Disagreement and Truth

Michael Lynch drives home a point

An otherwise bleak midwinter Monday was livened up by a welcome flurry of visitors at NIP. Michael Lynch (The Man Who Stole Marcus Rossberg from Us) took the afternoon session, and I’ll start with that, if I may.  His talk focused on a particular variety of disagreement, namely that concerning epistemic principles. You could think of the classical sceptical arguments as being just one such kind of disagreement. They are after all disputes as to whether certain epistemic principles (i.e. certain judgements regarding which belief-forming methods are reliable/acceptable or, more generally, epistemically valuable in an appropriate sense) that we normally take for granted are indeed in good standing. And the question one can ask is: how do you solve that kind of radical dispute over some fundamental epistemic principles (principles so basic as to rule out explication solely by appeal to other principles). Mike’s interesting take on this was an appeal to John Rawls’ familiar ‘veil of ignorance’ idea.

The Zardini/World Interface, in an unguarded moment

So, suppose you’re segregated away in a world α as a kind of hypothetical epistemic contractor—you’re placed in an epistemic version of the ‘original position’ scenario, that is. You’ve no idea what epistemic gifts you will have in the target world w. More generally, you’re not quite sure how the epistemic goods there will be distributed. You’re not even sure which of our cherished principles are privileged in w: all the possible methods are up for grabs, with no pre-ordained ranking. In discussion, the troublesome problem of what assumptions you could make, in that situation, about the (various) laws holding in w came up. In response you can either say, as Mike did, that we can assume that the laws at w are relevantly similar, at least with regard to appearances, to the laws at α. Or we could say that behind the veil of ignorance we’re required to choose epistemic principles that would best govern our practices regardless of the (possible) nomic idiosyncrasies at w (this, I thought, was something that Mike had made provisions (of sorts) for with the requirement that the chosen methods be self-correcting; for one way to gloss this is: able to track and adjust to the vagaries of the w-(natural) facts, whatever they may be).

Here's how to conduct a proper Q&A session

Leaving that complication aside, the chief question Mike wanted to address was: what kind of epistemic methods would we choose in that situation? Or rather: which methods would it be rational to select? The discussion was, predictably, lively, and there was little evidence of an agreement in sight… But the use of Rawls’ rhetorical device certainly holds some promise. Consider the usual way to look at it within political philosophy: ignorance can ensure unbiased decision, and the original position is best seen as a test of what we would consider fair, all things considered. Transferred to the epistemic field, if I get it right, Mike’s intention is to elicit, by its means, agreement on a set of desiderata that any ideal epistemic principle should satisfy. There’s however a snag: if the thought experiment is meant to apply to philosophers, then the theoretical baggage and the theoretical concerns that animate one’s take on epistemology will be carried into the decision chamber and will inevitably affect the choice of which constraints to impose on the principles. Which is exactly what happened this afternoon. But this was to be predicted—after all this was, partly, the fate of Rawls’ move too. The purpose had all along been that of illuminating the practices we actually engage in (give or take a few adjustments) as the ones we would have chosen in the hypothetical situation. What was nevertheless useful, I thought, was that the device (in both cases) gives us pause; never a bad thing in the hectic world of analytic philosophy.

Doug's looking for sparse properties. He came to the wrong place for that. Hardly a seat was left unoccupied

Douglas Edwards, an Arché graduate now a postdoc at University College Dublin, had spoken in the morning on ‘Naturalness, Eligibility and Truth’. Doug has been working on truth for quite some time now and today’s talk was mostly taken up by an assessment of how different notions of truth fare when squared up against naturalism. There’s a move, which Lewis has made in (at least) a couple of papers to quell referential anxieties (of the Putnam’s `Models and Reality’ kind). We can beta-block those anxieties by moving away from us and our linguistic filters and reach out straight to reality. There are properties out there, natural properties, that is, that things have and that make some of those things more eligible than others to be the referents of our expressions. The idea, then, seems to be that by homing in on those properties we can eliminate (or perhaps just lessen) various kinds of worries about indeterminacy of reference—and some may find the suggestion that we can isolate `natural’, sparse properties (those that chop up reality where it hurts) a rather unlikely source of consolation for semantic anxieties, but we’ll let that pass.

Lots of Eligible Referents listen up to Doug

Doug’s aim was to probe how well representationalism (which can do duty as an updated version of the correspondence theory of truth) could fare with respect to naturalism when compared to approaches such as deflationism which do rather poorly there. The lack of flexibility built into most versions of representationalism (i.e., their inability to adapt their R.H. clauses to the various domains to which the truth predicate applies) is the major obstacle to overcome (representationalism, that is, suffers from limitations of scope). Doug’s suggestion was that Lewisian eligibility and pluralism about truth might provide the resources for representationalism successfully to meet the scope challenge. We’ll hear more about this from Doug in the near future, no doubt.

