December 06, 2006
Testimony
Sophie Fortin has been thinking about testimony recently, and she has me reading the introduction to Lackey and Sosa's Epistemology of Testimony
Schmitt...invokes what he calls the Trasindividual Thesis, which consists of the following two parts: first, H's belief that p is justified on the basis of testimony only if it is justified on the basis of S's good reason to believe that p, unless on the basis of a good reason to believe that p that H possesses herself, and second, H's belief that p can be justified on the basis of testimony even though it is not justified on the basis of a good reason that H possesses to believe that p.
By way of defending his thesis Schmitt's central strategy is to discuss what he calls the Transtemporal Thesis, a similar though far more intuitively plausible thesis regarding memorial justification, which consists of the following two parts: first, a subject, A's belief that p is justified on the basis of memory only if it is justified on the basis of A's original good reasons to believe that p and, second, A's belief that p can be justified on the basis of memory even though it is not justified on the basis of a current reason to believe that p that A possesses. Schmitt then argues that if the intuitively plausible Transtemporal Thesis is accepted, then an analogous case can be made showing that the Transindividal Thesis is nearly as strong. (Lackey, p. 12-13)
Posted by logican at 12:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 09, 2005
Mill's Father and the Problem of Evil
Mill talks about his father's attitude to God and the problem of evil in his Autobiography
He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness. His intellect spurned the subtleties by which men attempt to blind themselves to this open contradiction. The Sabean, or Manichean theory of a Good and an Evil principle, struggling against each other for the government of the universe, he would not have equally condemned; and I have heard him express surprise, that no one revived it in our time.
This passage struck me because I heard that very theory - or at least something like it - proposed on the Greyhound bus the other day. I ended up talking, as one sometimes does, to the woman in the seat next to me. She told me about her children and their desires to study computer graphics, I told her about the talk I was giving at the University of Calgary, she told me about her church, and I tried to persuade her that free will was no solution to the problem of evil. We eventually hashed out that she didn't believe that God is omnipotent. Rather, he's in a scarily well-balanced fight with the devil. The devil causes all the unnecessary natural suffering and evil and God's just trying to hold up our end the best he can.
This was more than a month ago and I've been mulling it over ever since. This strikes me as a much more attractive solution than any solution which implies that suggests there's really no unnecessary natural evil in the world.
Posted by logican at 10:34 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
December 04, 2005
Is the pursuit of truth ever reprehensible?
Adam suggested the following case: our reading group was looking at Gila Sher's "Ways of Branching Quantifiers" and it occurred to him to wonder whether Sher was male or female - something that can be easily checked using google. But Adam suspected that it might be wrong to check. And so he suspected that this might be a case in which is wrong to pursue the truth.
I feel the force of the case, but I was wondering what might be behind the intuition that it is wrong to check. When challenged it's natural to appeal to the fact that Sher's gender is irrelevant to the quality of Sher's article, which makes one suspect that the worry is that one might judge the article less or more sympathetically given knowledge of the author's gender. This is the same kind of worry that one might have when one wonders whether a job candidate is male or female. Or black or not. Or from a decent graduate programme or not. Or also works on Foucault or not. Or wrote that paper on decision theory that you half remember. Or has a blog. (There seems to be some kind of slippery slope here - when is to ok to start pursuing truth?) But one might worry about one's assessment of the article being skewed by knowledge of the author's gender for two reasons. One might be worried about doing an injustice to the author. But one might also be worried about corrupting one's own epistemic processes - that is, placing obstacles in the way of one's own pursuit of truth. And in that case, the worry that investigating the truth might be wrong is motivated precisely by one's pursuit of truth.
Anyway, Adam guessed that Sher was female, and I said "I bet you anything they aren't", which no doubt made me guilty of all kinds of grammatical sin as well as of the sin of despair. To which I might have to add the sin of pursuit of truth - I checked.
Posted by logican at 10:21 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack