Here are two quotes from the first few pages in the new reader Experimental Philosophy edited by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols.

Of course, the most salient difference is just the fact that experimental philosophers conduct experiments and conceptual analysts do not. Thus, the conceptual analyst might write, “In this case, one would surely say…,” while the experimental philosopher would write, “In this case, 79% of subjects said…” (page 4)

But just after that we get…

Not only does it seem to us that empirical considerations can be relevant here; it seems to us just obvious that empirical considerations are relevant. Surely, the degree to which an intuition is warranted depends in part on the process that generated it, and surely the best way to figure out which processes generate which intuitions is to go out and gather empirical data. How else is one supposed to proceed? (page8)

I’m not trying to engage in Gotcha! Philosophy. But the passages taken together are, at least, initially puzzling. I just wanted to point the apparent discrepancy between the two passages.

Some experimental philosophers have been trumpeting an end to our naive reliance on intuitions without some empirical verification that the sources of those intuitions are not suspect.

If the first passage above is supposed to be a claim to this effect - namely that experimental philosophy has a core methodological commitment to not to rely on intuitions without some empirical confirmation of their reliabillity, then there is an odd discrepancy between the two passages. This core commitment seems to involve accepting something like the following two principles.

1. Intuitions that come from sources S are unreliable and cannot yield knowledge because they are unreliable.
2. Intuitions that have not been empirically confirmed to not come from sources S cannot yield knowledge.
   (Let S be whatever sources the experimental philosophers take to be suspect)

These commitments seem to me to be largely supported by some kind of intuition. Intuitions that I assume experimental philosophers have not empirically confirmed the reliability of (but please let me know if I’m wrong on this).

And it looks like a defense of some version of these two principles that appeals solely to intuition is exactly what is going on in the second passage. We get several appeals to intuitions without any of the empirical confirmations that seem to be touted in the first passage as an important difference between experimental philosophy and arm chair philosophy.

Maybe I’m being a bit uncharitable here. If I am, please set me straight.

Reference
Knobe, Joshua, and Shaun Nichols. Experimental Philosophy. Oxford University Press, USA, 2008.

I’ve been writing a lot about safety accounts of knowledge recently (here and here). It’s time for more.

My concern is that DuncanPritchard’s Safety Account of Knowledge doesn’t easily avoid Kripke’s Fake Barn Country counterexample to Nozick’s Sensitivity Principle. Pritchard is aware that Jonathan Kvanvig has already raised this worry, but Pritchard’s response to Kvanvig seems unsatisfactory.

Let’s recall a version of Nozick’s Sensitivity Principle

Sensitivity Principle
If S knows P, then S does not believe P in the nearest possible world where P is not true.

Now we are to imagine Bob is traveling through Fake Barn Country. Fake Barn Country used to have a lot of regular barns that were a tourist attraction, but they’ve started to fall apart. Instead of building new barns, they build barn facades. Whenever a barn collapses, the citizens of fake barn country put up a fake brown barn in its place. Real barns are always painted red, but the red paint destroys the cheap barn facade material so they cannot make fake red barns. Now consider the following two propositions.

(RB) There is a red barn in the field.
(B) There is a barn in the field.

Bob is sensitive to (RB). In the nearest possible world where (RB) is not true, Bob doesn’t believe it. Because in the nearest possible world where (RB) is not true, there is a brown facade in its place. So, by SP Bob knows (RB). However, Bob is not sensitive to (B). In the nearest possible world where there is not a barn in front of Bob, he still believes that there is because of the facade in it’s place. So, if the Sensitivity Principle is true Bob knows that there is a red barn in the field, but he doesn’t know there is a barn in the field. This is an egregious violation of closure.

Now let’s recall Pritchard’s version of the Safety Principle.

Safety Principle
If S knows (contingent proposition) P, then in nearly all (if not all) nearby possible worlds in which S forms the belief that P in the same way that S forms the belief that P in the actual world, that agent only believes that P when P is true.

Jonathan Kvanvig argues that safety principles fare no better in barn country (Kvanvig 2004). In the original thought experiment above he would argue that (RB) is safe for Bob because in almost all of the nearby worlds Bob believes (RB) when (RB) is true.

