Problematizing the B Condition on Knowledge

Central to contemporary epistemology is the question of what it is to know something. And the orthodox starting point in discussions of what it is to know something is the "JTB account" of knowledge: Knowledge is justified (J) true (T) belief (B), plus maybe some fourth condition to take care of weird cases where justified beliefs are true merely by accident (so-called Gettier cases). Discussion tends to focus on how to understand the J condition and whether some further fourth condition is necessary. The truth and belief conditions are typically regarded as unproblematic.

In a forthcoming paper, Blake Myers-Schulz and I pick up a mostly-cold torch from Colin Radford (whose seminal work on this topic was in the 1960s) and challenge the belief condition. Can one know that something is the case even if one doesn't believe that it's the case? We offer five plausible cases (one adapted from Radford) along with empirical evidence that our intuitions [note 1] about these cases are not idiosyncratic.

This paper has already drawn several follow-up studies, some critical and some supportive -- but interestingly, even the critical studies can be read as contributing to an emerging consensus that problematizes the belief condition. (I don't predict the consensus will last. They never do in philosophy. But still!)

First, to give you a feel for it, our cases:

1. An unconfident examinee who feels like she is guessing the answer but non-accidentally gets it right;

2. An absent-minded driver who momentarily forgets that a bridge he normally takes to work is closed and continues en route toward that bridge;

3. A prejudiced professor, who intellectually appreciates that her athletic students are just as capable as her non-athletic students but who nonetheless is persistently biased in her reactions to student-athletes;

4. A freaked-out movie-watcher who seems to have the momentary impression that the scenario depicted in a horror film is real;

5. A self-deceived husband who has lots of evidence that his wife is cheating and some emotional responses that seem to reveal that he knows this, but who refuses to admit the truth to himself.

Now maybe not all the cases work, but we think in each case there's at least some plausibility to the thought that the person in question knows (that Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, that the bridge is closed, that athletic students are just as capable, that aliens won't come out of her faucet, that his wife is cheating) but does not believe -- at least not as fully and determinately as she knows. And lots of undergraduates seem to agree with us! So we think the B condition on knowledge should at least be open for discussion. It should not be regarded as uncontroversially nonproblematic.

Follow-up studies (e.g., here, here, here, and here) have added some new plausible cases. Our favorite of these is:

6. A religious fundamentalist geocentrist who aces her astronomy class -- seeming to know that Earth revolves around the sun but not to believe it.

Although some of these follow-up studies are pitched as in agreement with us and others as critique, we think there's actually a pretty clear thread of consensus through it all, from a bird's-eye view:

Knowledge requires some sort of psychological connection to the justified, true proposition -- something broadly like a belief condition; but it doesn't seem to require full-on act-it-and-live-it-and-breathe-it belief. However reasonable it might be to think the Earth goes round the sun, that fact has to register with me cognitively in some way if I am to qualify as knowing it; but the fact needn't play the full functional role of belief as envisioned in behaviorally-rich accounts of belief like my own. But how exactly should we should conceptualize this somewhat weak but broadly beliefish psychological-connectedness condition? At this point, that's wide open.

Blake and I suggest that one must have the capacity to act on the stored information that P; Rose and Schaffer seem to suggest that what's crucial is that the information be "available to the mind"; Buckwalter and colleagues suggest that one must believe but only in some "thin" sense of belief; Murray and colleagues suggest that one need to be disposed to "assent" to the content. None of these approaches are well specified (and I've simplified them somewhat; apologies). Figuring out what's going on with the B condition thus seems like a potentially fruitful task that brings together core issues in epistemology and philosophy of mind.

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[note 1] Yes, I use the word "intuition". Herman Cappelen has me worried about the term. But I stand firm!

Hans Reichenbach's Cubical World and Elliott Sober's Beach

In his 1938 book, Hans Reichenbach imagines a "cubical world" whose inhabitants are prevented from approaching the sides. Outside the world, birds fly, whose silhouettes show on the translucent ceiling of the world. A "friendly ghost" has arranged lights and mirrors so that identical silhouettes also appear on one wall of the world, so that any time a silhouette on the ceiling flaps its wings so also, in perfect correspondence, a silhouette on the wall flaps its wings, etc.

Here's Reichenbach's diagram:

The inhabitants of this world, Reichenbach says, will eventually come to infer that something exists beyond the cubical boundary that causes the shadows on the ceiling and wall. So also likewise, he says, can we infer, from the patterns of relationship among our experiences, that something exists beyond those experiences, causing them.

It is crucial to Reichenbach's argument that the inhabitants of this world ("cubists", let's call them) infer the existence of something beyond the walls that is the common cause of the pairs of corresponding silhouettes. If the cubists could reasonably believe that only the shadows existed, with laws of relation among them, no external world would follow; and so correspondingly in the experiential case there might only be laws of relationship among our experiences with no external common cause beyond.

Unfortunately, it's obscure why Reichenbach thinks the cubists couldn't instead reach the conclusion that the shadows on the ceiling directly affect the shadows on the wall or vice versa, e.g., by the transmission of invisible and unblockable waves through the interior of the cube or simply by action at a distance. (In Reichenbach's mirror set-up, height has no influence on the bird's ceiling position but it does influence position on the wall; and the reverse holds for horizontal position; but direct-causers can posit hidden-variable explanations or similar.) Reichenbach addresses this worry with a single sentence: Within the confines of cubical world, he says, the cubists will have found that "Whenever there were corresponding shadow-figures like spots on the screen, there was in addition, a third body with independent existence", so they'll reasonably regard it as likely that the same is true on their walls (p. 123).

There are two serious problems with this response. First, it cannot be straightforwardly adapted to the sensory-experience/external-world case, which is of course the real aim of Reichenbach's argument. Second, it is false anyway: We can readily construct cases where one spot on a screen causes another on a separate screen without a common cause behind them, e.g. by using a mirror to reflect light from one screen onto another or by making the first screen sufficiently translucent and staging the second screen directly behind it; this is no less natural than the friendly ghost's arrangement.

In a 2011 article, Elliott Sober (the Reichenbach professor at UW-Madison!) notices the weaknesses in Reichenbach's argument and offers a new approach in its place. Call it Sober's beach.

Sober imagines sitting on the beach, noticing the correlation between visual experiences of waves breaking on the beach and auditory experiences of crashing waves. The two types of experience cannot be related as cause and effect because he can stop one while the other continues: When he closes his eyes he still hears the crashing; when he stops his ears he still sees the breakers. Presumably, then, there's a common cause of both.

So far, so good. But to establish an external world beyond the realm of experience, we must establish that this common cause is something outside the realm of experience. Sober responds to this concern by considering one solipsistic alternative: the intention to go to the beach. He then argues that this intention cannot serve as an adequate common cause because the visual and auditory experiences are correlated beyond what would follow simply from taking the intention into account. So he challenges the solipsist to produce a more adequate common cause. He suggests that this challenge cannot be met.

But it can be met! Or so I think. The common cause could be my first beach-like experience. This experience, whether auditory or visual or both, then causes subsequent beach-like experiences. That takes care of the correlation. If I have an experience as of closing my eyes, the auditory experience at time 1 causes the auditory experience at time 2 and also the visual experience at time 2 conditionally upon my having an experience as of opening my eyes; analogously if I stop my ears. The solipsist can either play this out with the first experience causing all the subsequent ones until conditions change, or she can have each experience cause the next in a chain. On the chaining version, if I have my eyes and ears simultaneously closed, my opinion that I will soon have beach-like experiences then does the causal work. (There are imperfections in these regularities, of course, e.g., I might seem to myself to have booted up an an audiorecording of waves, but to take advantage of those imperfections is contrary to the spirit of the toy example and would cause trouble for Sober's model too.)

I agree in spirit with what Reichenbach and Sober are trying to do -- and Bertrand Russell, and Jonathan Vogel. The most reasonable explanation of the patterns in my experience is that there is an external world behind those experiences. But the argument isn't quite as easy as it looks! That's why you need to read Alan Moore's and my paper on the topic. (Or for short blog-post versions of our arguments, see here, here, and here.)

Revised 4:42 pm.

How to Give $1 Million a Year to Philosophers

I hate grants.

I got into philosophy to think and to read and to teach -- to write articles and blog posts, to meet with grad students, to put together engaging classes for undergrads, to argue with colleagues. That's what I want to do with my time. What I don't want to do is spend lots of time applying for grant money.

And society should feel the same way. I'm an employee of the University of California, my salary funded by taxpayers. Taxpayers want me to teach. Taxpayers should want me to do research too -- if for no other reason than to make me the kind of leading scholar who can teach cutting-edge classes. But taxpayers should not be paying me to spend large amounts of time writing down stuff to convince some committee that I deserve money more than Professors X, Y, and Z deserve money. The amount of time academics spend applying for grants is a giant, loathsome waste of energy of some of the most capable minds in the world.

Plus, why should we want to tie researchers down to what they thought they wanted to do two years ago, when they applied? Times change, ideas mature, opportunities arise!

But society has to fund research, right? So there need to be grants out there to support researchers.

The solution is simple: Give money to researchers for their research without their having to apply, and let them spend it on any reasonable research expenses. That should be the dominant model of grant funding. The committees that award grant money should spend their time finding out who, based on recent performance, is likely to put research money to best use, and they should simply hand those people the money. This will free up the time of those people to do more of their interesting research. Think MacArthur "genius" grants on a small scale.

A few strings should be attached, so that recipients don't just pocket the money as salary. Suppose you're a foundation with $1 million a year to fund philosophical research on Topic X. Here's how you might do it. Form a committee of leading scholars on Topic X. Have them find 40 people who are actively doing excellent work on Topic X -- from post-docs through distinguished professors, some at every level. And then send each of the potential recipients a letter offering them $25,000 over the course of five years, with the following two conditions: (1.) The money be spent only on documented research expenses (provide a list of allowable expenses), and (2.) In the last year they receive money, they come to your annual conference to present some of their research on Topic X. (Right, you now have to host an annual conference on Topic X, where your brilliant researchers can argue with each other. That seems like a good idea anyway, doesn't it?)

(Or make it $10,000 to 100, or $100,000 to 10, or whatever -- depending on the committee's vision.)

A good committee (maybe eventually composed of past recipients) can easily identify a good pool of leading active researchers on Topic X. Look at who is publishing; look at who is presenting at conferences; etc. Those are the people to fund. They want to travel; they want to buy sabbatical time to be able to focus better on their research; they want to spend money on books and equipment and graduate student research assistants. I predict that the committee would end up funding better research overall, with less waste -- at least in philosophy -- than if they wait for applicants to come to them, funding on the basis of shiny-tight-looking proposals.

If the committee is especially interested in encouraging certain sorts of activities, the committee could also offer some funding contingent on executing those activities: $15,000 of research money if the recipient is willing to use it to organize a mini-conference, $4,000 bonus research money if the recipient speaks at four universities in continental Europe, whatever.

To counteract some of the elitism inherent in the proposal, the committee should be especially directed to look for researchers with large teaching loads and non-elite appointments who are able to be research-productive nonetheless. Such people especially deserve funding, and they might be especially likely to put their funding to good use.

I don't think this is the only way research should be funded. The standard model can still play a role: People with no brilliant track record, or who have been overlooked by the committee, should be funded if they can put together excellent proposals. Some people might have especially ambitious visions requiring sums of money larger than the usual amounts. For these cases -- but, I would argue, only for these cases -- the standard granting model makes sense.

(Templeton, are you listening?)

Update March 19:

In the comments, Neil reminded me about people whose salary is paid for by grants. This can easily be added to my system. One way is contingent directed funding: Offer some recipients $N of funding for a post-doc if they are willing to do the search and supervision. Another way is to have people apply for either renewable or non-renewable salaried grants, much as they might apply for a job. For the renewable ones, continuation would be based on actual performance during the lifetime of the grant.

Update April 9:

See Helen De Cruz's excellent post on this at NewAPPS, too.

The Coolest of All Possible Worlds (a Theodicy for the 21st Century)

If I knew that there were a planet with life on the far side of the galaxy, with no hope of contact with us, what would I wish for it? Not that it be merely bacteria, nor that it be merely happy cows, but rather that it soar with the heights of civilization, science, the arts, philosophy -- right? Wouldn't that be better, cooler? Let's, see, what else....

"Really cool wars?" suggests one of my TAs (Will Swanson), when I run the idea by him.

Yesterday, another one of my TAs (Meredith McFadden) was guest lecturing to my course, Philosophy 5 ("Evil"), on "the problem of evil": If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent, this should be the best of all possible worlds, shouldn't it? But it doesn't look like the best of all possible worlds. There are of course some traditional theological responses to this problem, though they all face considerable obstacles. However, with the help of Will's suggestion about wars, we might construct a somewhat different theodicy. In this theodicy, God is not omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent but rather:
(1.) omnipotent,
(2.) omniscient, and
(3.) super-cool.

Thus, instead of creating the best of all possible worlds, God creates the coolest of all possible worlds. The question then arises: Do we in fact live in the coolest of all possible worlds?

My first inclination is to say no. But the super-cool theologian can respond to some of the obvious objections. The issue isn't entirely straightforward.

Objection 1: The world would be cooler if magic were real.
Reply 1: No, if magic were real, we would just call it physics. Maybe, in this sense, magnetism is magic. It's much cooler for magic to be imaginary. (I owe this point also to Will.)

Objection 2: The world would be cooler if aliens were real.
Reply 2: The universe is large enough that aliens probably are real. We're not in contact with them (yet?), but it's not obviously cooler to have a universe in which every intelligent species is in contact with other intelligent species than to have a universe in which some intelligent species are isolated.

Objection 3: The world would be cooler if dorky person X didn't exist.
Reply 3: Although joy seems to be possible without suffering (a problem for traditional theodicies, especially those with a Heaven), coolness is arguably impossible without uncoolness as a contrast. For example, The Rolling Stones wouldn't have been nearly so cool if there weren't also dorky Beatles-imitators to contrast with.

Objection 4: The Holocaust was seriously uncool, and in a way that cannot be fully counterbalanced by any contrast effect.

Now before I reply let me say that I don't think this reply ultimately works, and I am reluctant to say anything good about the Holocaust. But theologians who think that this is the best of all possible worlds are in an even worse position, because all the super-cool theologian needs to say is that the world is cooler for having had the Holocaust than for not having had it -- not that the world is better all things considered for having had the Holocaust.

Reply 4: Let's suppose that the super-cool theologian does in fact buy into the idea of cool wars -- buys into the idea that violence, disaster, and tragedy can make for a cooler world than a world in which people are always placid and happy. Maybe The Lord of the Rings can be a model here. If Tolkien's world is cool, well, Sauron perpetrates some serious death and horror, and that's essential to the coolness of the world. If we think about Tolkien's world or a world on the other side of the galaxy, maybe we can warm up to the idea that huge amounts of horrible tragedy and undeserved suffering can belong in a maximally cool world, if there's also enough triumph at the end. Will likes Nietzsche, and maybe this attitude fits with Nietzschean yes-saying to even the most horrible aspects of the world.

Alternatively, maybe we can do some natural theology here: We can try to infer the attributes of God by looking out at the world God chose to create. If God was going for coolness, God must have thought a world with the Holocaust would be cooler than one without. Maybe this says something about God's moral character. Maybe we're like soldier ants God finds it cool to shake up and watch fight? A God with little sympathy for us but an interest in "cool wars" might think Nazis are the coolest bad guys, in part because because of the irredeemably evil awfulness of the Holocaust. I can't say that I would be fond of such a God, but if "coolness" isn't sharply separable from benevolence, super-cool theology is no real alternative to orthodoxy.

A Euthyphro question arises. Is something cool because it is seen as cool by the super-cool God, or is God super-cool because God loves things that are cool -- things that would be cool regardless of God's preferences? Although there are surely limits -- an uncool dork God seems possible -- to some extent it seems God could make things cool by finding them cool. For example, if God started wearing hightop sneakers, that might make hightop sneakers cooler than they would be if God weren't wearing them. I doubt this works for the Holocaust though.

The picture, then, would be an unbenevolent God who is entirely willing to inflict vast undeserved suffering in the interests of a "cool" historical arc, with maybe some triumphs and awesomeness down the road that we can't yet anticipate, and for whom uncoolness is justified mainly to make current and future coolness pop out ever more coolly. I can't say we have great evidence for this view. But a sufficiently motivated theist might find it avoids some of the problems that flow from assuming divine benevolence.

[Revised March 13]

Against the One True Kant

I start with two premises:
Premise 1: All human beings are bad at philosophy.
Premise 2: Kant was a human being.
Therefore, um, uh, let's see....

It is sufficient a person's for being "bad at philosophy" in the relevant sense that when that person tries to build an ambitious, elaborate philosophical system that addresses the great, enduring questions of metaphysics and epistemology, there will be some serious errors in the system, as a result of the person's cognitive shortcomings (e.g., invisible presuppositions, equivocal arguments). It is very easy to be bad at philosophy in this sense, and we have excellent empirical evidence for Premise 1. Premise 2 also seems well attested. Further supporting evidence for the conclusion comes from the boneheaded things Kant sometimes says when he is speaking clearly and concretely rather than in a difficult-to-evaluate haze of abstracta.

