It looks like I’m going to give blogging another go. I got a lot of useful feedback last summer when I returned to blogging.

A certain kind of case has been bugging me for a month or so. Here is a case with the relevant structure. Suppose Jack is getting ready to leave the house for work. He has a big date tonight. In fact, he is meeting is girlfriend’s parents for the first time. Jack is a philosopher, and so the professional standards for personal grooming that Jack is subject to are very permissive. However, things are not so permissive with his girlfriend’s parents. They would immediately think Jack is very lazy if he didn’t show up clean shaven. Jack knows, let’s say, that there is a reasonable chance that he won’t have time to come back home to shave before the date and a reasonable chance that he will. But he doesn’t know how long it will take him to get through the work he has to do after he teaches, and so he isn’t sure if he’ll be able to get home in time.

I think it’s clear that Jack should shave in the morning. Moreover, I think it is plausible that it is permissible for Jack to act on Conservative:

conservative: I won’t make it back home in time.

Thus, I think that it’s permissible for Jack’s motivating reason for shaving to be Conservative.

If this is right, what follows? At first I thought that the Knowledge Action Principle and its ilk was in trouble:

kap: When your choice is p-dependent, treat p as a practical reason iff you know p.

At least in one sense, this isn’t right. For I don’t think that it’s permissible for Jack to treat p as a practical reason full-stop. For example, it’s clearly not permissible for Jack to assert that Conservative is a practical reason. Moreover, it’s impermissible for Jack to believe that p is a practical reason. What I think is permissible for Jack is to accept p for the purposes of his grooming decision. If it’s permissible merely to accept p, then it’s not permissible to believe p is a practical reason and assert p is a practical reason.

Notice that appealing to the belief/accept distinction doesn’t seem to give the defender of KAP and its ilk any room to maneuver. For those principles are just about what status your attitudes must have towards a proposition in order to permissibly treat it as a practical reason. It seems like if acceptance isn’t knowing, or believing with justification, or believing a truth and you can permissibly act on p when you permissibly accept p, then KAI and its ilk have a problem.

In other words, if I’m right about cases of mere acceptance, then those who think that permissible action must be driven by states that have some type of positive justificatory status do have some kind of problem. For it seems like acting on p is a really central aspect of treating p as a practical reason. And if you can permissibly act on p when you permissibly accept p, then not all permissible action has a tight connection with states that have a positive justificatory status.

I take it the most natural response is to deny that it really is permissible to act on Conservative, and that instead it’s only permissible to act on a proposition about how likely you are to make it home, or about how bad it would be if you thought you would make it home but didn’t, or something like this. This doesn’t seem right to me. Most of my evidence for this is gained by reflecting on my own behavior in cases like this. I really think that I act on the ‘conservative’ proposition, so to speak. Moreover, at the time of acting I’m always quite confident that I am justified in doing so.

Alternative explanations welcome.

]]> http://theexcludedmiddle.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/acting-on-p-when-you-know-you-dont-know-p/feed/ 2 reflectiveequilibrium http://theexcludedmiddle.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/philpapers-bleg/ http://theexcludedmiddle.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/philpapers-bleg/#comments Tue, 12 May 2009 21:21:00 +0000 Errol Lord http://theexcludedmiddle.wordpress.com/?p=160 ]]>

I am now the leaf editor for the Reasons and Rationality and Subjective and Objective Reasons categories on PhilPapers. As such, I am responsible for populating those categories with as much relevant material as possible. I am imploring my readership to help me in this task. If you know of papers that would fit in either or both categories, go to PhilPapers, search for them, and make sure they are so categorized! Thanks in advance!

Update 5.21: I’m now the middle category editor for the Reasons category. That means I’m the leaf editor for Reasons and Rationality, Subjective and Objective Reasons, Internalism and Externalism about Reasons, Reasons and Causes, Reasons and Oughts, and Reasons Misc.

Also, let me take this opportunity to encourage qualified readers of this blog to apply to be editors of open categories (you can find the list of all the categories and editors here). Here are some open categories that readers of this blog might be interested in: Evidence, Justification, Principles of Knowledge, Assertion, pretty much all of metaethics and most of normative ethics.

The big news around here is that I have accepted an offer to join the graduate program at Princeton University. I will start in the fall. We all are very excited to move east. I am particularly excited to work with the likes of Michael Smith and Tom Kelly. It should be a good experience. If you’re curious what my son Thom thinks about it, see here.

In other news, I am now a reviewer for Philosopher’s Digest. Check it out here.

Finally, it seems to me that it’s time to change how this blog is run. I should have some type of plan about this before too long.