A Spot of Mens Sana

A view like this is an hour's drive (and an undisclosed amount of legwork) from five major philosophy departments. A fine wee place, this country

Next week and the week after that, as previously announced, we’ve five visitors coming up to NIP. So in addition to the regular seminars, we also have 7 extra slots lined up (gulp). As I was mentally girding my loins in preparation for the fortnight of fire ahead, I thought that the slenderer the loins, the easier the girding. And so it came to be that, taking advantage of an unexpected break in the weather, yesterday I took to the hills for a spot of exercise cum thinking among the splendours of early winter. The snow cover was phenomenal. Nice and crisp, very deep in places, and with plenty of ice around. Just as the doctor ordered. I thought it’d be good to post a picture from my trip to give you an idea of the peaks, sorry, the perks that come with the job…

Discussion Leads

Björn draws in the crowds. Here he's leading a busy session at the Self Pilot Seminar

Last week we took a look at the art of minuting. There’s another key component to our activities that deserves a mention: leading seminar discussions. Our seminars are meant to be research seminars, and so a good proportion of the schedule is normally taken over by research presentations from residents and visitors alike. What do we get up to in the rest of the session, though? Well, every phase of a project demands that the territory ahead be mapped as carefully as possible, and so a vital part of the schedule is devoted to detailed discussion of wisely chosen papers of relevance to the phase in question—actually, the dividing line between research presentation and discussion lead is not at all clear; often enough, folk will prepare discussion notes that are very nearly research papers, and arguably that’s what marks our activities apart (book club we ain’t).

Straight from the horse's mouth. Crispin draws up the main line of his 'Warrant for Nothing' on the board for us. Next week: Kant writes up the summary of his first Critique

At the moment, we have four seminars running, plus visitors’ slots, plus the teaching, writing your own research, thinking of Vienna, and so on. So there’s considerable pressure on one’s time and learning how to organise your work is essential—time management is no empty slogan here. And of course that in itself is already excellent training for your future activities. Discussion leads do add to your workload, no question about that, but it is hard to think of a better way to learn i) how to read papers with an eye towards research work; ii) how to hone your presentation skills under pressure (there’s nothing like having to repel a shoal of hungry sharks to keep you on your toes—or to force you to try and keep as much of your toes as you can in the circumstances); iii) how to prepare for your own research presentations.

Here's someone who knows a thing or two about keeping sharks at bay

Now, the theory is that everyone reads the paper ahead of the seminar. But in practice there will always be one or two people (ahem) who couldn’t quite do it. So the presenter has got to make allowances for that. In fact, one of the main roles of the presenter is to ensure that anyone who hasn’t had a chance to read the paper gets a sufficiently clear picture of what the paper is about. And that’s where one learns essential presentation skills (in fact: I think there’s a noticeable difference in presentational abilities between grad students who have been going through this sort of training and those who haven’t). You don’t want merely to summarise the paper and hope for the best: you want to get its structure out as clearly as possible, warts and all. And in many cases that’s easier said than done.

The trick is to learn how to individuate the key transition points in the paper, because (badly handled) transitions are the bane of philosophers. And indeed what you learn pretty quickly as a presenter is that more often than not it is the (completely or relatively unreflective) reliance on certain assumptions (that ought to have been probed harder instead) at key points in the argument that is the problem and someone (usually The Great Zardini) will query a specific step in the argument that you might have glided over, perhaps thinking: well, that’s obvious enough, isn’t it. And instead it wasn’t at all. The challenge won’t always be on target, but you’d better be prepared to address it to minimise the number of times your complexion gains an extra pigment or two. Discussion leads are also a great place where to refine the technical side of your presentation skills. If time is on your side, you may do a Powerpoint slide show (actually, the category extension broadening here is a misnomer: anyone who’s anyone uses Beamer these days. And at NIP we’re all anyone, anyhow). Or you may just do a handout (this is the most common strategy), and you soon learn how tough it is to put together a good handout. Sometimes the discussion lead may just be an oral presentation, to save trees and projector bulbs; and that can work quite well too and is a valuable skill to master in its own right. The point is: it is important to develop the ability to do all three things equally well, because, again, in a real world situation, the projector may break down and you want to be able to continue the (slide-less) show with undiminished brilliance.

In the second session on 'Warrant for Nothing', Crispin gets down to Entitlement of Substance

Apart from being a great opportunity to develop `transferrable skills’ (yuck), discussion leads are also a great way to deepen your acquaintance with subject matters you may not be entirely familiar with. A PhD can be a lonely enterprise: you focus hard on your area of research and there’s definitely a risk of compartmentalisation (a long word that I’m sure will bother Carrie). Discussion leads take care of that. For it’s not enough to read the paper you’re presenting on, drawing up the main theses and putting up a few questions for discussion here and there in the handout. You also want to read up a bit on the literature, see what others have thought about the subject and so on. Which means: you get to know a lot about areas of philosophy that are of no direct concern to your research. There’s also the added advantage that sometimes you’re struck by interesting analogies between the area on which you’re working for your thesis and the topic at hand (as we all know, ideas cross-fertilise in unexpected ways across different areas in philosophy). So, although it’s, again, a lot of work, discussion leads are a key part of the NIP experience. They make sure you come out of the training process a much more mature, well-rounded philosopher. And that can only be a good thing.

