Introducing Philosophy Journal Mashups!

Any philosophy journal with an RSS feed can be run through a mashup program. Mashups combine multiple RSS feeds and automatically screen those feeds for specific content. Once you've screened the journal articles for the kind of content you want, you can turn the results into a widget to post on a blog.

I tried one out for epistemology. I plugged in the feeds from some of the top philosophy journals and then entered in search criteria so that only journal articles with the right epistemology words in the title made it through. The result was a pretty awesome blog widget that cherry picks many (but not all) of the most recent epistemology articles from some of the top philosophy journals. How awesome is that?

Right now I just have an epistemology mashup, but I'll eventually put up mashups for metaphysics, philosophy of language, mind, ethics, and philosophy of religion. (You may have noticed the new look - the new left-hand column will be for philosophy journal mashups).

Below is more information concerning the search criteria for the mashups, so you can have some idea of what will be caught by the widget and what will not be caught by the widget. I welcome any suggestions for perfecting the widget (especially with respect to keywords that - when in a title - pretty much guarantee an article on the topic of the mashup).


Enjoy the mashups!

Journals Tracked (for all Mashups)
Journals Screened:
Analysis (Blackwell)
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (Blackwell)
Mind
Nous (Blackwell site)
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (Blackwell site)
Philosophical Quarterly (Blackwell)
Philosophical Review
(I'll be adding more journals soon)

Journals Attempted
Journal of Philosophy (no feed)

Epistemology Mashup (Keywords: Title Search)
knowledge
epistemic
evidentialism
reliabilism
proper functionalism
foundationalism
coherentism
internalism (I'm worried that this might be too permissive)
externalism (I'm worried that this might be too permissive)
contextualism (this one sometimes brings up 'moral contextualism')
justification
gettier
skepticism
scepticism (I found that both spellings are necessary)
safety
a priori
testimony
testimonial
common sense
proper functionalism
proper function
accessibilism
epistemic luck
fallibilism
infallibilism
warrant

Tracking Rule Disclaimer
As of right now the mashup only tracks the above listed journals. It only screens the titles from those journal for one of the above keywords. If one of the above keywords appears in the title of any recent articles from the above listed journals, then the mashup permits the article through to the widget (so don't get lazy. This IS NOT going to catch all the wonderful epistemology that's out there.)

I'll add more journals and tracking rules when I have time. I welcome any suggestions.

I just arrived in Madison for the Wisconsin Epistemology Conference. It's going to be awesome. The line-up of speakers is great.

Kudos to Juan Comesaña for organizing this.

I've got some ideas that occurred to me on the plane. I'll post them in a bit, but right now I'm going to go find breakfast.

Stay tuned.

Here's one standard way to formulate the skeptical paradox.

1. I know that I have hands.
2. I don't know I'm not a brain-in-a-vat.
3. If I don't know that I'm not a brain-in-a-vat, then I don't know that I have hands.
   

These three sentences cannot all be true, and yet each one seems plausible. Here are the standard replies.

The Standard Replies

Option One: Skepticism
We deny (1.)

Option Two: Dogmatist
We deny (2.)

Option Three: Closure Hater
Most people think that knowledge is closed under entailment. If we deny that, we're in a position to deny (3.)

Option Four: Contextualist
Utterances of (1.) and (2.) are never true in the same context. Which of the two we deny will depend on the context in which the sentences are uttered.

All of these responses treat the knowledge relation (or relations if you're a contextualist) as binary relations between a person and proposition.

Enter Contrastivism
Contrastivism holds that knowledge ascriptions do not express a binary relation. Knowledge ascriptions express a ternary relation between a person, a proposition, and a second contrast proposition. (see Contrastive Knowledge.)

I won't get into the details of the constrastivist resolution of the paradox just yet, I'm more interested in a passage from Schaffer criticizing the skeptic and dogmatist.

I object to skepticism and dogmatism on two parallel counts. First, the denials of [1] and [2] strike me as absurd. At least, some explanation is needed of their plausibility. Second, skepticism and dogmatism collapse distinctions. Suppose that Student, Assistant, and Professor are visiting the zebras at the zoo. Student is remarkably ignorant, and can’t even discern a zebra from a mule; Assistant can discern a zebra from a mule by its stripes, but cannot discern a zebra from a cleverly pained mule; Professor can discern a zebra even from a cleverly painted mule by anatomical features that no mere paint job can disguise. The skeptic confuses Student with Assistant, denying that either knows that the beast is a zebra, since neither can eliminate the painted mule hypothesis. The dogmatist confuses Assistant with Professor, maintaining that both know that the beast is a zebra, since both can eliminate the unpainted mule hypothesis. Both skepticism and dogmatism thereby distort partial knowledge. [emphasis added]

I'm interested in the last few sentences. My money is on dogmatism, so maybe I'm missing something rather simple here. Why can't the dogmatist capture intuitions about partial knowledge in the following way?

A. The student doesn't know it's a zebra
B. The assistant knows it's a zebra, but the degree of justification (or warrant) is moderate.
C. The professor knows it's a zebra, and the degree of justification (or warrant) is really high.

The basic idea is that I would not need contrastivism to capture any intuitions that someone like Schaffer has about partial knowledge - all I would need is that justification (or warrant) comes in degrees. Am I overlooking something here?

Joshua Thurow is here for our second set of lectures in the Young Philosophers Lecture Series. He gave a great talk yesterday developing and defending BonJour's Generality Argument for the conclusion that we have some a priori knowledge.

Today he is giving an introductory level talk titled "Is Morality Real, or Do We Make it Up?" Both talks will be available at the website sometime next week.

A couple of really interesting issues came up in his research talk last night. I'll post about those soon.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Our call for papers for the Fall 2008 Young Philosophers Lecture Series is out! Deadline is August 15th. If you'd be interested in presenting in the Young Philosophers Lecture Series - check out the call for papers at www.youngphilosophers.org

I'm hoping readers will oblige me with a little intuition check. Consider the following scenario.

Cross-Check Your Perception with Another Person's Perception
You seem to see a tiger. You're very surprised to see a tiger. They don't live around these parts. You ask a friend. Do you seem to see a tiger. Your friend says, "Yes. I see a tiger."

Remember this is just a test of your intuitions. It's also a test of PollDaddy. If this works well, I may use this to do more intuition checks in the future.

I'm curious how many people out there discuss the Analysis of Knowledge literature when they teach Epistemology in their general Introduction to Philosophy courses. I suspect there are a lot of people who don't.

I thought it would be worth saying why I like to include Gettier discussions when I start epistemology in my introduction to philosophy courses.t.

1. Epistemology isn't just about skepticism.

Epistemologists don't sit around all day trying to come up with responses to skepticism. If you think skepticism is mistaken, there are still a wide range of really interesting issues and puzzles to think about in epistemology.

2. Conceptual Analysis

I like to draw attention to that wonderful tool we call conceptual analysis. What do you do when you want to analyze the concept of a person? Step One: Start with some obvious cases of persons and some obvious cases of non-persons. Step Two: See what sorts of properties the obvious cases of persons have that the non-obvious cases lack. Step Three: Use those properties to construct a candidate analysis. Step Four: See what interesting consequences this analysis has and test analysis against other intuitions.

The analysis of knowledge debate is one more example of a kind of skill I think philosophy should help students develop.

3. Familiarity with the Analysis of Knowledge Debate Helps One Discuss Skepticism

A lot of skeptical arguments place some very stringent constraint on knowledge. Something like:

(I) If S knows that P, then it is not possible for S to believe P on the basis of S's current evidence and be wrong.

One way to respond to the skeptic is to try and explain away our infallibilist intuitions.

Having students start epistemology by discussing The Analysis of Knowledge and Gettier cases puts them in a position to see that these infallibilist intuitions aren't usually this wide-spread.