On Monday I turned in my last paper, and thus I am finally done with the fall 2008 semester. Here is a recap and some thoughts about it.

I had a lot going on this semester. I took three classes: Al Casullo’s epistemology of philosophy seminar, Mark van Roojen’s ethics core seminar, and Jennifer McKitrick’s seminar on feminism. I also had three hours of thesis hours, which basically turned out to be 6 hours of work. This is because I did a lot of work with my director–MvR–and a lot of work for an independent study I did with Mark Schroeder.

Al’s class was up and down. A lot of the stuff we read was not very good, and it took us a long time to get through a relatively small amount of material. I also was disappointed in my work. We had to do a lot and I don’t think much of my work was very good. I ended up writing two papers–neither of them are very good. Although, writing the first one helped me think a lot about justification in general and perceptual justification in particular (so much so that I now have some papers in the works about the epistemology of perception).

Mark’s class was good. I had read most of the things on the reading list before, but most of the discussions were really interesting. And the take-home midterm was fun to write. It got me thinking about a lot of issues that I had never thought about in any kind of rigorous way before. I also like the paper I wrote.

Jennifer’s class was a mix between Al’s and Mark’s in terms of quality. Most of the readings were really bad. But the discussions were often quite interesting. And although I felt kind of awkward pointing out a ridiculous mistake in a ’seminal’ paper in my paper, it was quite fun to write. It’s always fun to argue against an argument that makes you angry to know exists in print.

I also had three conference trips. The first two were in September. First, I drove up to Madison with Steve Swartzer and Mark Decker for the 5th Annual Madison Metaethics Workshop. This conference was really great. Lots of great philosophers and plenty of good philosophy. I had fun hanging out with Mark Schroeder again, and I met a lot of great people–including, but not limited to, Jamie Dreier, Michael Young, Dave Enoch, Tristram McPherson, Steve Finlay, Russ Shafer-Landau and Matt Bedke. I hope to go to Madison every year from now on.

For the second conference I drove up to St. Paul with Steve, Mark, and Chris McCammon for the Central States. We were all presenting papers. I presented my ‘The Propositional Account of Reasons and Compatibilism about Motivating and Normative Reasons.’ Aside from having a horrible title, I am not that enthused about that paper anymore. I do want to defend the view though. I just don’t like the way I set it up in that paper. Nevertheless, I got some great comments from Tristram McPherson. We also had a good time at a local brewery, the name of which escapes me (ask Steve).

The big trip of the semester was to Oxford for the Oxford Graduate Philosophy Conference. Aidan was one of the other speakers, which turned out to be great! It was really nice to have a friend there–especially since there were three groups of presenters from the same school (one group from Michigan, one from Cambridge, and one from Oxford). I presented my ‘Two Puzzles about Ought.’ I was really lucky to have John Broome commenting. His comments were very good. I also got to spend some time with Jonathan Dancy (mostly thanks to Aidan). That was also fun. All in all, it was a great trip.

Those were the main philosophical things in the fall ‘08. Hopefully I’ll have some exciting news to announce in the next few weeks…

My wife tagged me. Usually I don’t do Memes, but it will make her happy (hopefully).

5 Things on My To-Do List:

1. Finish feminism paper
2. Finish intuitions paper
3. GRADE
4. Stop thinking about admissions
5. Work on my thesis

5 Things I Like to Snack On:

1. Doritos
2. Cookies
3. Bananas
4. Nutella
5. Muffins

5 Things I Would Do if I Was a Millionaire:

1. Have a house in France.
2. Invest for the kids’ college education.
3. Visit friends more often.
4. Eat out more often.
5. Buy a new car.

5 Places I Have Lived:

1. Lincoln, NE
2. Scottsdale, AZ
3. Tempe, AZ
4. Prescott, AZ
5. Steamboat Springs, CO

5 Jobs I have Held:

1. TA
2. B & N Bookseller
3. Golf lackey
4. Hockey referee
5. SOL

Some good news in my neck of the woods lately.

First, I will be presenting my ‘Two Puzzles about Ought‘ at the 12th Annual Oxford Philosophy Graduate Conference the weekend before Thanksgiving.

Second, my paper ‘Having Reasons and The Factoring Account’ (formerly known as ‘A Defense of The Factoring Account of the Having Reasons Relation’) has been accepted by Philosophical Studies. A draft can be found here (pdf). N.B. that draft is not final.

My first publication has now appeared in Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. You can access it for free here (pdf). It took approximately 2.5 months to appear from the time I sent it in initially to the time it was published. Hooray for open access!!