Here's a vision, then, of Kant:

Kant has a brilliant sense of what it would be very cool to be able to prove -- or at least a brilliant sense of what lots of philosophers think it would be very cool to be able to prove. For example, it would be very cool to (non-question-beggingly) prove that the external world exists. It would be very cool to prove that immorality is irrational. Kant also has some clever and creative pieces of argumentation that seem like promising elements in potential proofs of this sort. And finally, Kant has an intimidating aura of authority. He creates a fog of jargon through which the pieces of argument appealingly glint, in their coolness and cleverosity. And, voila, he asserts success. If you fail to understand, the fault seems to be yours.

Maybe this sounds bad. But the thing is: There really are interesting pieces of argument in there! It's just that they don't all fit together. There are gaps in the arguments, and seeming inconsistencies, and different possibilities for the meaning of the jargon. Because these gaps, seeming inconsistencies, and possibilities might be variously resolved, there need be no one right interpretation of Kant. We can be Kant interpretation pluralists. Although there are clearly bad ways of reading Kant (e.g., as an unreconstructed Lockean), there might be no determinately best way, but rather a variety of attractive ways with competing costs and benefits.

Interpret the terms this way and fill in the gaps that way, and find a Kant who thinks that there's stuff out there independent of our minds that causes our sensory experiences. Interpret the terms this other way and fill in the gaps that other way, and find a Kant who regards such stuff as merely an invention of our minds. Yet another Kant holds that there might be such stuff, but we can't prove that there is. Call these Kant Model 1, Kant Model 2, and Kant Model 3. There will also be Kant Model 4, Kant Model 1a, Kant Model 5f, etc. Similarly across the range of Kantian issues.

But surely only one of these things is what Kant really thought? No, I wouldn't be sure of that at all! When our terms admit multiple interpretations, when our arguments are gappy and dispositions unstable, the contents of both our occurrent thoughts and our dispositional opinions can be muddy. When I say, "the only really important thing is to be happy" or "all men are created equal", what exactly to do I mean? There might be no exactness about it! (See my dispositional approach to attitudes.) This is as true of philosophers as of anyone else -- and, I would argue, as true of the mortal Kant as of any other philosopher.

But even if Kant did have absolutely specific private opinions on all the topics of his writings, it doesn't matter. The philosophy of Kant is not that. Maybe in the secret grotto of his soul he was an orthodox Thomist and he invented the critical philosophy only as a joke to amuse his manservant Martin Lampe. This would not render the Critique of Pure Reason a defense of Thomism. Kant's philosophy is embodied in the words he left behind, not in his private opinions about those words. And those words might not, very likely do not, determinately resolve into one single self-consistent philosophical system.

Historians of philosophy can and should fight about whether to treat Kant Model 2b, Kant Model 5f, or instead some other Kant, as the canonical Kant. But those of us who don't make Kant interpretation our profession should have some liberty to choose among the Kants, as best suits our philosophical purposes -- as long as we bear in mind that Kant Model 2b is no more the One Kant than Hamlet Interpretation 2b is the One Hamlet.

The Spatial Location of Inner Speech

Last night, my six-year-old daughter Kate told me she had a song "in her head". I asked her if it was really inside her head, and she said yes it was. I asked her how big it was. At first she said she didn't know, but when pressed she agreed that it was larger than a pea but smaller than a dog, and she spread her fingers a few centimeters apart.

Most of the people I've interviewed are willing to attribute a spatial location to their experience of inner speech and imagined tunes -- and that location is virtually always inside their heads, not in their tummies or their toes or out in the environment, unless it's a hallucination or a case in which they're not sure whether the origin is some subtle environmental sound. Why, I wonder, this uniformity of report?

You might say -- as my 13-year-old son Davy said later last night, when I interviewed him -- that it's experienced as in the head because its origin is in your brain, and your brain is in the head. But that argument can't work without some supplementation. Phantom-limb pain, for example, is experienced as spatially located outside the head, even if its origin is in the head (or in peripheral nerves closer to the center of the body). Visual experience is a product of the brain but not normally described as located in the head. Visual imagery, too, although often described as "in the head", is sometimes experienced as out in the environment. For example, I might imagine a demon crouching in the corner of my office as I now look into that very corner. Also -- somewhat surprisingly to me! -- when I interview people about their visual imagery experiences, about 25% describe their visual imagery as spatially located a few inches in front of the forehead. In contrast, I have never heard anyone describe their inner speech as transpiring a few inches in front of their forehead!

You might say that it's because the origin of our outwardly verbalized speech is our head, so we're used to locating our speech inside our heads. But that doesn't quite work either. When I speak, the spatial origin of the sound, it seems to me, is my mouth. Although that's part of my head, most people, when they locate their inner speech, locate it not in their mouths but in the interior of their cranium.

You might think that it makes sense that we would imagine music as transpiring in our cranium, since that's where it seems to be when you're listening with headphones. But that doesn't quite work either, I think, since people with limited exposure to headphones (like Kate), who hear most of their music from exterior sources, still report tunes as spatially interior. (I'd wager one finds this "inside the head" phenomenological positioning, too, if one looks at phenomenological reports in Anglophone culture pre-stereophonics, but I haven't done the search on that (yet).)

A more interesting possibility is this: Sometimes imagery is experienced as environmentally positioned -- like that demon in the corner of my office. We might imagine a representation like this {demon with properties a,b,c; egocentric location x,y,z}. But most of the time we don't visually imagine things as environmentally located, so the representation is just {demon with properties a,b,c}. Without an environmental position explicitly represented, we might default to representation at our subjective center -- either actually experiencing it as there or erroneously thinking we experience it as there. And maybe our subjective center is inside our cranium. But even if so, the view has problems accounting for visual imagery reported as in front of the forehead, and with reports of inner speech as moving around inside one's head (as some of Russ Hurlburt's interviewees report).

So I'm left still wondering....

An Objection to Some Accounts of Self-Knowledge of Attitudes

You believe some proposition P. You believe that Armadillo is the capital of Texas, say.[footnote 1] Someone asks you what you think the capital of Texas is. You say, "In my opinion, the capital of Texas is Armadillo." How do you know that that is what you believe?

Here's one account (e.g., in Nichols and Stich 2003): You have in your mind a dedicated "Monitoring Mechanism". The job of this Monitoring Mechanism is to scan the contents of your Belief Box, finding tokens such as P ("Armadillo is the capital of Texas") or Q ("There's an orangutan in the fridge"), and producing, in consequence, new beliefs of the form "I believe P" or "I believe Q". Similarly, it or a related mechanism can scan your Desire Box, producing new beliefs of the form "I desire R" or "I desire S". Call this the Dedicated Mechanism Account.

One alternative account is Peter Carruthers's. Carruthers argues that there is no such dedicated mechanism. Instead, we theorize on the basis of sensory evidence and our own imagery. For example, I hear myself saying -- either aloud or in inner speech (which is a form of imagery) -- "The capital of Texas is Armadillo", and I think something like, "Well, I wouldn't say that unless I thought it was true!", and so I conclude that I believe that Armadillo is the capital. This theoretical, interpretative reasoning about myself is usually nonconscious, but in the bowels of my cognitive architecture, that's what I'm doing. And there's no more direct route to self-knowledge, according to Carruthers. We have to interpret ourselves given the evidence of our behavior, our environmental context, and our stream of imagery and inner speech.

Here's an argument against both accounts.

First, assume that to believe that P is to have a representation with the content P stored in a Belief Box (or memory store), i.e., ready to be accessed for theoretical inference and practical decision making. (I'm not keen on Belief Boxes myself, but I'll get to that later.) A typical deployment of P might be as follows: When Bluebeard says to me, "I'm heading off to the capital of Texas!", I call up P from my Belief Box and conclude that Bluebeard is heading off to Armadillo. I might similarly ascribe a belief to Bluebeard on that basis. Unless I have reason to think Bluebeard ignorant about the capital of Texas or (by my lights) mistaken about it, I can reasonably conclude that Bluebeard believes that he is heading to Armadillo. All parties agree that I need not introspect to attribute this belief to Bluebeard, nor call upon any specially dedicated self-scanning mechanism (other than whatever allows ordinary memory retrieval), nor interpret my own behavior and imagery. I can just pull up P to join it with other beliefs, and conclude that Q. Nothing special here or self-interpretive. Just ordinary cognition.

Now suppose the conclusion of interest -- the "Q" in this case -- is just "I believe that P". What other beliefs does P need to be hooked up with to license this conclusion? None, it seems! I can go straightaway, in normal cases, from pulling up P to the conclusion "I believe that P". If that's how it works, no dedicated self-scanning mechanism or self-interpretation is required, but only ordinary belief-retrieval for cognition, contra both Carruthers's view and Dedicated Mechanism Accounts.

That will have seemed a bit fast, perhaps. So let's consider some comparison cases. Suppose Sally is the school registrar. I assume she has true beliefs about the main events on the academic calendar. I believe that final exams end on June 8. If someone asks me when Sally believes final exams will end, I can call up P1 ("exams end June 8") and P2 ("Sally has true beliefs about the main events on the academic calendar") to conclude Q ("Sally believes exams end June 8"). Self-ascription would be like that, but without P2 required. Or suppose I believe in divine omniscience. From P1 plus divine omniscience, I can conclude that God believes P1. Or suppose that I've heard that there's this guy, Eric Schwitzgebel, who believes all the same things I believe about politics. If P1 concerns politics, I can conclude from P1 and this knowledge about Eric Schwitzgebel that this Eric Schwitzgebel guy believes P1. Later I might find out that Eric Schwitzgebel is me.

Do I need to self-ascribe the belief that P1 before reaching that conclusion about the Eric Schwitzgebel guy? I don't see why I must. I know that moving from "P1 is true and concerns politics" to "that Eric Schwitzgebel guy believes P1" will get me true conclusions. I can rely on it. It might be cognitively efficient for me to develop a habit of thought by which I leap straight from one to the other.

Alternatively: Everyone thinks that I can at least sometimes ascribe myself beliefs as a result of inference. I subscribe to a general theory, say, on which if P1 and P2 are true of Person S and if P3 and P4 are true in general about the world, then I can conclude that S believes Q. Now suppose S is me. And suppose Q is "I believe P" and suppose P3 is P. And then jettison the rest of P1, P2, and P4. Voila![footnote 2]

If there is a Desire Box, it might work much the same way. If I can call up the desire R to join with some other beliefs and desires to form a plan, in just the ordinary cognitive way that desires are called up, so also it seems I should be able to do for the purposes of self-ascription. It would be odd if we could call up beliefs and desires for all the wide variety of cognitive purposes that we ordinarily call them up for but not for the purposes of self-ascriptive judgment. What would explain that strange incapacity?

What if there isn't a Belief Box, a Desire Box, or a representational storage bin? The idea remains basically the same: Whatever mechanisms allow me to reach conclusions and act based on my beliefs and desires should also allow me to reach conclusions about my beliefs and desires -- at least once I am cognitively sophisticated enough to have adult-strength concepts of belief and desire.

This doesn't mean I never go wrong and don't self-interpret at all. We are inconsistent and unstable in our belief- and desire-involving behavioral patterns; the opinions we tend to act on in some circumstances (e.g., when self-ascription or verbal avowal is our task) might very often differ from those we tend to act on in other circumstances; and it's a convenient shorthand -- too convenient, sometimes -- to assume that what we say, when we're not just singing to ourselves and not intending to lie, reflects our opinions. Nor does it imply that there aren't also dedicated mechanisms of a certain sort. My own view of self-knowledge is, in fact, pluralist. But among the many paths, I think, is the path above.

(Fans of Alex Byrne's approach to self-knowledge will notice substantial similarities between the above and his views, to which I owe a considerable debt.)

Update, February 27

Peter Carruthers replies as follows:

Eric says: “I can just pull up P to join it with other beliefs, and conclude that Q. Nothing special here or self-interpretive. Just ordinary cognition.” This embodies a false assumption (albeit one that is widely shared among philosophers; and note that essentially the same response to that below can be made to Alex Byrne). This is that there is a central propositional workspace of the mind where beliefs and desires can be activated and interact with one another directly in unconstrained ways to issue in new beliefs or decisions. In fact there is no such amodal workspace. The only central workspace that the mind contains is the working memory system, which has been heavily studied by psychologists for the last half-century. The emerging consensus from this work (especially over the last 15 years or so) is that working memory is sensory based. It depends upon attention directed toward mid-level sensory areas of the brain, resulting in globally broadcast sensory representations in visual or motor imagery, inner speech, and so on. While these representations can have conceptual information bound into them, it is impossible for such information to enter the central workspace alone, not integrated into a sensory-based representation of some sort.

Unless P is an episodic memory, then (which is likely to have a significant sensory component), or unless it is a semantic memory stored, at least in part, in sensory format (e.g. a visual image of a map of Texas), then the only way for P to “join with other beliefs, and conclude that Q” is for it to be converted into (say) an episode of inner speech, which will then require interpretation.

This is not to deny that some systems in the mind can access beliefs and draw inferences without those beliefs needing to be activated in the global workspace (that is, in working memory). In particular, goal states can initiate searches for information to enable the construction of plans in an “automatic”, unconscious manner. But this doesn’t mean that the mindreading system can do the same. Indeed, a second error made by Eric in his post is a failure to note that the mindreading system bifurcates into two (or more) distinct components: a domain-specific system that attributes mental states to others (and to oneself), and a set of domain-general planning systems that can be used to simulate the reasoning of another in order to generate predictions about that person’s other beliefs or likely behavior. On this Nichols & Stich and I agree, and it provides the former the wherewithal to reply to Eric’s critique also. For the “pulling up of beliefs” to draw inferences about another’s beliefs takes place (unconsciously) in the planning systems, and isn’t directly available to the domain-specific system responsible for attributing beliefs to others or to oneself.

Peter says: "Unless P is an episodic memory... or unless it is a semantic memory stored, at least in part, in sensory format (e.g. a visual image of a map of Texas), then the only way for P to “join with other beliefs, and conclude that Q” is for it to be converted into (say) an episode of inner speech, which will then require interpretation." I don't accept that theory of how the mind works, but even if I did accept that theory, it seems now like Peter is allowing that if P is a "semantic memory" stored in partly "sensory format" it can join with other beliefs to drive the conclusion Q without an intermediate self-interpretative episode. Or am I misunderstanding the import of his sentence? If I'm not misunderstanding, then hasn't just given me all I need for this step of my argument? Let's imagine that "Armadillo is the capital of Texas" is stored in partly sensory format (as a visual map of Texas with the word "Armadillo" and a star). Now Peter seems to be allowing that it can drive inferences without requiring an intermediate act of self-interpretation. So then why not allow it to drive also the conclusion that I believe that Armadillo is the capital? We're back to the main question of this post, right?

Peter continues: "This is not to deny that some systems in the mind can access beliefs and draw inferences without those beliefs needing to be activated in the global workspace (that is, in working memory). In particular, goal states can initiate searches for information to enable the construction of plans in an “automatic”, unconscious manner. But this doesn’t mean that the mindreading system can do the same." First, let me note that I agree that the fact that some systems can access stored representations without activating those representations in the global workspace doesn't stricly imply that the mindreading system (if there is a dedicated system, which is part of the issue in dispute) can also do so. But I do think that if, for a broad range of purposes, we can access these stored beliefs, it would be odd if we couldn't do so for the purpose of reaching conclusions about our own minds. We'd then need a pretty good theory of why we have this special disability with respect to mindreading. I don't think Peter really offers us as much as we should want to explain this disability.

... which brings me to my second reaction to this quote. What Peter seems to be presenting as a secondary feature of the mind -- "the construction of plans in an 'automatic', unconscious manner" -- is, in my view, the very heart of mentality. For example, to create inner speech itself, we need to bring together a huge variety of knowledge and skills about language, about the social environment, and about the topic of discourse. The motor plan or speech plan constructed in this way cannot mostly be driven by considerations that are pulled explicitly into the narrow theater of the "global workspace" (which is widely held to host only a small amount of material at a time, consciously experienced). Our most sophisticated cognition tends to be what happens before things hit the global workspace, or even entirely independent of it. If Peter allows, as I think he must, that that pre-workspace cognition can access beliefs like P, what then remains to be shown to complete my argument is just that these highly sophisticated P-accessing processes can drive the judgment or the representation or the conclusion that I believe that P, just as they can drive many other judgments, representations, or conclusions. Again, I think the burden of proof should be squarely on Peter to show why this wouldn't be possible.

Update, February 28

Peter responds:

Eric writes: “it seems now like Peter is allowing that if P is a "semantic memory" stored in partly "sensory format" it can join with other beliefs to drive the conclusion Q without an intermediate self-interpretative episode.”

I allow that the content of sensory-based memory can enter working memory, and so can join with other beliefs to drive a conclusion. But that the content in question is the content of a memory rather than a fantasy or supposition requires interpretation. There is nothing about the content of an image as such that identifies it as a memory, and memory images don’t come with tags attached signifying that they are memories. (There is a pretty large body of empirical work supporting this claim, I should say. It isn’t just an implication of the ISA theory.)

Eric writes: “But I do think that if, for a broad range of purposes, we can access these stored beliefs, it would be odd if we couldn't do so for the purpose of reaching conclusions about our own minds. We'd then need a pretty good theory of why we have this special disability with respect to mindreading.”