Visiting Scholars Can Be Exciting

The first ever NIP visitor: Martin Smith gives us his take on entitlement, BK seminar, November 18

Rome, it is alleged, wasn’t built in a day. Fair enough. Hardly anything is anyway. Now, NIP is still in its infancy, chronologically speaking. But things are already progressing at a blistering pace that few infants could keep up with (if you want to be part of the March of NIP-Time, don’t forget those job ads, by the way). Today we got a draft of the 2010 events schedule and I gasped in awe at how much Paula and Sharon have accomplished already. Think about it: we’ve only been up and running since September and I’ve counted no fewer than 3 conferences, 3 workshops and a summer school in next year’s schedule. And 2009 is also going out with a bang. We’ve 5 visitors in the ten days between 7-17 December. Douglas Edwards (University College Dublin), who’s been featuring on the Analysis pages quite a lot recently with his work on mixed conjunctions, opens up the visitors-fest (and he can rest assured he won’t be given a mixed reception. Ah, ah). On the same day we also welcome Michael Lynch (University of Connecticut), with a paper called  ’Skepticism and Epistemic Disagreement’. The next day, in connection with the Formal Epistemology pilot, we have Stephan Hartman (Tilburg). And then to round off the week Jonathan Schaffer (ANU) will talk about entitlement (or so I am hoping). In the following week, Ian Rumfitt (Birkbeck) will take us through his forthcoming book The Boundary Stones of Thought over three sessions that promise to be particularly absorbing. Rumfitt was a regular visitor to the Abstraction workshop in the early Arché years and I still remember a mesmerising session he lead that included forty minutes or so of collaborative work on a point of substance on the board together with Crispin. To my mind, that was philosophy at its collegiate, unforgettable best. And now we’re in for more. Christmas come early indeed.

The Art of Minuting

BK-Minutes Session at NIP. Where's everyone? Not at Aberdeen beach. 'Twas a week Nippers were away at conferences and the like. At least, that's what they said

A canny Scot once shared his granny’s wisdom with me (I hasten to add: no more than her wisdom. He wasn’t the kind who, as they say in West Lothian, would sell his granny to a glue factory. But I digress): it’s better to have a short pencil than a long memory, he said. I didn’t have a pencil with me at the time, but the proverb was short enough to stick in my memory. Where is this leading to, you’ll be wondering. Right. Here’s the lesson: the secret to a successful research centre is a well-oiled minuting machine. It’s not enough to have weekly seminars where visitors are entertained, key papers scrutinised and one’s own research taken to pieces by friendly vultures. You also want to have a record of what you’re doing, week in week out, so that you can go back to it when taking stock of the project’s progress. And nothing does that better than accurate minute-taking. But minutes don’t take minutes (almost as parse-multiple as ‘fish fish fish’), and so minuting is not always popular with the troops. When you get one of those weeks with seven seminars to attend, a deadline hovering over your career-making paper and a sick cat requiring attention, your heart may well sink at the thought of the impending minutes session ahead. Couldn’t we just go for a walk to Aberdeen beach instead? (the local equivalent of ‘On reflection, I’d rather be in Philadelphia’). The thing is: there’s an art to minuting, and it’s an elusive one. We’ve tried various formats back at Arché: 1) the courtroom style (‘X said that P, to which Y replied “Piffle!” ’), recording every nuance of the discussion (some pranksters have been known to go for an OTT style, possibly in an attempt at minutes-style deconstructivism: ‘X wearily retorted to Y that no, much as it pains him to say so, it doesn’t follow from his theory that Y is an eggplant. He’s working on that, though.’); 2) the narrative style, writing up a short summary of the main points discussed and outlining open research questions for further work, with minimal attributions of responsibilities; 3) the uncooperative style, sketchy annotations with lots of ‘can you fill this in please, Mr X‘; 4) the blank style (no minutes at all), the minute-taker’s laptop broke down/forgot to turn up/the cat ate the pencil/no-one will bother reading this anyway (yawn). Needless to say, the best option is 2): getting things in some sort of disciplined narrative really helps nailing down the points of importance. It also helps with the drafting of the milestones papers (popularly known as The Millstone Papers) that mark the various stages of the research projects.