However, Pritchard argues that Kvanvig doesn’t really have a version of the safety principle, as Pritchard construes it, in mind. According to Pritchard, Kvanvig has in mind a safety principle that only focuses on nearest possible worlds not nearby worlds. After noting this confusion, Pritchard says,

With this in mind it seems that the agent in this example does not have a safe belief in the target proposition, since in an environment where there is ban deception going on there will be a wide class of nearby possible worlds where, for example, the agent is looking at a [red] barn facade and yet is nevertheless forming a belief that she is looking at a [red] barn (it could be for instance that this is one of the barn facades that the townsfolk haven’t got around to painting [brown] yet). (Pritchard 2005, 186)

It is not, however, that easy. All we need to do is tweak the worlds so that fake red barns are not in nearby worlds. When Richard Feldman spells out Kripkean counterexamples to sensitivity principles he spells out worlds where the red paint ruins fake barns. (Feldman 2002, 89) We could even go so far as to build it into the laws of physics of the world that fake red barns are very difficult to obtain. The counterexample would run as Kripke’s original and Bob would believe in all nearby worlds that there was a red barn only when there was a red barn, but Bob would not believe in all nearby worlds that there was a barn only when there was barn. It’s very difficult to see how Pritchard could maintain that fake red barns are in nearby worlds.

A rather long post, to make a minor point.

References
Feldman, R. (2002). Epistemology. Prentice Hall.
Kvanvig, J. L. (2004). “Nozickian Epistemology and the Value of Knowledge”. Philosophical Issues, 14(1), 201-218.
Pritchard, D. (2005). Epistemic Luck. Oxford University Press.

I’m working on a revise and resubmit, and there’s an interesting issue that I’m going to have to deal with. So let me begin with a question. Is it possible to forgive someone for an action, but fail to believe that the action was wrong?

I’m inclined to say yes. Here’s three potential motivations.

Moral Skepticism
Suppose someone is a moral skeptic and they actually don’t believe that actions are morally right or wrong. It would be odd to say that it is metaphysically impossible for them to forgive someone. Surely, Walter Sinnot-Armstrong is capable of forgiving people.

Permissible Harm
Suppose someone revealed information about you that hurt you in someway, but you thought that they were well within their rights to reveal that information (suppose lives were at stake). You might be hurt or damaged by that revelation, fail to believe that the revelation was wrong, but it still seems possible for you to forgive the person for that revelation. (HT: Sarah came up with this one)

Moral Uncertainty
Forget someone who is a global moral skeptic. Suppose you’re simply unsure whether or not a particular action against you (that harmed you) was wrong or right. This seems like a perfectly intelligible thing to say “You hurt me. I’m not really sure whether it was permissible or not, but whatever the case - I forgive you” (and then proceed to act in whatever ways one should act if they have actually forgiven someone)

Anyway, those are three possible motivations for the claim that it is possible to forgive someone without believing that they have wronged you. I’d appreciate any thoughts on this.

Last week, I laid out some problems for the naive safety account of knowledge that Pritchard presents early in his book Epistemic Luck.

I wanted to get them out so that we could make sure that, whatever revisions Pritchard made to the safety account, we had a safety view that also avoided those worries.

Pritchard’s revised version does avoid those worries (one of my own students actually wrote about this for his weekly - which was awesome).

Here is the final revised version of the safety principle.

Safety Revision
If S knows P, then in nearly all (if not all) nearby possible worlds in which S forms the belief that P in the same way as she forms her belief in the actual world, S only believes P when P is true.

The same belief method clause above avoids both the Bear Beliefs Case and The Shooting Star case from the previous post. Recall that in both of those cases, I was including nearby worlds where the person does not form the belief using the same method (because they don’t form the belief at all).

However, I have a couple  of other criticisms to raise against this revised account. First, I think we’ll have generality problem worries that standard reliabilism faces. Second, Pritchard seems to think that the safety account adequately handles Gettier cases - I don’t think it does. Third, Pritchard thinks that safety accounts avoid Kripke-style Fake Barn Country objections that have been raised against Nozick’s Sensitivity Principle. I don’t think his response to these Kripke-style objections are adequate.

I’m not going to get into the generality problem issue. In the rest of this post, I’ll focus on the Gettier Case issue. In the next post, I’ll talk about Fake Barn Country.

Safety and Gettier
Pritchard seems to think that Gettier cases can all be explained because of a bad kind of epistemic luck that he thinks his safety principle rules out. I don’t think this is true.

Sheep in the Field
Imagine Bob wakes up in a field filled with lots and lots of sheep. He opens his eyes and just so happens to look in the direction of a fake sheep. Had he looked in any other direction he would would have looked at real sheep. Further fill in the details so that the only possible worlds in which there are not sheep in this field are VERY FAR OFF.

If Bob forms the belief that there is a sheep in the field on the basis of his visual perception, then it seems that he’s going to count as knowing that there is a sheep in the field. His belief is not veritically lucky as Pritchard defines it. His belief is safe as Pritchard defines it, so it seems that Pritchard’s theory of knowledge runs is not Gettier-proof the way he seems to think it is.

I think Pritchard’s view runs into Barn Country problems as well. He argues that they do not. I’ll post about that in the next post.