In my previous post, I discussed the relationship between the knowledge account of assertion, a non-factive account of justification, and a prima facie plausible principle linking warranted belief with warranted assertion. In this post, I’ll turn my attention to the knowledge account of action (KAAc). There is a problem analogous to the one for KAA for KAAc. Namely, it’s bad to be committed to the following three principles:

knowledge-act: One may act as if if and only if one knows .

justified-not-knowledge: One can be justified in believing even though one fails to know .

belief-act: If one is epistemically warranted in believing , then one may (=is epistemically warranted to) act as if .

Here is why it’s bad to hold all three. From Justified-Not-Knowledge, it follows that one can justifiably believe even when is false. Suppose that A justifiably believes but does not know . From Belief-Act, it follows that A may act as if . But, since A doesn’t know , it follows from Knowledge-Act that one may not act as if . #

I think we should reject Knowledge-Act. And I would like to point out that there is no response analogous to Aidan’s responses in the comments on the previous post that applies to Belief-Act. Aidan’s response was to point out the relationship between assertion and testimony. Since one might think that the primary role of assertion is testimony (i.e. the transferral of knowledge through testimony), and that there isn’t an analogous role in reasoning (something I doubted), one might be tempted to think that the epistemic standards governing assertion are stronger than the ones governing belief. This is reason to deny Belief-Assert. However, this won’t work with Belief-Action. Indeed, since a natural end-point for deliberation is action, it seems as if those who take Aidan’s route should deny Knowledge-Action. After all, we’re only talking about deliberation, not about assertion.

This is curious in a few ways. First, there is the sociological fact that many of the philosophers attracted to Knowledge-Assert are also attracted to Knowledge-Act, and it seems as if they are attracted to both principles for similar reasons. Second–and I admit this is only an appeal to intuition–the view that holds Knowledge-Assert but not Knowledge-Act is intuitively weird to me. It seems as if deliberation in the head and deliberation out loud are similar activities. Moreover, it seems as if doing is very similar to telling others to do . But this view makes a sharp–and to me an artificial–distinction between these activities.

Good news. The note on Dancy I posted a link to here, entitled ‘Dancy on Acting for the Right Reason,’  has been accepted by the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. I will leave the version linked to in the previous post up until I make some revisions tomorrow.

I’m sure you’re all dying to for more about ought, but for now I’m going to let you continue to die. This post is about knowledge and assertion (and I’m betting Clayton has already had some of these thoughts). I want to argue that being committed to the following three positions is a sorry state to be in:

knowledge-assert: One may assert if and only if one knows .

justified-not-knowledge: One can be justified in believing even though one fails to know .

belief-assert: If one is epistemically warranted in believing , then one may (=is epistemically warranted in asserting) .

I take it that most defenders of the Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA) want to be able at least to accept Knowledge-Assertion and Justified-Not-Knowledge. Williamson makes it clear that Justified-Not-Knowledge is compatible with E=K+his account of justification. Moreover, he seems to think that it would be a bad thing if he was forced to give up Justified-Not-Knowledge. I also think that Hawthorne and Stanley (e.g.) want to hold both Knowledge-Assertion and Justified-Not-Knowledge (although, I should say that I’m not as familiar with those two books as I am with Williamson).

Belief-Assert is also very intuitively plausible. Imagine what would make it false: A case in which it is perfectly within your epistemic rights to believe but not within your epistemic rights to assert (of course, it’s easy to imagine a case where it’s not within your etiquette rights to assert ). Some also argue (e.g. Jon Kvanvig and Kent Bach) that the fight about the norm of assertion is really just a fight over the norm of belief. Obviously Belief-Assert falls out of that.

Here’s why it’s a sorry state to hold all three positions: If you hold Justified-Not-Knowledge, it’s possible for someone to be epistemically warranted in believing but not know . Thus, from Belief-Assert one is epistemically warranted in asserting . But since one doesn’t know , it follows from Knowledge-Assert that one may not assert . #

There are several fairly common moves one might employ to get rid of this. One might make some type of objective/subjective distinction about ‘warranted’ and say that one is objectively warranted iff one knows and one is subjectively warranted iff one is justified (or make the distinction between objective ‘may’ and subjective ‘may’). I’m skeptical that will work, but encourage people to try.

Barring arguing that there is an equivocation, the only other way to get rid of the problem is by giving up one of the three views. I take it that most who hold Knowledge-Assert will want to give up Justified-Not-Knowledge (‘Sutton’ it, as it were). But that means that justification=knowledge. That means that that Gettier guy was all wrong! Surprising result.

I say let’s give up Knowledge-Assert.