November Graduation Day. No more minutes for some. Hence the jubilation

Necessities of book-keeping apart, minuting sessions are in any case crucial to our activities because they offer a second chance to examine any controversial points that exercised us at the seminars, as well as providing additional training opportunities for graduate students (taking minutes takes a lot of skill and concentration on the day). And if anything has gone wrong, you can always ask the postdocs for helpful pointers; speakers too, if gracious enough to attend, may get a second chance of clarifying any points that got drowned in the heat of the discussion (mixed metaphor, I know, but so what). Minutes also do something more (yes, I know this is getting a bit too much), for they engender a tremendous sense of camaraderie among the students and postdocs—it’s the ideal place for gossip and in-jokes, you see. Causation may be the cement of the universe, as someone once claimed: minuting sessions are the cement of a research institute (and if you abscond three times, you get a nice pair of cement boots as a bonus). So, love ‘em or hate ‘em, well-run minuting sessions can make the difference between a good research centre and an outstanding one. There. I’ve spilt some beans after all. You can’t say we keep our secrets all to ourselves. Now, where did I put that pencil?

Taking the Pulse

New Kid on the Block. Not everything in Old Aberdeen is old. New King's was built in 1913 and lots of happy lectures have taken place there ever since

Hilary Putnam once said that any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs in one. What about large nutshells, one may wonder: would they also be a bad idea when it comes to philosophy? After all, nuts come in all shapes and sizes. And what about a collection of nutshells? Would such a collection inherit the (allegedly flawed) nutshellness of its parts? Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. Only a metaphysician could answer that, I suppose (whether she would care to do so it’s a different matter). But what about receptacles that boast less nugatory dimensions, while still displaying a commitment to conciseness; say, a nutshell no larger than 4,500 words?—(I know, that’s a hell of a nutshell, even if the words were all monosyllabic). Because after all that’s what Putnam was objecting to, wasn’t he: there are some things that require space to be said, and no substantive philosophy can possibly be squeezed into confined boundaries without doing violence to its subtleties. If that is so, how much good philosophy can one cram into 4,500 words?

(Now, I’ve just given you a good example of reckless use of space. 180 words to say not very much at all.)

Well, here, at last, is the point of this post: you see, NIP is a restless place. It just cannot rest content with running seminars, workshops, conferences, inviting exciting speakers, training young researchers, knocking down buildings and hatching plans for world domination (not forgetting the hoarding of sofas). No, NIP cannot just rest content with that. For it takes its commitments to impact and the creation of opportunities for philosophy-making very seriously indeed (don’t forget those jobs ads, by the way. Deadlines are getting closer and closer…). And so, to enhance even further the world of philosophy, NIP intends to establish a new philosophy journal covering its areas of remit and with the only constraint that papers be submitted only if less than 4,500 words long. Excellent philosophy, that is, can be short, concise and to the point (just what this post is not, then. Yes, precisely.) and the new NIP journal will provide an exciting new venue for that sort of high-level, well-focused research. And with the promise of a lightning-fast turnaround too. A nutshell on steroids, you might say.

Towards that aim, NIP is now taking the pulse of the philosophical (virtual) nation at large. So, please go to the survey page that Andri has prepared on the NIP web-mothership and help us canvass opinion and, ahem, further refine our target audience projections. You may find it helpful to take a look first at the journal outline. The Editorial Board looks rather impressive, if I say so myself. Crispin Wright is the Editor; John Divers the Executive Editor and the Associate Editors for the various areas of interest include JC Beall (Logic), Richard Heck (Mathematics), Ross Cameron (Metaphysics), Tim Crane (Mind), Jonathan Schaffer (Language) and Brian Weatherson (Epistemology). That’s a lot of nuts, you will say. Indeed. And I bet even Putnam would be impressed.

Workshop on the Lottery Paradox

View from the Old Town House, Old Aberdeen. NIP's looking South on December 12th

As the sharp-eyed among you will have noticed, NIP is running a pilot project on Formal Epistemology at the moment. Well, our cousins down South, Martin Smith (Glasgow), Peter Milne and Philip Ebert (both from Stirling), are organising a Workshop on the Lottery Paradox. Confirmed speakers include Igor Douven (Leuven), Richard Pettygrew (Bristol) and Ralph Wedgwood (Oxford). It’ll take place on December 12th at the Caird Room in the Philosophy Department in Glasgow. To register (places are limited: it may well be a lottery to get in…), just get in touch with Martin Smith and make him an offer he can’t refuse. Quite a few of us Nippers will make the journey South. Formal Epistemology looks set to become a major point of aggregation for philosophers up North (and elsewhere) in the coming months.

Making It Comfortable

Philosophers worry a lot about the ultimate furniture of the universe. They should have asked Paula and Sharon. NIP's Common Room: ending the worrying in style

NIP, it should be clear by now, is a Social Inclusion Zone. You know the Rembrandt painting of the philosopher gloomily meditating in a dark corner? Well, we’ve got nothing against the odd bit of gloomy meditation in a dark corner, but if that’s the only way you do philosophy, then this place might not be for you after all. Around here philosophy is an ‘in your face’ activity, you see; no room at all for those with ivory towers leanings. Nip-philosophy starts at the crack of dawn (you wish), and we take it along to the bakery, to the Hub, we spill it over coffee, we munch it over muffins. It’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere. And so there was something still missing from our setup: a Common Room.