Well, I and others (especially Nichols & Stich in their mindreading book) had provided that theory. The separation between thought-attribution and behavioral prediction is now widely accepted in the literature, with the latter utilizing the subject’s own planning systems, which can in turn access the subject’s beliefs. There is also an increasing body of work suggesting that on-line, unreflective, forms of mental-state attribution are encapsulated from background beliefs. (I make this point at various places in The Opacity of Mind. But more recently, see Ian Apperly’s book Mindreaders, and my own “Mindreading in Infancy”, shortly to appear in Mind & Language.) The claim also makes good theoretical sense seen in evolutionary and functional terms, if the mindreading system evolved to track the mental states of others and generate predictions therefrom. From this perspective one might predict that thought-attribution could access a domain-specific database of acquired information (e.g. “person files” containing previously acquired information about the mental states of others), without being able to conduct free-wheeling searches of memory more generally.

Eric writes: “these highly sophisticated P-accessing processes can drive the judgment or the representation or the conclusion that I believe that P, just as they can drive many other judgments, representations, or conclusions. Again, I think the burden of proof should be squarely on Peter to show why this wouldn't be possible.”

First, I concede that it is possible. I merely claim that it isn’t actual. As for the evidence that supports such a claim, there are multiple strands. The most important is evidence that people confabulate about their beliefs and other mental states in just the sorts of circumstances that the ISA theory predicts that they would. (Big chunks of The Opacity of Mind are devoted to substantiating this claim.) Now, Eric can claim that he, too, can allow for confabulation, since he holds a pluralist account of self-knowledge. But this theory is too underspecified to be capable of explaining the data. Saying “sometimes we have direct access to our beliefs and sometimes we self-interpret” issues in no predictions about when we will self-interpret. In contrast, other mixed-method theorists such as Nichols & Stich and Alvin Goldman have attempted to specify when one or another method will be employed. But none of these accounts is consistent with the totality of the evidence. The only theory currently on the market that does explain the data is the ISA theory. And this entails that the only access that we have to our own beliefs is sensory-based and interpretive.

I agree that people can certainly make "source monitoring" and related errors in which genuine memories of external events are confused with merely imagined events. But it sounds to me like Peter is saying that a stored belief, in order to fulfill its function as a memory rather than a fantasy or supposition must be "interpreted" -- and, given his earlier remarks, presumably interpreted in a way that requires activation of that content in the "global workspace". (Otherwise, his main argument doesn't seem to go through.) I feel like I must be missing something. I don't see how spontaneous, skillful action that draws together many influences -- for example, in conversational wit -- could realistically be construed as working this way. Lots of pieces of background knowledge flow together in guiding such responsiveness; they can't all be mediated in the "global workspace", which is normally thought to have a very limited capacity. (See also Terry Horgan's recent work on jokes.)

Whether we are looking at visual judgments, memory judgments, social judgments about other people, or judgments about ourselves, the general rule seems to be that the sources are manifold and the mechanisms complex. "P, therefore I believe that P" is far too simple to be the whole story; but so also I think is any single-mechanism story, including Peter's.

I guess Peter and I will have a chance to hammer this out a bit more in person during our SSPP session tomorrow! _______________________________________________

[note 1]: Usually philosophers believe that it's raining. Failing that, they believe that snow is white. I just wanted a change, okay?

[note 2]: Is it really "inference" if the solidity of the conclusion doesn't require the solidity of the premises? I don't see why that should be an essential feature of inferences. But if you instead want to call it (following Byrne) just an "epistemic rule" that you follow, that's okay by me.

Empirical Evidence That the World Was Not Created Five Minutes Ago

Bertrand Russell writes:

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into existence 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.... I am not here 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 (The Analysis of Mind, 1921, p. 159-160).

Wait... what?! We can't prove that the world has existed for more than five minutes, but who cares, bo-ring?

I'd think rather the opposite: We can prove that the world has existed for more than five minutes. And if I didn't think I could prove that fact, I wouldn't say ho-hum, whatevs, maybe everything I thought really happened is just an illusion, *yawn*.

Okay, well, "prove" is too strong. Logical certainty of the 2+2=4 variety, I can't provide. But I think I can provide, at least to myself, some good empirical evidence that the past existed five minutes ago. I can begin by opening up the New York Times. It tells me that Larry Kwong was the Jeremy Lin of his day. Therefore, the past exists.

Now hold on, you'll say. I've begged the question against Russell. For Russell is asking us to consider the possibility that the world was created five minutes ago with everything exactly as it then was, including the New York Times website. I can't disconfirm that hypothesis by going to the New York Times website! The young-world hypothesis and the old-world hypothesis make exactly the same prediction about what I will find, and therefore the evidence does not distinguish between them.

Here I need to think carefully about the form of the young-world hypothesis and the reasons I might entertain it. For example, I should consider what reason I have to prefer the hypothesis that a planet-sized external world was created five minutes ago vs. the hypothesis that just I and my immediate environment were created five minutes ago. Is there reason to regard the first hypothesis as more likely than the second hypothesis? I think not. And similarly for temporal extent: There's nothing privileged about 5 minutes ago vs. 7.22 minutes ago vs. 27 hours ago, vs. 10 seconds ago, etc. (perhaps up to the bound of the "specious present").

So if I'm in a skeptical enough mood to take young-world hypotheses seriously, I should have a fairly broad range of young-world hypotheses in mind as live options. Right?

In the spirit of skeptical indifference, let's say that I go ahead and assign a 50% probability to a standard non-skeptical old-world hypothesis and a 50% probability to a young-world hypothesis based on my subjective experience of a seeming-external-world right now. Conditional on the young-world hypothesis, I then further distribute my probabilities, say, 50-50% between the I-and-my-immediate-environment hypothesis and the whole-planet hypothesis. The exact probabilities don't matter, and clearly there will be many other possibilities; this is just to show the form of the argument. So, right now, my probabilities are 50% old-world, 25% young-small-world, and 25% young-large-world.

Now, if the world is young and small, then all should be void, or chaos, beyond the walls of this room. (In a certain sense such a world might be large, but the Earthly stuff in my vicinity is small.) In particular, the New York Times web servers should not exist. So if I try to visit the New York Times' webpage, based on my entirely false seeming-memories of how the world works, New York Times content which is not currently on my computer should not then appear on my computer. After all the hypothesis is that the world was created five minutes ago as it then was, and my computer did not have the newest NYT content at that time. But, I check the site and new content appears! Alternatively, I open my office door and behold, there's a hallway! So now, I reduce the probability of the young-small-world hypothesis to zero. (Zero makes the case simple, but the argument doesn't depend on that.) Distributing that probability back onto the remaining two hypotheses, the old-world hypothesis is now 67% and young-large-world is 33%. Thus, by looking at the New York Times website, I've given myself empirical evidence that the world is more than five minutes old.

Admittedly, I'd hope for better than 67% probability that the world is old, so the result is a little disappointing. If I could justify the proposition that if the world is young, then it is probably small enough not to contain the New York Times web servers, then I can get final probabilities higher. And maybe I can justify that proposition. Maybe the likeliest young-world scenario is a spontaneous congealment scenario (i.e., a Boltzmann brain scenario) or a scenario in which this world is a small-scale computer simulation (see my earlier posts on Bostrom's simulation argument). For example, if the initial probabilities are 50% old, 45% young-small, 5% young-large, then after ruling out young-small, the old-world hypothesis rises above 90% -- an almost-publishable p value! And maybe the probability of the old-world hypothesis continues to rise as I find that the world continues to exist in a stable configuration, since I might reasonably think that if the world is only 5 minutes old or 12 minutes old, it stands a fair chance of collapsing soon -- a possibility that seems less likely on the standard non-skeptical old-world hypothesis. (However, there is the worry that after a minute or so, I will need to restart my anti-skeptical argument again due to the possibility that I only falsely remember having checked the New York Times site. Such are the bitters of trying to refute skepticism.)

You might object that the most likely young-small-world hypothesis is one on which there is an outside agent who will feed me the seeming-New York Times website on demand, purposely to trick me. But I'm not sure that's so. And in any case, with that move we're starting to drift toward something like Cartesian demon doubt, which deserves separate treatment.

[Slightly edited 6:33 pm in light of helpful clarificatory questions from Jonathan Weisberg.]

Consciousness Online 2013 Is Now Underway

here.

Was the Latter Half of the 20th Century a Golden Age for Philosophy?

No, you will say. And I tend to agree, probably not. But let me make the case against dismissing the idea out of hand.

One framing thought is this. The normal condition of humanities research in academia is probably to be poorly funded. People on the left would rather fund poverty relief. People on the right would rather not fund at all. Pragmatists in the center want to fund disciplines with what is perceived as "practical application". The normal condition of humanities research in academia is probably also to survive as a conspiracy of mediocrity in which social connections and political alliances determine position much more than research quality does. Anglophone academic philosophy has, perhaps, defied gravity for a long while already.