I just discovered what promises to be a cool plugin for Word Press. It’s called Twitter Updater. If it works, every time I publish a blog post, Word Press will automatically update my Twitter status with something that says “Published a New Post: [Title]“.

This is a test post to see if it works.

UPDATE: It works!

In this post, I wrote about the issue of using the white spaces freed up by the switch to digital TV to enable wide-spread affordable high speed internet (especially in rural areas).

The FCC just voted to do that!

As I noted in the previous post, this is not some issue that only technophiles should care about. There are enormous social benefits at stake here (especially for the economically disadvantaged). So…be happy.

In the epistemology class I’m teaching, we’ve moved on from Bergmann’s book to Pritchard’s book Epistemic Luck.

Here’s a principle that Pritchard ultimately is going to defend.

Safety Principle
If S knows P, then S believes P in most nearby worlds where P is true

This is not to be confused with the Nozickean/Dretskean tracking/sensitivity type principles (e.g., where S knows P just in case S believes P in the nearest possible world where P is true and does not believe P in the nearest possible world where P is false.)

Pritchard introduces this principle and notes that we’re going to need to refine it in order to avoid some problems. (For example, it seems as though Kvanvig has a modfied Barn Country scenario that would apply to this principle) - so I haven’t thought carefully yet about whether Pritchard’s refinements will handle the two cases I’m about to present. Nevertheless, I want to get them down before I forget them.

Bear Hating Neuroscientists
Suppose you have a band of bear hating neuroscientists who want to wipe out all beliefs in the existence of bears. They put a chemical in the world’s water supply for 7 days. Through a series of very bizzare coincidences you never actually drink the water from the water supply, but there are MANY, MANY nearby worlds where you do.

You can fill in the details of the scenario however you like. Suppose you were accidentally locked in the basement for two days. You nearly got out on several occasions - so there are many nearby worlds where you are not locked in the basement. You have a case of bottled water which you very nearly didn’t get. You get locked in the basement again for a few days and you very nearly weren’t.

A week goes by, and you’re one of the few people in the world who still has the capacity to believe in bears. You walk out and see a bear. It seems that you know there is a bear in front of you, however, it’s not true that in most of the nearby worlds you believe that proposition when it’s true - given all of the many, many ways in which you narrowly escaped ingesting the chemical.

Lucky to Have Looked
Suppose you have attention deficit disorder, and never can focus on any one thing for a long period of time - you just happen to glance up at the sky when there is a shooting star. I imagine we can, given your ADD and some other facts about you, cook this case up so that there are many nearby worlds where it’s true that there is a shooting star there - but you don’t believe it. It seems like you still know that there is a shooting star.

Again, I quickly read through chapter 6 a while back, and I know he says earlier in the book that Safety must be tweaked. I just want to get these down, so we can assess whether his proposed tweaks successfully avoid these counterexamples.

Here

Here’s a good discussion about how eVoting should be done.

Of particular interest, is the case made for using an open source software for the electronic voting machines.

With closed-source, proprietary software a company has the perfect cover to pull some cloak-and-dagger stuff (e.g., insert a backdoor program that allows for the creator to manually change results, or a simple algorithm that swaps a preset percentage of votes).

With open-source everyone could view the code, and there would be plenty of eyes out there to spot suspicious bits of code.

Last week I wrote about the Open Office 3.0 note feature. If you have students submit papers electronically - OpenOffice 3.0 is a big improvement - because you can type notes and comments that appear in colored bubbles in the margins.

The problem is that in OpenOffice 3.0 these comment bubbles appear outside the printable margin. You cannot print a copy of the paper with your comments in the format that you see on the screen. In MS Office, you can.

Students can view the comments in the neat format on their computers - so it’s not a complete loss. But if you or your students ever wanted to print the paper out in the neat format (from OpenOffice) - there is no option to do that.

I figured out a simple way around this.

In Windows, Mac, and even Ubuntu(Linux) you simply need to download the MS Word Viewer. Open the file that you edit in OpenOffice in MS Word Viewer and you’ll get a file with the comments displayed in pretty bubbles that are inside the printable margin.

To do this in Ubuntu you’ll need to install the MS Word Viewer in Wine. It’s easy.

Ubuntu Users

1. Install Wine (if you haven’t already)
   If you are using Ubuntu, you can now install Wine by
   clicking this link. Alternatively, you can install by going to
   Applications->Add/Remove and searching for Wine.
2. Download the MS Word Viewer file for Windows.
3. Right-click on the execute file
4. Select “Open with Wine Windows Program Manager”

The Application should install. Now when you type comments in OpenOffice. You can re-open the saved file in you MS Word Viewer and the comments appear in the margins. You can print the paper, and the comments show up in the margins.