The Common Room is inaugurated

Enter Paula and Sharon; a couple of downtown trips later, and here we are: a well-appointed and deceptively spacious common room where we’ll have a weekly philosophy lunch (on Thursdays) and a daily informal meeting place, where ideas get tossed around along with the salad cream. Cosy or what.

Deep in the NIP-cave, Crispin lays out our plans for world domination. All we need is a few more sofas

Apart from the Entitlement Workshop, the weekly seminars chugged along nicely (the only blip was that due to the aftermath of Sunday’s deluge Stewart Shapiro was prevented from paying us a much-anticipated mid-week visit) and we also had another planning meeting where the NIP future was made a little less open. I can’t spill any beans (especially not on those nice sofas), but I’ll just say that Crispin’s breadth of vision is breathtaking. Come to think of it, I need to sit down for a while to take it all in. I’d better hop along to the Common Room…

Federico Luzzi

Luzzi engrossed in conversation: what did Mary learn when going out of King's College? (the invisible interlocutor is Björn Brodowski)

As I said in the last post, it was a week of firsts at NIP, the one leading up to the Entitlement Workshop. For it wasn’t just the week of our first ever event. We also celebrated NIP’s first publication (less than a month into our existence). And the scorer was, appropriately enough, our top footballer (sorry Elia…), Federico Luzzi (better known as The Fed). His paper ‘Counter-Closure’ got accepted by the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (one more appropriate detail: the main idea for the paper had occurred to Fed while visiting the Epistemology mini-workshop at the ANU beach campus in Kioloa. At that time he was, in his own words, “jet-lagged, sunburnt and ill”—nothing a spot of beach philosophy couldn’t fix, clearly.).

And here’s Appropriate Detail No 3: NIP is closely linked to the New York Institute of Philosophy and we may well end up staging joint events at the La Pietra Villa in Florence (yes, life can be tough sometimes). Suitably enough, Fed too has got roots in both New York and Florence, as witnessed by his elegant, soft-spoken, dulcet-toned New York drawl that can break, at the drop of a cornetto, into an elegant, soft-spoken, dulcet-toned Florentine accent. And the dulcet tone points to another of Fed’s accomplishments: he’s no mean singer either, settling down beautifully, as he is, into a well-rounded baritone range—in St Andrews, he graced the stage in various G&S productions, and his departure up North has been much lamented by damsels in pinafores and several pairs of sparkling eyes.

But what about philosophy? Well, Fed did his undergraduate years in that hotbed of philosophy, Sheffield, and then moved on to another philosophical hotbed (albeit chilled by that famous North Sea breeze), St Andrews, for his MLitt. The attraction was the strong epistemology component in the department there. After a gap year mostly spent filling beer glasses from behind the counter, he thought that you could look at beer from a different, more rewarding perspective, that of the glass-emptier (a typical student preoccupation), and three profitable years at Arché followed (with a stint to Australia, as we have seen, to investigate beer-emptying habits there). Fed’s now a NIP Research Fellow, but he’s having a go at teaching too, with a rather busy schedule this semester (two logic courses and a philosophy of language one).

So, what of his record-breaking paper? Well, you all know Closure: in its post-Dretske, Williamsonian formulation it usually says something like (multi-premise complications aside): if you know that p and if you have competently deduced q from it, and you believe q on that basis, then you know q too (sometimes (e.g. Hawthorne) a further clause is added: one’s knowledge that p is retained throughout the deduction). Counter-closure shuffles things around a bit: Necessarily, if S comes to believe q solely on the basis of competent deduction from p, and S knows q, then S knows p. The principle is appealing (to the unwary). Fed, a born troublemaker, builds up a problematic case against Counter-Closure and argues that this forces a trilemma (and I quote from him again): either we have to (a) abandon Counter-Closure; or (b) revise the orthodox judgment of Fake Barns-like cases and understand them to be cases of knowledge; or (c) admit into our epistemology a novel brand of Gettier case.

Like Daedalus' statues, Luzzi flies, unless tethered down

This is in fact the core of Fed’s PhD thesis (whose uplifting title is: ‘Knowledge from Ignorance’; there’s hope for us all then) and you’ll be able to read all about it in a forthcoming issue of the AJP. For now, here’s the link to the AJP preview. And warmest congratulations to Fed for putting NIP on the publishing map so very early on indeed.

I mentioned football: Fed’s move into philosophy is undoubtedly Italy’s football team loss, judging from his decisive contribution to several Edgecliffe Cup wins by Arché against the Moral Philosophers at St Andrews. Now that NIP’s own football team is being established, Fed’s role will be essential to secure victory for our Northerly troops. Come to think of it, an expert on counter-closure is exactly what we need to thwart any sneaky incursions into our box from whichever team will dare to challenge us. Rest of the world, here we come.

Basic Knowledge: 5th Workshop. A Report

The Old Town House: lots of blue sky thinking went on here at the weekend

Few topics get as near the engine room of our practices as epistemic entitlement does.