I remind my students about something that happened when I walked them through the 4-step process for analyzing knowledge. First, we listed what many would regard as obvious cases of knowledge. When we got to step 2 and started trying to figure out what the obvious cases of knowledge had in common that at least some of the cases of non-knowledge lack, students were very quick to say, "All of those cases of knowledge are true, " "All of those knowledge cases are believed," or "All of those knowledge cases have good evidence for them..." - rarely does anything like impossibility of error come up.

Add that interesting fact to some other attempts in the literature to explain away infallibilist intuitions, and you've got a case for fallibilism that doesn't look so bad.

About a month ago, I posted about an article that presents some interesting experiments involving perception. You don't have to click that link...here's the relevant bit.

It turns out that there are many cases in which what people expect to see tricks them into thinking they saw it. For example, they had people watch someone throw two balls. The thrower then pretended to throw a third ball. Most people think they see a third ball that suddenly disappears in mid-air. They don't even realize that a third ball wasn't thrown. Their first thought is usually that the person somehow made the third ball disappear.

I started having some vague concerns about how these findings might impact recent attempts from in experimental philosophy to undermine the claim that intuitions can yield justified beliefs.

I decided that I need to start looking more closely at some of the experimental philosophy literature. In my search, I just discovered that Ethics Etc is doing a review of a new book out called Experiments in Ethics. Here's the review of chapter one, chapter two, and chapter three. This book has just been added to my to do list. (My summer is going to be great!)

I'm want to look into this more before I really start mouthing off, but here's my vague worry.

In the case of the experiment involving perception it seems that some mechanism stepped in and yielded a false perception. The existence of this mechanism isn't enough to show that perceptions are generally unreliable. I bet there are other experiments out there involving perception. I think they're going to be worth tracking down. They're going to be relevant to fleshing out precisely what experiments involving intuitions should tell us about the general reliability of intuitions.

Many of the experiments (that I've come across) attempting to show that intuitions are unreliable seem to involve certain kinds of priming. If you prime people with certain kinds of questions or set up the cases in which they have certain expectations or assumptions about the cases, they'll intuitions will vary. Set up the cases one way - they'll have an intuition that an action is wrong. Set it up another way - they'll have an intuition that an action is permissible.

The conclusion that some philosophers draw from these experiments is that intuitions are generally unreliable and cannot justify moral beliefs.

My suspicion (and it is merely that - a suspicion) is that it will be tricky to explain why these experiments involving intuition cut against the general reliability of intuitions, but the perception experiments do not cut against the general reliability of perception. That said - I think I should wait until I've looked into both sets of experiments in more detail before I say more.

(For those of you who know more about the literature, feel free to mouth-off in the comments.)

In the last few hours, I've stumbled on quite a few cool bits of philosophy...

1. Mike Almeida has a pretty interesting post on Multiverse responses to a variety of versions of the Problem of Evil here.

2. Carrie Jenkins just suggested that we might be able to handle Kripkenstein Undetermination Worries in a (roughly) analogous way that epistemologists might handle Drestke Cleverly Disguised Mule cases.

3. Lewis Powell just pointed out some very cool papers by Mark Schroeder. The one I've been reading through argues that a common argument against Divine Command Theory generalizes to just about any moral theory. We then get a diagnosis of where the original argument goes wrong. I'm only about half-way through the paper, but it's a good read so far. Here's the link.

This is a pretty interesting article that was just posted on Slashdot. It summarizes some pretty cool findings that should be of interest to philosophers interested in issues related to epistemology and perception.

It turns out that there are many cases in which what people expect to see tricks them into thinking they saw it. For example, they had people watch someone throw two balls. The thrower then pretended to throw a third ball. Most people think they see a third ball that suddenly disappears in mid-air. They don't even realize that a third ball wasn't thrown. Their first thought is usually that the person somehow made the third ball disappear.

The research article that Slashdot summarizes is available here.

This starts off as what purports to be a discussion of the misuse of the expression "begging the question"...

Half way through the article, it stops being serious and gets pretty funny.

