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July 11, 2005
Change of Title
Greg Restall and I have decided to change the name of our joint paper from "Barriers to Inference" to "Barriers to Implication". The old title sounds good and it respects a tradition in the literature, but it led to some odd situations. At FEW, for example, I found myself asking the aren't-you-conflating-inference-and-implication question after someone else's talk, only to stand up and present our barriers paper and have to sheepishly explain that it wasn't really about inference barriers at all...anyway, Greg and I both accept Harman's distinction, so we thought we'd try to bring our practices in line with our beliefs.
Posted by logican at July 11, 2005 11:54 PM
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Using the methods of Russell and Restall's paper on inference barriers, I will show that one can't derive an "is" from a "probably". That is, no consistent set of statements expressing only relations among the probabilities of statements expressible in... [Read More]
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Comments
If it isn't too impertinent to ask, how was the Harman question received at FEW? My experience is that asking a question like that in a setting like that often produces blank stares.
Having said that, it seems the inference-implication distinction might matter here. The 'technical' counterexamples to Hume's Law (e.g. It is raining and it isn't, so murder is wrong) seem like implications that don't support inferences. Does anyone defend the view that Hume's Law is a good principle for inference and a bad principle for implication?
Posted by: Brian Weatherson at July 12, 2005 09:03 AM
Hi Brian,
Greetings from Melbourne!
It's not too impertinent to ask. I had the same worry about asking it, so I introduced it as a philosopher's question and said that I was a bit worried that I wouldn't be able to persuade the two speakers of its importance. As it turned out, I needn't have worried. One speaker fielded the question and he simply said that he had read about Harman's distinction, found it compelling, and, though they tended to speak loosely in talks, he considered them to be working on inference and belief revision. (At least, that's how I remember it several months on. My appologies to the speakers in question if they feel I've misrepresented them.)
I think you are right that the distinction matters in the context of the barrier theses that Greg and I discuss. It's one thing to say that no set of descriptive sentences entails a normative sentence, but it would be quite another to say that there is no good way to INFER normative conclusions from descriptive premises - that would be rather frightening, I think. I suspect some of the antipathy to Hume's Law comes from thinking that it entails that claim.
I don't know of anyone who maintains that you can't infer a normative conclusion on the basis of descriptive claims, whilst at the same time maintaining that some descriptive sentences entail normative sentences. I can see how it would work in your contradiction case though. You could probably use the old paradoxes of material "implication" to get more support: -D entails D-> N, but it's not the case that if you believe -D, you (ought to) infer D->N. That would be a waste of resources, and would get you in trouble if it turned out that D was true after all.
Posted by: Gillian Russell at July 17, 2005 01:03 AM