. "Abortion is evil" Obviously, the meaning of a sentence depends to an extent on the meaning of the words in it, so what it means to be evil will matter when we determine the meaning of this sentence. But the sentence isn't ABOUT good and evil. The sentence is about abortion. OK, OK, OK, hypothetical reader. Yes, that's the sort of stupid thing you expect a really stupid undergrad to make. But is there a more precise way to put this weird intuition that I have? Is there anything here at all?
Let me try again. We know that there are certain typically philosophical questions, and among these we're used to the fact that there is disagreement. Now, I'm going to use an argument here that I'm just ripping off of Justin Clarke-Doane. Consider the disagreement about abortion. Now, the two people disagreeing might be deluding themselves by thinking that they can disagree about abortion with each other without the disagreement coming down to a disagreement about what is good/evil, and that in order to really take this argument down to it's rational roots they would need to advocate a theory of morality. That's fine. But that's not what's in their heads. What's in their heads is that they're disagreeing about abortion and whether you can do it or not. I take this to be a non-philosophical ethical disagreement. Again, they're not having a fight about the theory of good.
This, I think, is a difference between ethics and epistemology. People don't have non-philosophical disagreements about epistemology, but they do have non-philosophical disagreements about ethics. But it's the non-philosophical disagreements that indicate that something weird is going on, because, as I noted, we expect deep and difficult disagreement in philosophy. What's weird about ethics is that there's disagreement that has nothing to do with the theory of good, and this indicates that maybe people are just talking about something completely non-objective.
To elaborate a bit: "Believing what the Torah says is justified." "No, it's not." What is this sentence about? Is it about the Torah? No, I think it's about the nature of justification. Note also that belief in the nature of justification, the second-order stuff, that's not normative even though it's epistemic in a sense. Statements about the nature of justification aren't normative even though justification is a normative concept. I think that's another way of putting the point. They're not having a normative disagreement when they're having a philosophical one; it's not even really an argument about epistemology. It's an argument about philosophy. So maybe I should define philosophy as the second-order claims about epistemology, though maybe I should just dump "philosophical disagreements" for "second-order."
If this is so, then I think that this is a reason why the argument from disagreement applies to ethics in a way that it doesn't apply to epistemology. I'm going to sit with this point for a bit now, and see how I feel about it. Maybe I can make it stronger.
Note that if Cuneo were to read this, he's likely say "this person is massively misguided." Partly because in his version of the argument from disagreement the only role that first-order disagreement has is to indicate the presence of second-order dsiagreement. But I find this confusing: it doesn't seem to me part of any of the other versions of the argument from disagreement that I've read, and in fact it seems odd. Second-order disagreement about concepts is normal, to an extent. What's at issue in the argument from disagreement is what the best explanation of unresolvable conflict is, and the claim is that the best explanation of this is that there is no factual disagreement at all--and this seems true even if there is complete second-order agreement (we might all agree what it means when we talk about best flavor but still have unresolvable conflict here, no?). So I remain a bit puzzled with tihs, and I'm not sure what to do with it.
Ways in which this thesis is flawed
It's a bit strange to argue against parity of ethics and epistemology with regard to arguments for moral anti-realism, when I might think that some of the arguments might not stick. For example, right now I'm reading about the argument from disagreement (Gowans, Brink and Enoch are all excellent), and I'm not sure how convinced I am that there is a problem for moral realism with disagreement. But yet I'm arguing against parity?
I think that the point is that in this thesis, what I'm heading towards, is the view that there are no shortcuts for taking on the arguments for moral anti-realism one by one. Epistemology (I hope!) can help with this project, but there's no way to take a shortcut to moral realism through epistemic realism. The work that needs to be done is slow and dirty, but full of more insight than the shortcuts. And so I think that's my justification for taking on parity. It's against the argument that there is a shortcut.
I think that the point is that in this thesis, what I'm heading towards, is the view that there are no shortcuts for taking on the arguments for moral anti-realism one by one. Epistemology (I hope!) can help with this project, but there's no way to take a shortcut to moral realism through epistemic realism. The work that needs to be done is slow and dirty, but full of more insight than the shortcuts. And so I think that's my justification for taking on parity. It's against the argument that there is a shortcut.
Monday, February 8, 2010
When push comes to shove...
...it's often easier to just find downloadable versions of contemporary philosophy books than to track them down in a library. Rapidshare is an invaluable research tool.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Is epistemic supervenience a conceptual truth?
This is what is needed in order to avoid Blackburn's critique. But epistemic supervenience has been challenged by Keith Lehrer. Cuneo notes, in a footnote, that if Lehrer is right about epistemic supervenience then the ethical doesn't supervene on the non-ethical either. But I thought supervenience was supposed to be a conceptual truth, in which case Keith Lehrer is making a conceptual error. If we think that he's not making a conceptual error, then we have to ask whether it's a conceptual truth that ethical truths supervene on the non-ethical (as has been assumed).
It's his coherence theory of justification that allows him to ask whether epistemic supervenience is false (let alone a conceptual truth!), and if we think that this would be plausible in ethics maybe that would answer Blackburn's claim that it's a conceptual truth. (But here too we have to be concerned about whether, in a coherence theory of ethical justificaiton the work is being done by ethics or by a coherence theory of justification, in which case we might just be forgetting why ethical supervenience makes sense).
It's his coherence theory of justification that allows him to ask whether epistemic supervenience is false (let alone a conceptual truth!), and if we think that this would be plausible in ethics maybe that would answer Blackburn's claim that it's a conceptual truth. (But here too we have to be concerned about whether, in a coherence theory of ethical justificaiton the work is being done by ethics or by a coherence theory of justification, in which case we might just be forgetting why ethical supervenience makes sense).
Monday, February 1, 2010
Enoch says that metanormative realism is justified, because it's indispensable to our deliberative project. We simply must deliberate over what to decide--it's non-optional. Am I missing something, or does deliberation need nothing beyond hypothetical imperatives, as opposed to categorical ones? Is his view entirely consistent with a kind of relativism?
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