Grounding Inferential Norms
I’m preparing my talk for the exciting-looking Brown Shapiro Conference on the Epistemology of Inference.
It’s going to pull together two strands in my thinking about epistemology, which I hadn’t until now attempted to amalgamate but which (I’m relieved to find) will hopefully mesh neatly.
The first is that I suspect that epistemically normative claims are made true by natural facts. (I wrote a bit about this idea a few years ago, in Epistemic Norms and Natural Facts.) The second is newer: I suspect that there’s an interesting story to be told about the epistemology of basic norms of inference, according to which it is reliance on our empirically grounded concepts (in the sense of Grounding Concepts) that guides us to trust in and apply the right inferential rules.
This story is in some respects different from the one I outlined in Grounding Concepts about how reliance on empirically grounded concepts could guide us to true and knowledgeable beliefs: trust in, and use of, inferential norms is (plausibly) not best thought of as a matter of believing certain propositions. However, I’m going to try and suggest that concepts could do the same kind of work in making trust in an inference rational as they can do in making belief in a proposition rational.
If that’s right, things align tidily. Empirically grounded concepts are sensitive to empirical input. Empirical input, presumably, is sensitive to the natural world. And it is aspects of the natural world it is that make true epistemically normative claims. So the right concepts can serve as reliable guides to which inferential rules we ought to trust and use.
Could data from psychology and cognitive science on people’s inferential practices as empirically observed be incorporated into the story? My first reaction is that some of this material may lend support to what you want to argue, but some of it seems to be in tension with your points.
Hi Catarina,
What sort of data did you have in mind? Sounds interesting!
Hi Carrie,
I’m thinking of the familiar stuff on reasoning biases, Wason task, belief bias, nothing very exotic. For an overview, I usually recommend J. Evans 2002, ‘Logic and Human Reasoning: An Assessment of the Deduction Paradigm’.
On the other side of the story, people in the tradition of embodied cognition also talk about ‘grounding’, and although it is not exactly what I think you mean by it, it’s somewhat related (e.g. the work of Rafael Nunez on the bodily grounding of mathematical cognition.).
It seems like in a quadratic system brief variables might be used like “O” for coherency, “=” for contingency, “::” for objectivity, and “~” for proportion or dimensionality.
This might be an objective system that does not use large words.
Picture a four-square diagram —!
O corresponds with qualia & proof
= corresponds with history & proof
:: corresponds with structure & proof
~ corresponds with mathematics & proof
Each is contained in the following “shell”;
The proof follows O -> = -> :: -> ~ -> O ideally
Maybe that’s concise.