The irony, though, is that entitlement itself (the epistemic state, whatever it is, that we’re supposed to enjoy when appropriately situated, not the notion we are arduously struggling to capture while in the philosophical closet) is an activity where we break no epistemic sweat (the heat from the engine room doesn’t quite reach us, although we brush along, unknowingly, really close to it). For entitlement, you see, is unearned warrant, epistemic theft, of sorts, without much toil but still with some (lots of, if you’re a positive kind of guy) honesty preserved; it gives us (or simply is) the right to take things on trust, to believe things without the need, or compulsion, to show others (and ourselves, when we succumb to our reflective moods) what directly supports the belief. And indeed, the whole point of entitlement is that no matter how hard we tried, we could not show a specific piece of evidence that would (or could) directly support our epistemic right to hold a certain belief (or, more trickily still: to take ourselves as being guided by a certain basic rule of inference). We’ll see (and qualify) in a moment what kind of doxastic states enjoy, allegedly, entitlement protection and how many varieties of entitlement there are (or seem to be). But a bit of reporting first; that’s, after all, what this post is all about: telling you, dear reader, what went on in the NIP-cave at the weekend.

Saturday morning session: Nikolaj takes us through the territory

Well, then, over the All Saints weekend we had our first ever event (this is a week of firsts at NIP, as the next post will also show) and appropriately enough we had both beatific visions of epistemic heaven and spooky intrusions in the shape of Truth Fairies and other quirky goddesses. NIP’s inaugural event was the Fifth AHRC-funded BK workshop and it took place in the rather wonderful Georgian-ly restrained surroundings of the recently restored Old Town House on the Aberdeen campus. The building has seen it all in its history—it has been, among other things, a court house, a police station and a masonic lodge—so a couple of days of intense forensic activity by a bunch of eager philosophers was nothing to bat an eyelid at (not that granite is prone to much eyelid-batting anyway, but never mind).

Nikolaj Pedersen taking us to the sources of entitlement

It was, by any measure, a highly successful workshop: work in varying degrees of progress was aired, friendly suggestions put forward, the odd devastating objection delivered and taken with perfectly good humour. All in that spirit of collegiality that is the hallmark of NIP’s ancestry as well as of its current and future activities. Nikolaj Pedersen opened proceedings with a very useful map of the territory. And given the contrasting uses of the term in the literature, one question comes pretty natural right from the start (and expert bootstrapper Colin Caret, on a welcome day visit from Arché, asked it): is entitlement a term of art, or are we indeed trying to capture (and make precise) a pre-existing folk notion? A bit of both, probably; but in any case, the (at times frustrating) divergence in use between, say, Burge, Wright and Peacocke may well indicate that they each are after a different quarry, so it’s no surprise at all if the notions on the table are divided by a common label. Perhaps we’d be better off jettisoning the term altogether, but usage is pretty much entrenched and there also seems to be some proprietary pride involved on part of the various practitioners. In other words, we’re stuck with the confusion and we’d better make some sense of it. Hence the usefulness of Nikolaj’s taxonomy (which, by the time the audience had finished tampering with it, gained some further refinements). Incidentally, Nikolaj didn’t actually say much about Peacocke; it was Field who completed the trio of notions up for comparison (and, inspired by this, the next few BK sessions will probably see us dip into Fieldean entitlement too: we can certainly do with a break from Burgean entitlement for a while).

Aaron Cotnoir, Colin Caret, Julien Murzi and Elia Zardini

One thing that emerged from the discussion is that when trying to pinpoint the differences between Burgean and Wrightean entitlement, appeals to externalist/internalist distinctions may not be wholly helpful. In fact, the two notions are not just distinct qua notions, but, more significantly, they’re at the service of radically separate purposes. For Burge, the point of introducing entitlement is to give epistemology as broad a base as possible. Burgean entitlement, that is, is (at least partly) of methodological interest and it is geared towards putting us in a position to give epistemic Brownie points to conceptually impoverished agents. More generally, it’s meant to allow us to give an account of why run-of-the-mill takings on trust (from testimony to perceptual inputs) even by agents of far-reaching conceptual powers are in good standing despite the unreflective stance normally adopted in such cases. Wright’s notion, by contrast, is not so much concerned with conceptual accessibility as with the availability (or rather penury) of evidence. It is aimed squarely at the question of what we should say when, in tracing the pedigree of certain cornerstone propositions (propositions whose lack of warrant would impair the execution of some privileged cognitive project), reasons give out and yet the having of warrant, for such propositions, is both rationally mandated and, seemingly, there for the taking.  Whence the rational authority of these trustings in the absence of outright reasons in their favour, we want to ask. And how can we trace their rational provenance when the trail of reasons goes cold (or turn on itself)? The pressing problem is to give an answer to these kinds of questions without lapsing into explanatory quietism. More about this a little later (but notice, for the time being, that Wright’s main concern is with our claims to knowledge, whereas Burge’s is with knowledge-conducive states irrespective of an agent’s urge to establish the soundness of her epistemic credentials).

