A Priori, Live

I made a video of a live take of my A Priori song. Happy New Year all!

Goldman on Context-Sensitivity and Naturalness

Here’s Goldman (from this paper):

A popular view in contemporary epistemology (with which I have much sympathy) is that knowledge has an important context-sensitive dimension. The exact standard for knowledge varies from context to context. Since it seems unlikely that natural kinds have contextually variable dimensions, this renders it dubious that any natural kind corresponds to one of our ordinary concepts of knowledge.

What’s going on here?  Two possibilities:

(1) The view Goldman’s talking about is not epistemic contextualism, which is (at least primarily) a view about ‘knowledge’ rather than knowledge; it is rather (perhaps) some form of sensitive invariantism. And Goldman thinks that a concept (as) of something which is sensitive in the relevant respects is unlikely to correspond to a natural kind.

(2) Goldman is talking about epistemic contextualism, and thinks that the fact that we use a context-sensitive word ‘knowledge’ means that (probably) no natural kinds are picked out by that word in its various contexts of utterance.

Neither of these strikes me as especially plausible on its face. Does anyone have an idea what could motivate one or other of these positions?

Tim-less Explanations

At this weekend’s New Directions in Metaphysics conference, Tim Williamson argued that a contingentist (someone who believes that some things, e.g. Tim himself, exist contingently) cannot satisfactorily explain why Tim’s negative haecceity (the property of being such that necessarily one is not identical to Tim) exists at Tim-less worlds.  The non-contingentist can explain the existence of that property at the relevant worlds (worlds, for example, where Tim’s parents never meet) by appeal to Tim’s existing (albeit as a non-human abstract object) at those worlds.

Granting for the sake of argument that Tim’s negative haeceeity exists at the relevant worlds and this fact needs explanation, I think the contingentist can fairly ask why the existence of Tim is of crucial explanatory importance.  What is wrong with an explanation that cites the possibility at w of Tim’s existing as an explanation of the existence at w of Tim’s negative haecceity?

Here are three things that could be said to be wrong with that, none of which should, I think, be motivating Tim:

(1) There are no possibilities for Tim at worlds at which he does not exist.  Tim doesn’t accept this.

(2) The explanation of the existence of the negative haecceity property should ground out in being; that is, in the existence of something.  But even granting that, the contingentist could say that the possibility of Tim is something.  (Maybe it is something abstract, but on Tim’s view, Tim himself is something abstract at the worlds at which the contingentist wants to say he does not exist.)

(3) It’s less satisfying than a Tim-based explanation.  That may be true; I feel some intuitive pull in that direction myself.  But that doesn’t mean the possibility-of-Tim-based explanation is inadequate; it just means something else is even better. Roy Sorensen helpfully suggested in an email to me yesterday (about a different topic) that the notion of explanatory supererogation may be a useful one.  Maybe the contingentist should say that to although the Tim-based explanation is better than her own, providing an explanation that good is supererogatory.  And of course, explanatory goodness is to be traded against other considerations, such as parsimony.

NIP Survey and Workshop

In case anyone hasn’t yet taken the NIP journal survey, please click through and help the Northern Institute of Philosophy out with a very brief market research exercise.

Speaking of the NIP, I’ve been intending to post a link here to Walter Pedriali’s detailed report on the recent Entitlement Workshop.  Photos are included; they are (representatively) dark due to a lighting malfunction, but the illumination provided by our discussions naturally compensated.  See also the full photo gallery for the workshop.

The 21st Century Monads …

… are on Facebook.  Be there or be mereologically variable (inclusive ‘or’).

See also: this page, with all the Original Monads tunes and the new tracks from the 21st CMs!

UPDATE: New song out now! The G. E. Moore Shift

Contextualism is not a Comfort Blanket

This post concerns the strategy of postulating contextual variability to resolve/dissolve an apparent philosophical dispute.  Sometimes, it seems to me, philosophers feel methodologically aggrieved  when they encounter instances of this strategy.  I’m going to list some of the criticisms I’ve heard from (or thought up on behalf of) the aggrieved parties, and explain why I think they’re bad criticisms of the contextualist strategy.

(1) ‘It’s too easy.’

Why assume that good philosophy should be hard? Assuming we’re interested in getting at the truth, rather than proving that we can do difficult things, easiness is irrelevant. To put it another way, if difficulty is a theoretical virtue at all, I know of no reason to think it is a virtue of the kind that is relevant to rational belief. 

Also, it’s far from clear that it is easy.  There are, for example, many serious and important objections to epistemic contextualism which the epistemic contexualist needs to engage with in order to sustain her position.

(2) ‘It’s too broadly applicable.’

Why assume that philosophical strategies should not be broadly applicable?  In some arenas, features such as generality and breadth of explantory power are regarded as theoretical virtues, and moreover virtues of the kind relevant to rational belief.

Perhaps the concern is supposed to be that, given the breadth of applicability, it is difficult or impossible to place constraints on when the strategy is appropriate.  But I see no reason to suppose that breadth of applicability is directly relevant to the issue of how to find and justify such constraints.  Any strategy that is (or even might be) appropriate in some but not all of the debates in which it is applicable raises the methodological question of what constraints to place on its appropriate application.

(3) ‘It’s lazy.’  

It could be argued that reaching for the contextualist strategy, like reaching for one’s comfort blanket, enables philosophers to avoid doing the hard work of evaluating other strategies and making a proper assessment of their merits relative to those of the contextualist strategy.

But this is not a criticism of the strategy; it’s a criticism of a particular way of abusing the ready availability of the strategy.  Of course no defender of widespread contextual variability should forget to consider other options and assess their pros and cons.  But the same goes for every philosopher who has a view to defend.

Disposition Impossible

Daniel Nolan and I are working on a draft paper looking at unmanifestable dispositions: dispositions, that is, to PHI in circumstances C where at least one of PHI and C is impossible (logically, metaphysically and/or nomically).  We think many things have such dispositions, and this isn’t trivial.  (A trivialist would say that everything has every unmanifestable disposition.)  And we think it matters.  It turns out not to be easy for standard kinds of theories of dispositions to accommodate the unmanifestable sort.

Nottingham A Priori Workshop

More details on the forthcoming Nottingham A Priori Workshop (9th October) are now available, including the programme and information on how to register.

Attendance is free (though we do require advance registration), lunch, tea and coffee are provided, and the speakers are Anthony Eagle (Oxford), Jessica Brown (St Andrews), myself (Nottingham) and Michael Devitt (CUNY/Nottingham Special Professor).

A Priori

For enjoyers of geeky philosophy humour, I wrote a song called A Priori (link to an MP3 file) especially for you. Here are its lyrics.

Contacting OUP

I’ve heard a few philosophers mention recently that it seems to be more difficult than usual to get in touch with people at OUP at the moment.  This is also how it’s seemed to me over the last few months.

I wonder whether anyone else has noticed this, and particularly whether anyone knows of an explanation.