Another framing thought is this. Greatness is comparative. In an era with lots of philosophers not vastly different in quality or influence, in the eyes of their contemporaries, it might be hard to pick out a few as giants of world-historical stature. But with time, with the winnowing of greats, that is, with the forgetting of almost-great philosophers, those whose works are still discussed might come to seem more nearly peerless.

I'm considering a fifty-year period, 1950-1999. Ancient Greece hosted a golden age in philosophy, but if limit ourselves to a comparable fifty-year period we probably can't include all three of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle at the height of their powers, instead having to settle for two plus their lesser contemporaries. The early modern period in Western Europe was probably also a golden age, but again a fifty-year restriction limits those who can be included. By aiming very carefully we can include Descartes' Meditations (1641) through Locke's Essay and Treatises (1689-1690), plus Spinoza and Hobbes in the middle and a dash of Leibniz; or we can run from Locke through early Hume, with most of Leibniz and Berkeley between (plus lesser contemporaries). German philosophy waxed golden from 1780-1829, with Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, plus. The question, then, is whether Anglophone philosophy from 1950-1999 might be roughly comparable.

To a first approximation, two things make a philosopher great: quality of argument and creative vigor. (Personally, I also rather care about prose style, but let's set that issue aside.) With apologies to Kant enthusiasts, it seems to me that despite his creativity and vision, Kant's arguments are often rather poor or gestural, requiring substantial reconstruction by sympathetic (sometimes overly charitable?) later commentators. And Descartes' major positive project in the Meditations, his proof of the existence of God and the external world, is widely recognized to be a rather shoddy argument. Similar remarks apply to Plato, Hegel, Spinoza, etc. The great philosophers of the past had, of course, their moments of argumentative brilliance, but for rigor of argument, I think it's hard to say that any fifty-year period clearly exceeds the highlight moments of the best philosophers from 1950-1999.

The more common complaint against Anglophone "analytic" philosophy of the period is its lack of broad-visioned creativity. On that issue, I think it's very hard to justify a judgment without the distance of history. But still... in my own area, philosophy of mind, the period was the great period of philosophical materialism. Although there had been materialists before, it was only in this period that materialism really came to full fruition. And arguably, there is no more important issue in all of philosophy than the cluster of issues around materialism, dualism, and idealism. From a world-historical perspective, the development of materialism was arguably a philosophical achievement of the very highest magnitude. The period also saw a flourishing of philosophy of language in Kripke and reactions to him. In epistemology, the concept of knowledge came under really careful scrutiny for the first time. In general metaphysics, there was David Lewis. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations also falls within the period. In philosophy of science, Kuhn. In ethics and political philosophy, Rawls and Williams. Without pretending a complete or unbiased list, I might also mention Strawson, Putnam, Foot, Singer, Quine, Anscombe, Davidson, Searle, Fodor, Dretske, Dennett, Millikan, and early Chalmers. In toto, is it clear that there's less philosophical value here than in the period from Descartes through Locke or from Kant through Hegel?

Or am I just stuck with a worm's-eye view in which my elders loom too large, and all of this will someday rightly be seen as no more significant than, say, Italian philosophy in the time of Vico or Chinese philosophy in the time of Wang Yangming?

Consciousness Online 2013

Consciousness Online will be running its 2013 conference starting next Friday, February 15th. All are invited to read, view, or listen to the papers and commentaries and contribute to the online discussion.

The program is available here, with Daniel C. Dennett, as the headliner. Other contributors are Katja Crone, Joel Smith, Daniel Morgan, Peter Langland-Hassan, Farid Masrour, Matteo Grasso, Chad Kidd, Miguel Sebastian, Cheryl Abbate, and Bence Nanay.

I will be presenting my essay If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious. A YouTube version, prepped for the conference, is available here.

Apology to a Kindergartener

As the parent of a kindergartener, I constantly find myself apologizing for English orthography. Consider the numbers from one to ten, for instance. Of these, only "six" and "ten" are spelled in a sensible way. "Five" and "nine" make a certain amount of sense once one has mastered the silent-e convention, but that convention is bizarre in itself, inconsistently applied (cf. "give" and "zine"), and only one of a dozen ways to make a vowel long. "Seven" and "three" might not seem so bad to the jaded eye -- but why not "sevven"? Shouldn't "seven" rhyme with "even"? And why make the long "e" with a double-"e"? Why not "threa" (cf. "sea") or "threy" (cf. "key") or "thre" (cf. "me") or "thry" (cf. "party")? "Two"? Why on Earth the "w"? Why the "two", "to", "too" distinction? "Four"? Same thing: "four", "for", "fore"! "One"? Same again: "one", "won", and arguably "wun". Really, "one" it starts with an "o"? My daughter thought I was kidding when I told her this, like the time I told her "dog" was spelled "jxqmpil". It's not much different from that. We're just used to it and so fail to notice. Worst of all is "eight". If English spelling were ever brought to court, it could be tried, convicted, and hung on the word "eight" alone.

Preliminary Evidence That the World Is Simple (An Exercise in Stupid Epistemology)

Is the world simple or complex? Is a simple hypothesis more likely to be true than a complex hypothesis that fits the data equally well? The issue is gnarly. Sometimes the best approach to a gnarly issue is crude stupidity. Crude stupidity is my plan today.

Here's what I did. I thought up 30 pairs of variables that would be easy to measure and that might relate in diverse ways. Some variables were physical (the distance vs. apparent brightness of nearby stars), some biological (the length vs. weight of sticks found in my back yard), and some psychological or social (the S&P 500 index closing value vs. number of days past). Some I would expect to show no relationship (the number of pages in a library book vs. how high up it is shelved in the library), some I would expect to show a roughly linear relationship (distance of McDonald's franchises from my house vs. MapQuest estimated driving time), and some I expected to show a curved or complex relationship (forecasted temperature vs. time of day, size in KB of a JPG photo of my office vs. the angle at which the photo was taken). See here for the full list of variables. I took 11 measurements of each variable pair. Then I analyzed the resulting data.

Now, if the world is massively complex, then it should be difficult to predict a third datapoint from any two other data points. Suppose that two measurements of some continuous variable yield values of 27 and 53. What should I expect the third measured value to be? Why not 1,457,002? Or 3.22 x 10^-17? There are just as many functions (that is, infinitely many) containing 27, 53, and 1,457,002 as there are containing 27, 53, and some more pedestrian-seeming value like 44. On at least some ways of thinking about massive complexity, we ought to be no more surprised to discover that third value to be over a million than to discover that third value to be around 40. Call the thesis that a wildly distant third value is no less likely than a nearby third value the Wild Complexity Thesis.

I can use my data to test the Wild Complexity Thesis, on the assumption that the variables I have chosen are at least roughly representative of the kinds of variables we encounter in the world, in day-to-day human lives as experienced in a technologically advanced Earthly society. (I don't generalize to the experiences of aliens or to aspects of the world that are not salient to experience, such as Planck-scale phenomena.) The denial of Wild Complexity might seem obvious to you. But that is an empirical claim, and it deserves empirical test. As far as I know, no philosopher has formally conducted this test.

To conduct the test, I used each pair of dependent variables to predict the value of the next variable in the series (the 1st and 2nd observations predicting the value of the 3rd, the 2nd and 3rd predicting the value of the 4th, etc.), yielding 270 predictions for the 30 variables. I counted an observation "wild" if its absolute value was 10 times the maximum of the absolute value of the two previous observations or if its absolute value was below 1/10 of the minimum of the absolute value of the two previous observations. Separately, I also looked for flipped signs (either two negative values followed by a positive or two positive values followed by a negative), though most of the variables only admitted positive values. This measure of wildness yielded three wild observations out of 270 (1%) plus another three flipped-sign cases (total 2%). (A few variables were capped, either top or bottom, in a way that would make an above-10x or below-1/10th observation analytically unlikely, but excluding such variables wouldn't affect the result much.)

So it looks like the Wild Complexity Thesis might be in trouble. Now admittedly a caveat is in order: If the world is wild enough, then I probably shouldn't trust my memory of having conducted this test (since maybe my mind with all its apparent memories just popped into existence out of a disordered past), or maybe I shouldn't trust the representativeness of this sample (I got 2% wild this time, but maybe in the next test I'll get 50% wild). However, if we are doubtful about the results for either of those reasons, it might be difficult to escape collapse into radical skepticism. If we set aside radically skeptical worries, we might still wonder how wild the world is. These results give us a preliminary estimate. To the extent the variables are representative, the answer seems to be: not too wild -- though with some surprises, such as the $20,000 listed value of the uncirculated 1922 Lincoln wheat penny. (No, I didn't know about that before seeking the data.)