Carrie Jenkins

After lunch, Carrie Jenkins took a break from her burgeoning career as Nottingham’s (or indeed Leibniz’s) response to Florence and the Machine to present a paper on The Truth Fairy (the artist formerly known as The Quirky Goddess). Her target was Wright’s notion of entitlement to cognitive project, one of the four sub-species of entitlement that Wright contemplates (yes, Virginia, four sub-species, you heard that right). This particular notion had already been subjected to sustained assault in Jenkins’ 2007 Synthese paper (and Duncan Pritchard had also expressed similar concerns in a 2005 paper). At the workshop, Carrie was back for more of the same. One problem Wright faces is the need to make clear why some acts of trusting are more rational than others. Some form of epistemic consequentialism might suggest itself as a way to regiment Wright’s suggestion that certain trustings are, in a given context and for a given project, the dominant strategy—on balance, better (or at least no worse) epistemic goods accrue to the agents who accept a certain cornerstone than to those who refrain from so doing. Jenkins’ Truth Fairy is meant as a challenge to this escape route, for we could imagine this kindly (or mischievous?) little fairy promising us all sorts of epistemic goodies as long as we accept some basic (and possibly pointless, or even false) proposition. The intuition here is supposed to be that acceptance, in the envisaged scenario, is no more than a practical expedient as opposed to a fully fledged rational act—there’s a fatal disconnection between the untold epistemic riches awaiting us and the puny intrinsic epistemic value of the acceptance act. It also amounts to (horribile dictu) an abdication of epistemic responsibility. And yet it is Wright’s intention that entitlement be a trusting under normative (not just pragmatic) constraints. The specific awkwardness here arises when we try to spell out the conditions that make some trustings more rational than others in the absence of a direct link to truth—the slide into mere practical rationality is but a small slippery step away, for it is not that the chosen trusting is the right thing to do because it itself is nearer the truth than its discarded competitors but rather because of the anticipated epistemic benefits that will flow from the act of acceptance.

Elia Zardini in full flight

Let’s step back a bit now and say something about the role played by entitlement within Wright’s wider concerns. Very roughly, Wright’s anti-sceptical strategy is to show that the classic project-disabling arguments deployed by the sceptic make an illicit move from the impeccably drawn conclusion that no evidence can be mustered for a certain class of beliefs (say, concerning the correct functioning of our cognitive system) to the further step (not entailed by the reasoning at that stage) that no warrant is available either, for the targeted class. Wright’s proposal is that you can have warrant even without evidence (a move missed by both parties to the dispute). The hard work starts when you have to show that the claim to warrant is a rationally supported one. And here the added difficulty is that for Wright entitlement, i.e. non-evidential warrant, (primarily) attaches not to beliefs (like in Burge’s framework) but rather to a broader doxastic notion, namely, acceptance, where only some aspects of the notion of belief are retained (mostly, those connected with commitment to action). And so, if the mark of rationality, adapting Hume’s dictum about wisdom, is that we proportion our belief to our evidence, Wright has his work cut out in making out a notion of rational epistemic value that supposedly applies to cases where we have neither belief nor evidence on hand.

Finn Spicer, Luca Moretti, Peter Graham

This is where Jenkins launches her attack: when it comes to acceptance of cornerstones, rationality had better not be a simple matter of the obtaining of best consequences, but rather of the consequences of the best rules. Wright’s response is that hinge propositions are essentially connected to the project as a whole and so truth-fairy cases do not really threaten genuine cornerstones, for the basic proposition in such cases enjoys, ex hypothesi, only incidental (if not flatly accidental) relations to the undertaking at stake. But we’re treading delicate ground here: for, given Wright’s own strictures, the pieces of quasi-belief state to which entitlements attach cannot be inflated to the rank of fully-blown reasons, and without doing that it seems difficult to endow them with enough of a rational connection to the project to make the Truth Fairy disappear in a puff of disappointed smoke. No doubt we’ll have to return to this point in some of our seminars ahead.

Duncan Pritchard

In a previous post, I announced there would be much gnashing of hinges at NIP in the session ahead, of both the metaphorical and the real variety. Duncan Pritchard, I’m told, is no slouch with a screwdriver, but on Saturday his contribution was limited to having a vigorous go at some familiar Wittgenstenian hinges (I’m pleased to report that the doors in the Old Town House all survived the weekend intact). The option explored by Pritchard in this regard was that some form of Wittgenstenian naturalism might be put at the service of quasi-epistemic entitlement, that is, the kind of entitlement under pressure from the misdoings of the Truth Fairies. Here’s a sketch of the idea: it is peculiar to entitlements that they be cases where warrant is had without the ability to recover the grounds that hold it in place. But perhaps the impossibility is only with respect to direct recovery; we may nevertheless have an indirect recovery route that can still make us fully rational (or as rational as we can get in the circumstances) in accepting hinges/cornerstones. Pritchard is still refining his neo-Wittgenstenian argument on the structure of (indirect) reasons. The difficulty will be, once again, how to navigate the fine line between cheerfully saying that while our epistemic situation unimprovably commits us to forced acceptance of cornerstones (these propositions are such that rational support for them is neither available nor mandated because the question of rationally doubting them cannot even arise) we’re still nevertheless enjoying indirect rational support for our stance and, on the other hand, and more sombrely, conceding defeat and admitting that the epistemic status of cornerstones show that in the most crucial areas of our belief system we face, as it were, an institutional lack of rational grounding. This is heady stuff and, as Duncan puts it, it is also vertigo-inducing; I for one am certainly looking forward to the final version of the paper.