But it's worth noting that before the article goes humorous, the author gives an example of a valid modus tollens as begging the question. Which begs the question (in the wrong sense of the word) - Why don't philosophers just stop using this phrase? We clearly think that to do philosophy (or any kind of reasoning) we must employ logically valid arguments, but all logically valid arguments, in some sense, assume what they are proving. After all, the thing being proved is contained in the conjunction of the premises.

And this is not some recent discovery. The literature is full of papers discussing the messy, unclear nature of this kind of criticism.

One possible skeptical scenario is Russell's 5 minute hypothesis. This is from The Analysis of Mind...

In investigating memory-beliefs, there are certain points which must be borne in mind. In the first place, everything constituting a memory-belief is happening now, not in that past time to which the belief is said to refer. It is not logically necessary to the existence of a memory-belief that the event remembered should have occurred, or even that the past should have existed at all. There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago. Hence the occurrences which are CALLED knowledge of the past are logically independent of the past; they are wholly analysable into present contents, which might, theoretically, be just what they are even if no past had existed.

I am not suggesting that the non-existence of the past should be entertained as a serious hypothesis. Like all sceptical hypotheses, it is logically tenable, but uninteresting. All that I am doing is to use its logical tenability as a help in the analysis of what occurs when we remember.

Today's New York Times has a story claiming that there are certain hypotheses that cosmologists take seriously that other cosmologists say predict that the Russell scenario is highly probable.

(They don't call it the Russell hypothesis, but that's what they're talking about).

UPDATE: I should be more careful. It's not that what some cosmologists say predict Russell's skeptical scenario...The scenario that Russell imagines is that the universe was created 5 minutes ago. The cosmologists in question endorse the multiple universe hypothesis - this is incompatible with Russell's scenario...so it can't confirm it.

What some cosmologists think it does confirm, however, is the hypothesis that it is highly probably that you are just a momentary flash of organized matter created just moments ago that is complex enough to have thoughts and apparent memories of having been around for a long time.

UPDATE: I posted this same thing over at Prosblogion - there's been some discussion there.

We don’t have a complete science of the brain yet, but look at what recent neuro-science has shown. Don’t the recent successes of neuro-science give us good reason to believe that there will one day be adequate evidence for the proposition that the brain is completely scientifically explainable. Shouldn’t we then now think that the brain is completely scientifically explainable?

I think many would find something like the above reasoning plausible. I have to admit I find it plausible, and there are a few other kinds of arguments out there in philosophy that make a similar kind of move.

But here is where I start to get worried. For these strategies to work, something like the following principle must be true.

(1) If S is justified in believing that at some future time S will be justified in believing P, then S is justified in believing P now.

However, this won't do. I am justified in believing that, at some future time, it will be reasonable for me to believe that my dog is dead. After all, I'm pretty sure my dog isn't immortal. That doesn't mean I'm justified in believing that my dog is dead now. We might think there is a quick fix that can get around this.

(1*) If S is justified in believing (at T), both that
i. At some future time it S will be justified in believing P
AND
ii if P is true at some future time, then P is true at T,
then S is justified in believing P at T.

This gets around the dog worry, and would allow the inference in the first paragraph to go through. But suppose I have severe alzheimer's. My wife tells me that once I am to the point where I can't remember her anymore, she will insist to my face that she has never met me before. I am justified in believing right now that I will be justified in believing that I never met Sarah. I'm also justified in believing that if I never met Sarah at some future time, then I never met her now. So this revised principle doesn't work either.

You might think the problem is that in both counter examples the person in question is justified in believing at T that the relevant proposition is false at T.

(1**)
IF S is justified in believing (at T), both that
i. At some future time it S will be justified in believing P
AND
ii. if P is true at some future time, then P is true at T,
AND
iii. S is not justified in believing that P is false at T,
THEN S is justified in believing P at T.

But we can modify the alzheimer's case, suppose I learn that someone named Sue is going to do the same thing that my wife does. I am given very good reasons to believe that I should right not be skeptical whether or not I have ever met Sue. So, I'm not justified in believing (at T) that I have never met Sue. In this case, I would satisfy the antecedent of (1**), but I don't think I'm justified in believing (at T) that I never met Sue.

Thoughts?