If we use a Wildness criterion of two (two times the max or 1/2 the min), then there are 33 wild instances in 270 observations, or about 12%, overlapping in one case with the three flipped-sign cases, for 13% total. I wouldn't take this number too seriously, since it will presumably vary considerably depending on the variables chosen for analysis -- but still it's smaller than it might have been, and maybe okay as a first approximation to the extent the variables of interest resemble those on my list.

I had meant to do some curve fitting in this post, too -- comparing linear and quadratic predictions with more complex predictions -- but since this is already a good-sized post, we'll curve fit another day.
I admit, this is a ham-handed approach. It uses crude methods, it doesn't really establish anything we didn't already know, and I'm sure it won't touch the views of those philosophers who deny that the world is simple (who probably aren't committed to the Wild Complexity Thesis). I highlight these concessions by calling the project "stupid epistemology". If we jump too quickly to clever, though, sometimes we miss the necessary groundwork of stupid.

Note: This post was substantially revised Feb. 6.

Metaphysical Skepticism a la Kriegel

I'm totally biased. I admit it. But I love this new paper by Uriah Kriegel.

Taking the metaphysical question of the ontology of objects as his test case, Kriegel argues that metaphysical disputes often fail to admit of resolution. They fail to admit of resolution, Kriegel argues, not because such disputes lack substance or are merely terminological, but for the more interestingly skeptical reason that although there may be a fact of the matter which metaphysical position is correct, we have no good means of discovering that fact. I have argued for a similarly skeptical position about the "mind-body problem", that is, the question of the relationship between mind and matter. (Hence my pro-Kriegel bias.) But Kriegel develops his argument in some respects more systematically.

Consider a set of four fundamental particles joined together in a tetrahedron. How many objects are there really? A conservative ontological view might say that really there are just four objects and no more: the four fundamental particles "arranged tetrahedronwise". A liberal ontological view might say that really there are fifteen objects: each of the four particles, plus each of the six possible pairings of the particles, plus each of the four possible triplets, plus the whole tetrahedron. An intermediate ("common sense"?) view might hold that the individual particles are each real objects, and so is the tetrahedron, but not the pairs and triplets, for a total of five objects.

Now who is right? Kriegel envisions three possible approaches to determining where the truth lies: empirical testing, appeal to "intuition", and appeal to theoretical virtues like simplicity and parsimony. However, none of these approaches seems promising.

Contra empirical testing: There is, it seems, no empirical fact on which the conservative and liberal would disagree. It's not like we could bombard the tetrahedron with radiation of some sort and the conservative would predict one thing, the liberal another.

Contra appeal to intuition: "Intuition" is a problematic concept in metaphilosophy. But maybe it means something like common sense or coherence with pre-theoretical opinion. Intuition in this sense might favor the five-object answer (the four particles plus the whole), but that's not entirely clear. However, Kriegel argues, hewing to intuition means doing only what P.F. Strawson calls "descriptive metaphysics" -- metaphysics that aims merely to reveal the structure of reality implicit in people's (possibly misguided) conceptual schemes. If we're aiming to discover real metaphysical truths, and not merely what's already implicit in ordinary opinion, we are doing instead what Kriegel and Strawson call "revisionary metaphysics"; and although descriptive metaphysics is beholden to intuition, revisionary metaphysics is not.

Contra appeal to theoretical virtue: Theoretical virtues like simplicity and parsimony might be pragmatic or aesthetic virtues but, Kriegel argues, there seems to be no reason to regard them as truth-conducive in metaphysics. Is there reason to think that the world is simple, and thus that a simple metaphysical theory is more likely to be true than a complex one? Is there reason to think the world contains few entities, and thus that a parsimonious metaphysical theory that posits fewer entities than its rivals is more likely to be true? Kriegel suggests not.

As I said, I love this paper and I'm sympathetic with its conclusion. But I'm a philosopher, so I can't possibly agree entirely with another philosopher working in the same area. That's just not in our nature! So let me issue two complaints.

First: I'm not sure object ontology is the best test case for Kriegel's view. Maybe there's a real fact of the matter whether there are four, five, or fifteen objects in our tetrahedron, but it's not obviously so. It seems like a good case for reinterpretation as a terminological dispute, if any case is. If Kriegel wants to make a general case for metaphysical skepticism, he might do better to choose a dispute that's less tempting to dismiss as terminological, such as the dispute about whether there are immaterial substances or properties. (In fairness, I happen to know he is working on this now.)

Second: It seems to me that Kriegel commits to more strongly negative opinions about the epistemic value of intuition and theoretical virtue than is necessary or plausible. It sounds, in places, like Kriegel is committing to saying that there's no epistemic value, for metaphysics, in harmony with pre-theoretical intuition or in theoretical virtues like simplicity. These are strong claims! We can admit, more plausibly I think, that intuitiveness, simplicity, explanatory power, etc., have some epistemic value while still holding that the kinds of positions that philosophers regard as real metaphysical contenders tend not to admit of decisive resolution by appeal to such factors. Real metaphysical contenders will conflict with some intuitions and harmonize with others, and they will tend to have different competing sets of theoretical virtues and vices, engendering debates it's difficult to see any hope of resolving with our current tools and capacities.

Consider this: It seems very unlikely that the metaphysical truth is that there are exactly fourteen objects in our tetrahedron, to wit, all of the combinations admitted by the liberal view except for one of the four triplet combinations. Such a view seems arbitrary, asymmetric, unsimple, and intuitively bizarre, compared to the more standard options. If you agree, then you should accept, contra a strong reading of Kriegel's argument, that those sorts of theoretical considerations can take us some distance, epistemically. It's just that they aren't likely to take us all the way.

Oh That Darn Rationality, There It Goes Making Me Greedy Again!

Or something like that?

In a series of studies, David G. Rand and collaborators found that participants in behavioral economics games tended to act more selfishly when they reached decisions more slowly. In one study, participants were paid 40 cents and then given the opportunity to contribute some of that money into a common pool with three other participants. Contributed money would be doubled and then split evenly among the group members. The longer participants took to reach a decision, they less they chose to contribute on average. Other studies were similar, some in physical laboratories, some conducted on the internet, some with half the participants forced into hurried decisions and the other half forced to delay a bit, some using prisoner's dilemma games or altruistic punishment games instead of public goods games. In all cases, participants who chose quickly shared more.

I find the results interesting and suggestive. It's a fun study. (And that's good.) But I'm also struck by how high the authors aim in their introduction and conclusion. They seek to address the question: "are we intuitively self-interested, and is it only through reflection that we reject our selfish impulses and force ourselves to cooperate? Or are we intuitively cooperative, with reflection upon the logic of self-interest causing us to rein in our cooperative urges and instead act selfishly?" (p. 427). Ten experiments later, we have what the authors seem to regard as pretty compelling general evidence in favor of intuition over rationality as the ground of cooperation. The authors' concluding sentence is ambitious: "Exploring the implications of our findings, both for scientific understanding and public policy, is an important direction for future study: although the cold logic of self-interest is seductive, our first impulse is to cooperate" (p. 429).

Now it might seem a minor point, but here's one thing that bothers me about most of these types of behavioral economics games on self-interest and cooperation: It's only cooperation with other participants that is considered to be cooperation. What about a participant's potential concern for the financial welfare of the experimenter? If a participant makes the "cooperative" choice in the common goods game, tossing her money into the pool to be doubled and then split back among the four participants, what she has really done is paid to transfer money from the pockets of the experimenter into the pockets of the other participants. Is it clear that that's really the more cooperative choice? Or is she just taking from Peter to give to Paul? Has Paul done something to be more deserving?

Maybe all that matters is that most people would (presumably) judge it more cooperative for participants to milk all they can from the experimenters in this way, regardless of whether in some sense that is a more objectively cooperative choice? Or maybe it's objectively more cooperative because the experimenters have communicated to participants, through their experimental design, that they are unconcerned about such sums of money? Or maybe participants know or think they know that the experimenters have plenty of funding, and consequently (?) they are advancing social justice when they pay to transfer money from the experimenters to other participants? Or...?

These quibbles feed a larger and perhaps more obvious point. There's a particular psychology of participating in an experiment, and there's a particular psychology of playing a small-stakes economic game with money, explicitly conceptualized as such. And it is a leap -- a huge leap, really -- from such laboratory results, as elegant and well-controlled as they might be, to the messy world outside the laboratory with large stakes, usually non-monetary, and not conceptualized as a game.

Consider an ordinary German sent to Poland and instructed to kill Jewish children in 1942. Or consider someone tempted to cheat on her spouse. Consider me sitting on the couch while my wife does the dishes, or a student tempted to copy another's answers, or someone using a hurtful slur to be funny. It's by no means clear that Rand's study should be thought to cast much light at all on cases such as these.