Mikkel Gerken

The first day of the workshop closed with dinner in downtown Aberdeen, and with all the Halloween costume extravagance the talk at the philosophers’ tables was not, for once, the most outrageous thing around. Disappointingly, I spotted no-one donning a Truth Fairy outfit. Or maybe I didnae look hard enough. Could do with a cornucopia of epistemic riches right now.

On Sunday morning, the debauchery of the night behind us, the skies darkened ominously (as they are wont to do in such circumstances) and after the glorious weather on the Saturday we were in for a sting in the meteorological tail, as we shall see. Mikkel Gerken took the entitlement debate back to the externalist/internalist divide. Broadly speaking, Gerken adopts the Burgean division whereby entitlement is externalist warrant and justification its internalist variant. The dividing factor is accessibility of reasons/evidence. The main focus of attention was the epistemology of testimony, something on which Burge has written ground-breaking (and slightly baffling) stuff. Mikkel’s aim was to convince us that epistemic pluralism (roughly, the view that more than one type of warrant can be had by a single piece of belief, either synchronically or diachronically) about testimony is the way to go (and if the approach can be sustained, it may generalise across the epistemic board), for it can take us away from some of the false dichotomies and clashes of intuitions about the classic twin-earth cases that are the bread and butter of the literature on externalism.

Peter Graham

Peter Graham’s was the last paper in the workshop and it took us back to a form of broadly Burgean entitlement. For Burge, reliability is the key notion. Entitlement is a property that attaches to the outcomes of certain belief-forming mechanisms in a cognitive system that is functioning normally and is itself the product of a social-evolutionary history of the right sort. So, within this framework, we have entitlement because we are reliable in the appropriate way (the system developed its perceptual types in normal conditions and the belief-forming methods to whose outputs entitlements accrue are functioning normally, i.e., in line with their functional evolutionary design).

A couple of things to note, doing a bit of violence to the subtlety of both positions: for Burge, we are entitled because we function properly; for Wright, if we didn’t help ourselves to entitlements, we could not function properly (this is not quite right, but it’ll do for the purpose). As we saw, the difficulty for Wright is to say why entitlements are rational (and not merely practical), if their only role is to allow the implementation of some crucially important cognitive project. For Burgean entitlement theorists, like Peter, the problem is that too much explanatory burden is assigned to evolutionary design. Incidentally, Hartry Field is the one who can smile and relax here, for in his account the sui generis status of entitlements is straightforwardly explained because they are non-factual: the lack of sweat for the agent here is explicated on a completely different basis than on the other two accounts. Field is therefore not under any pressure to defend claims of epistemic rationality, whereas both Burge and Wright have to show that the source of the entitlement (some kind of evolutionary story for Burge and some kind of dominant strategy argument for Wright) plays an essential part in securing that status. The problem for Burge, then, as Dylan Dodd vividly showed, is that if we remove the evolutionary story (just imagine some startling scientific discovery that showed the world only came into existence relatively recently with all the species already in their wondrously appointed place), we do not feel that this suffices to remove the entitlement (would we start doubting the reliability of testimony and of our perceptual apparatus on being apprised of Darwin’s delusion?), whereas in Wright’s case if we keep the dominant strategy move in place but alter the intrinsic epistemic value of the warrant for the cornerstone, we do feel that there’s no question of the move being rational after all.

The High Street and the Market Cross, Old Aberdeen

Not another philosophical aporia, I hear you groan. Well, yes and no, because while entitlement remains as tough a customer as they come, there was also genuine progress during the workshop and much to take home and ruminate on in the BK-weeks ahead. The workshop closed, then, with a round table where lots of research questions for future work within the project and elsewhere were mooted. All in all, it could hardly have been a better start to NIP’s progress as a major research centre (there are a few more pictures in the photo gallery for this event, by the way). Meanwhile, the skies had further darkened outside, relieving themselves of a month’s supply of watery stuff in a mere 20 hours or so. Flooding blocked the railway line, forcing some of our intrepid participants to become acquainted with the interior of Montrose station to a greater degree than they had ever wished for. But not even the rage of the deluge (where is the Weather Fairy when you need her?) could dampen the enthusiasm for NIP’s nascent activities. The future, if not Sunday’s skies, is bright indeed.