Rae Langton: Informative Presupposition as Back-door Testimony
Informative presupposition is used in speech acts of back-door
testimony. ‘Even George could win’ presupposes and testifies
that George is an unpromising candidate. Moreover,
presuppositions about credibility, standards for knowledge, and
stakes for topics of knowledge, affect knowledge gain and
knowledge ascription, with implications for the enactment of
social norms and hierarchies. Presupposition accommodation can
build knowledge, ignorance and error: so if a knowledge-norm
applies to assertion, it applies equally to any sort of
back-door testimony.
Timothy Williamson: Evidence about One’s Own Evidence
If the principle “Evidence of evidence is evidence” holds at all, it
should hold of one’s own present evidence about one’s own
present evidence. I will consider natural renderings of the
principle in that setting, and argue that they require
implausible conditions on one’s self-knowledge.
Contributed Papers
Alexander Dinges: Anti-intellectualism, Egocentrism, & Bank Case Intuitions
Salience-sensitivity is a form of anti-intellectualism that says the
following: whether a true belief amounts to knowledge depends on
which error-possibilities are salient to the believer. I will
investigate whether salience-sensitivity can be motivated by
appeal to bank case intuitions. Some experimental philosophers
argue that it can’t for the simple reason that the intuitions in
question don’t exist. Good attempts have been made at answering this
challenge. But there is a more general problem. Even if we grant bank
case intuitions, so-called third-person bank cases threaten to sever
the connection between bank case intuitions and
salience-sensitivity. I will argue that salience-sensitivists can
overcome this worry if they appeal to egocentric bias, a general
tendency to project our own mental states onto others. I will al-so
suggest that a similar strategy is unavailable to stakes-sensitivists,
who hold that whether a true belief amounts to knowledge depends on
what is at stake for the believer.
Jie Gao & Davide Fassio: The Rational Threshold View and the problem of statistical evidence
According to the Rational Threshold View, a rational agent believes p
if and only if her credence in p is equal to or greater than a certain
threshold. One of the most serious challenges for this view is what
may be called the problem of statistical evidence: statistical
evidence is often not sufficient to make rational an outright belief,
no matter how probable the target proposition is given such
evidence. This indicates that rational belief is not as sensitive to
statistical evidence as rational credence is. The aim of this paper is
twofold. First, we argue that, in addition to playing a decisive role
in rationalizing outright belief, non-statistical evidence also plays
a preponderant role in rationalizing credence. We show intuitive cases
supporting this claim. Moreover, on the basis of such cases, we
suggest a possible account of how different types of evidence should
interact to determine rational credence in different
contexts. Roughly, our suggestion is that, when both statistical and
non-statistical evidence are present in a context, non-statistical
evidence should receive a heavier weight than statistical evidence in
determining rational credence. Second, based on this account, we argue
that modified versions of the Rational Threshold View can avoid the
problem of statistical evidence. We conclude suggesting a possible
explanation of the varying sensitivity to different types of evi-dence
for belief and credence based on the respective aims of these
attitudes.
Alex Jackson: Useful Knowledge Ascriptions
I’ll talk about how practical stakes affect people’s knowledge
ascriptions, such as in the ‘bank case’ discussed by DeRose and
Stanley. First I’ll summarize some related work in psychology,
describing the situation-dependence of people’s evaluative judgements
and their full beliefs. (e.g. Ledgerwood, 2014, “Evaluations in Their
Social Context”.) Inspired by these empirical theories, I’ll suggest a
psychological hypothesis about how people ascribe knowledge. The
hypothesis is a good educated guess. It also predicts the findings of
experimental philosophy in the area. But it predicts that people do
not ascribe knowledge as demanded by any of the standard philosophical
views (classical invariantism, interest-relative invariantism,
contextualism). In my view, our metaphysical/semantic view should
legitimize ordinary knowledge ascriptions. A bold approach is called
for.
Mihaela Popa-Wyatt: How Words Cause Harm
How is it that words cause harm? Speech that oppresses doesn't just
describe an oppressed state, but it helps to create it. In this talk I
will sketch the beginnings of a game theoretic account of oppressive
speech I am working on. The main ingredients are the classic elements
of game theory. In oppressive speech the key to understanding the game
is the balance of power, and how it can be manipulated. I will argue
that the special nature of conversational games allows speakers to
make utterances that manipulate the rules of the game. I'll give some
examples from an account of slurs.
Thomas Raleigh: Agnosticism Requires Belief
A good account of the agnostic attitude of Suspending Judgement should
explain how it can be rendered more or less rational/justified
according to the state of one’s evidence. I argue that the attitude of
suspending judgement whether p constitutively involves having a belief
– specifically, a belief about one’s evidence for p. I show that an
account of suspending that treats it as a sui generis attitude, wholly
distinct from belief, struggles to account for how suspension of
judgement can be rendered more or less rational (or irrational) by
one’s evidence. I show how my preferred belief-based account, in
contrast, neatly accounts for this and other features of suspending
and so neatly accounts for why an agnostic has a genuine neutral
opinion concerning the question whether p, as opposed to simply having
no opinion.
Bernhard Salow: Evidence of Evidence
A familiar slogan in epistemology, articulated by Feldman (2007), is
that “evidence of evidence is evidence”: if I receive evidence that
the scientific community has received new evidence for the existence
of the Higgs Boson, then, even if I don’t myself have access to this
new evidence, I thereby have more reason to believe in the Higgs
Boson. If correct, this idea promises to explain a variety of
phenomena, such as why we should factor in the opinions of others or
our future selves (that they believe p is evidence that their evidence
supports p, hence evidence for p), or why it’s pointless to try
avoiding evidence that supports things we don’t want to believe (if we
have evidence that there is such evidence, we already have evidence
for the things we don’t want to believe).
Recently, however, the slogan has generated more confusion than
illumination; for, as Fitelson (2012) observes, the flat-footed ways
of making it precise leaves it open to simple counterexamples. This
paper attempts to do better. Section 1 distinguishes two problems we
face in precisifying the slogan, and offers solutions to both. Section
2 shows that the resulting precisification can be derived from a
probabilistic theory of evidence, provided that we take certain
controversial positions regarding the epistemology of “higher-order”
evidence. It also argues that doubts one might have about these
positions are also reasons to reject the intuitive slogan itself. This
shows that my proposal is indeed the right way to precisify the
slogan. The connection to higher-order evidence also reveals that two
readings of the slogan differ in how controversial they ought to be.
Johanna Schnurr: Doxastic Normativism: The Argument from Dispositions to Believe
I evaluate doxastic normativism, the thesis that belief is
intrinsically normative, by discussing a specific argument for it that
I ultimately reject: the argument from dispositions to believe, which
has been advanced by Zangwill, Wedgwood, and Nolfi. I begin by laying
out general reasons to be weary of doxastic normativism, before
summarising the argument from dispositions as formulated by
Wedgwood. I then go on to critically consider two of its premises in
detail. The first of these is that rational dispositions are
normative. I argue that this premise is based on some implausible
background assumptions about the way dispositions to believe interact
with defeaters. The second premise I consider is that the dispositions
essential to the capacity for belief are rational dispositions. I
reject this premise as well. I then go on to consider one of the
implausible consequences of accepting the two premises from the
argument from dispositions in conjunction. This, I argue, gives us
reason to reject at least one of the two. I finish on an observation
that the apparent initial plausibility of the argument from
dispositions might be due to its premises invoking two distinct
notions of rationality.
H. Orri Stefansson: A Challenge for Comparativism
This paper discusses a challenge for Comparativists about belief, who
hold that numerical degree of belief (e.g. subjective probability) is
a useful fiction, unlike comparative belief, which they regard as
real. The challenge consists in making sense of claims like “I am
twice as confident in A as in B” in terms of comparative beliefs
only. After showing that at least some Comparativists can meet this
challenge, I discuss implications for Zynda’s (2000) and Stefansson’s
(2017) defenses of Comparativism.
David Thorstad: The Permissivist Triangle
What does epistemic permissivism have to do with evidentialism and
precise Bayesianism? I argue: a great deal. Permissivism is exactly
the claim precise Bayesians need to address leading counterexamples to
their normative view. Reconciling Permissivism with evidentialism
yields a new insight about evidential support. Motivating this insight
yields a new model of the relationship between evidence and rational
belief. This model reveals the normative conflict between precise and
imprecise Bayesians as an underlying conflict about the manner in
which evidence governs rational belief.
Verena Wagner: Against Doxastic Freedom
In this talk, I will discuss recent approaches that aim at making
sense of the notion of "doxastic freedom". Like Harry Frankfurt's
famous drug addict is supposed to explain the requirement of a special
sort of compatibilist free will in addition to freedom of action, the
fact that there are delusional believers seems to create the need for
a special sort of freedom that concerns our doxastic states. The so
called "doxastic compatibilists" (e.g. C. McHugh, M. Steup) claim that
if there is an acceptable version of compatibilist free will in the
practical debate, then there also is a version of compatibilist free
belief that has to be accepted on the same grounds. Though agreeing to
this conditional and being a compatibilist myself, I will challenge
the idea of compatibilist doxastic freedom by illustrating the
consequences of such an approach for other propositional mental
states. As it turns out, compatibilist free will has to be rejected on
the same grounds as compatibilist free belief has to be.
Natalia Waights Hickman: Novelty, Skill, and Knowledge How
Stanley and Williamson (2016) have recently argued that skill is a
disposition to know, in particular, “to be skilled at the action type
of f-ing is to be disposed to form knowledge appropriate for guiding
tokens of f-ing.” (Stanley and Williamson 2016, p.3). This paper is a
critical response to this new proposal, from the perspective of
someone sympathetic to Stanley and Williamson’s intellectualism about
knowledge how. There are problems of two kinds that I will draw
attention to. The first is, so to speak, internal: it concerns
relations between the new paper on skill and Stanley and Williamson’s
earlier work on knowledge how, in particular relating to the so-called
‘novelty objection’ to intellectualism. The second kind of problem is
independent, it concerns Stanley and Williamson’s account of skill in
its own right, and is laid out with somewhat more sympathy to the
anti-intellectualist.
The general thrust of what follows is that one can’t have one’s cake
and eat it. On the one hand, I argue that Stanley and Williamson’s
recent reply to the novelty objection—which is central to the
motivation of their view of skill—undermines Stanley’s (2011) earlier
attempt to defuse it, and leaves their intellectualist view of
standing knowledge how vulnerable to the novelty objection. On the
other hand, I will argue that Stanley and Williamson’s equation of
skill with a disposition to know is vulnerable to just the same kinds
of counterexamples as the anti-intellectualists equation of knowledge
how to f with the ability to f, namely (counter) examples in which the
agent has all the knowledge pertaining how to f on some occasion, and
yet is not able to f (a fortiori, not be able to f skilfully). These
cases indicate that knowledge alone is not sufficient for skill in
f-ing, even if it is necessary—a familiar anti-intellectualist claim.