Is our first impulse cooperative, and does reflection makes us selfish? Or is explicit reflection, as many philosophers have historically thought, the best and most secure path to moral improvement? It's a fascinating question. We should resist, I think, being satisfied too quickly with a simple answer based on laboratory studies, even as a first approximation.

CFP: Consciousness and Experiential Psychology

The Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society will be meeting in Bristol, September 6-8. They have issued a call for submissions "particularly, but not exclusively" on the topics of non-verbal expression, affective or emotional responses, and subjectivity and imagination.

Details here. I will be one of four keynote speakers.

About a week later (September 12-13), also in Bristol, the Experimental Philosophy Group UK is planning to hold their annual workshop. I'll be keynoting there too. For details on that one, contact Bryony Pierce (bryonypierce at domain: btinternet.com, and/or experimentalphilosophyuk at domain: gmail.com) or check their website for updates.

Make it a two-fer!

A Memory from Grad School

Circa 1994: Josh Dever would be sitting on a couch in the philosophy graduate student lounge at U.C. Berkeley. I would propose to him a definition of "dessert" (e.g.: "a sweet food eaten after the main meal is complete"). He would shoot it down (e.g.: "but then it would be a priori that you couldn't eat dessert first!"). Later he would propose a definition to me, which I would shoot down. Over time, the definitions became ever more baroque. Other graduate students participated too.

Eventually Josh decided that he would define a dessert as anything served on a dessert plate. Asked what is a dessert plate is, he would say it was intuitively obvious. Presented with an objection ("So you couldn't eat Oreos right out of the bag for dessert?") he would simply state that he was willing to "bite the bullet" and accept a certain amount of revision of our pre-theoretical opinions.

At the time it seemed like cheating. In retrospect, I think Josh saw right to the core.

Being the World's Foremost Expert on X Takes Time

According to the LA Times, governor Jerry Brown wants to see "more teaching and less research" in the University of California.

I could see the state of California making that choice. Maybe we U.C. professors teach too few undergraduate courses for our state's needs. (I teach on average one undergraduate course per term. I also advise students individually, supervise dissertations, and teach graduate seminars.) But here's a thought. If it is valuable to have some public universities in which the undergraduate teaching and graduate supervision is done by the foremost experts in the world on the topics in question, then you have to allow professors considerable research time to attain and sustain that world-beating expertise. Being among the world's foremost experts on childhood leukemia, or on the neuroscience of visual illusion, or on the history of early modern political philosophy, is not something one can squeeze in on the side, with a few hours a week.

In my experience, it takes about 15 hours a week to run an undergraduate course (longer if it's your first time teaching the course): three hours of lecture, plus lecture prep time, plus office hours, plus reviewing the assigned readings and freshening up on relevant connected literature, plus grading and test design, plus email exchanges with students and course management. And let's suppose that a typical professor works about 50 hours a week. If Professor X at University of California teaches two undergraduate lecture courses per term, that leaves 20 hours a week for research and everything else (including graduate student instruction and administrative tasks like writing recommendation letters, serving on hiring committees, applying for grants, refereeing for journals, keeping one's equipment up to date...). If Professor Y at University of Somewhere Else teaches one undergraduate lecture course per term, that leaves 35 hours a week for research and everything else. How is Professor X going to keep up with Professor Y? Over time, if teaching load is substantially increased, the top experts will disproportionately be at the University of Somewhere Else, not the University of California.

Of course some people manage brilliantly productive research careers alongside heavy undergraduate teaching loads. I mean them no disrespect. On the contrary, I find them amazing! My point above concerns only what we should expect on average.

Blind Photographers

Yes, that's right. Some of the world's leading blind photographers! Here at UCR. What is it like to point your camera, print, and present it, all without seeing? What is your method of selection? What is your relation to your art?

 

photo by Ralph Baker, from http://www.cmp.ucr.edu/exhibitions/sightunseen/

The Moral Behavior of Ethicists and the Rationalist Delusion

A new essay with Joshua Rust.

In the first part, we summarize our empirical research on the moral behavior of ethics professors.

In the second part, we consider five possible explanations of our finding that ethics professors behave, on average, no better than do other professors.

Explanation 1: Philosophical moral reflection has no material impact on real-world moral behavior. Jonathan Haidt has called the view that explicit moral reflection does have a substantial effect on one's behavior "the rationalist delusion".

Explanation 2: Philosophical moral reflection influences real world moral behavior, but only in very limited domains of professional focus. Those domains are sufficiently narrow and limited that existing behavioral measures can't unequivocally detect them. Also, possibly, any improvement in such narrow domains might be cancelled out, in terms of overall moral behavior, by psychological factors like moral licensing or ego depletion.

Explanation 3: Philosophical moral reflection might lead one to behave more morally permissibly but no morally better. The idea here is that philosophical moral reflection might lead one to avoid morally impermissible behavior while also reducing the likelihood of doing any more than is strictly morally required. Contrast the sometimes-sinner sometimes-saint with the person who never goes beyond the call of duty but also never does anything really wrong.

Explanation 4: Philosophical moral reflection might compensate for deficient moral intuitions. Maybe, from early childhood or adolescence, some people tend to lack strongly motivating moral emotions. And maybe some of those people are also drawn to intellectual styles of moral reflection. Without that moral reflection, they would behave morally worse than the average person, but moral reflection helps them behave better than they otherwise would. If enough ethicists are like this, then philosophical moral reflection might have an important positive effect on the moral behavior of those who engage in it, but looking at ethicists as a group, that effect might be masked if it's compensating for lower rates of moral behavior arising from emotional gut intuitions.

Explanation 5: Philosophical moral reflection might have powerful effects on moral behavior, but in both moral and countermoral directions, approximately cancelling out on average. It might have positive effects, for example, if it leads us to discover moral truths on which we then act. But perhaps equally often it becomes toxic rationalization, licensing morally bad behavior that we would otherwise have avoided.

Josh and I decline to choose among these possibilties. There might be some truth in all or most of them. And there are still other possibilities, too. Ethicists might in fact engage in moral reflection relevant to their personal lives no more often than do other professors. Ethicists might find themselves increasingly disillusioned about the value of morality at the same time they improve their knowledge of what morality in fact requires. Ethicists might learn to shield their personal behavior from the influence of their professional reflections, as a kind of self-defense against the apparent unfairness of being held to higher standards because of their choice of profession....

Full essay here. As always thoughts and comments welcome, either by email or attached to this post.

Fame Through Friend-Citation

Alert readers might raise the following objection to my recent post, Fame Through Self-Citation: By the 500th article of our Distinguished Philosopher's career, his reference list will include 499 self-citations. Journal editors might find that somewhat problematic.

If this concern occurred to you, you are just the sort of perceptive and prophetic scholar who is ready for my Advanced Course in Academic Fame! The advanced course requires that you have five Friends. Each Friend agrees to publish five articles per year, in venues of any quality, and each published article will self-cite five times and cite five articles of each other Friend. (In Year One, each Friend will cite the entire Friendly corpus.)

Assuming that the six Friends' publications can be treated serially, ABCDEFABCDEF..., by the end of Year One, Friend A will have 29 + 23 + 17 + 11 + 5 = 85 citations, Friend B will have 80 citations, Friend C 75, Friend D 70, and Friend E 65, and Friend F 60. Friend A will have an h-index of 5 and the others will have indices of 4. By the end of Year Six, the Friends will have 4,935 Friendly citations to distribute among themselves, or 822.5 citations each. If they aim to maximize their h-index, each can arrange to have an h-index of at least 25 by then. (That is, each can have 25 articles that are each cited at least 25 times.) This would give them an h-index exceeding that of the 20 or so characteristic of leading youngish philosophers like Jason Stanley and Keith DeRose. (See Brian Leiter's discussion here.)

By the end Year 20, the Friends will have 100 articles each and 17,535 citations to distribute among those articles. Wisely-enough distributed, this will permit them to achieve h-indices in excess of 50, higher than the indices of such leading philosophers as Ned Block , David Chalmers, and Timothy Williamson. By the end of their 50-year careers, they will have 7,422.5 Friendly citations each, permitting h-indices in the mid-80s, substantially in excess of the h-index of any living philosopher I am aware of.

But this underestimates the possibilities! These Friends will be asked to referee work for the same journals in which they are publishing. They wouldn't be so tacky as to use the sacred trust of their refereeing positions to insist that other authors cite their own work -- but of course they can recommend the important work of their Friends! If each Friend accepts one refereeing assignment per month and successfully recommends publication for half of the articles they referee, contingent upon the authors' citing one article from each of the other five Friends, that will add 180 more citations per year to the pool. Other scholars, seeing the range of authors citing each of the Friends' work, will naturally regard each Friend as a leading contributor to the field, whom they must also therefore cite, creating a snowball effect. Can h-indices of 100 be far away?

(Any resemblance of this strategy to the behavior of actual academics is purely coincidental.)