tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post2929709287210175718..comments2023-10-29T10:32:36.914-04:00Comments on Philosophy, et cetera: Three Options in the Epistemology of PhilosophyRichard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-80808020763590933272015-12-01T14:00:49.819-05:002015-12-01T14:00:49.819-05:00You could have something more cosmopolitan than ju...You could have something more cosmopolitan than justifying based on (potentially unusual) features of your own psychology. My take on a related topic here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/iao/common_sense_as_a_prior/Nick Becksteadhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16561745593227211371noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-47393942284736290082015-11-19T18:54:54.330-05:002015-11-19T18:54:54.330-05:00Oh yeah, I hadn't meant to suggest that you...Oh yeah, I hadn't meant to suggest that you'd denied the existence of other sorts of evidence. My intention was just to suggestion that there are certain kinds of statements which are doubtlessly known, without being known by virtue of the objective content of the statement - such that at least some of our knowing must have a different sort of foundation than the kind laid out in option three (while also being immune to the kind of skeptical critique put forward by option one).Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-36864725593569372852015-11-19T10:32:25.902-05:002015-11-19T10:32:25.902-05:00I agree that self-evidence is not the only kind of...I agree that self-evidence is not the only kind of evidence! There I'm focused on <i>a priori</i> beliefs, as found in philosophy. For a posteriori (and typically contingent) matters, such as what you're currently perceiving, your perceptual evidence matters.Richard Y Chappellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-17238995286006275162015-11-19T10:20:02.901-05:002015-11-19T10:20:02.901-05:00Just a few thoughts (no answer to the question its...Just a few thoughts (no answer to the question itself!):<br /><br />Off the top of my head, it seems possible that someone could believe that we can't know a single thing, without regarding that belief itself as something that is known, or something that is rational. For it seems at least logically possible for a person to just hold onto a certain belief about our knowledge with a kind of blind and invincible instinct - in the same way that Hume seems to suggest that we ultimately hold onto many of our foundational beliefs about the world. But, it may very well be an empirical impossibility, or a thing that never actually happens in the world.<br /><br />As for the third option, I think that there are at least some propositions that we know are true, but which we cannot know are true from the contents of those propositions alone (or, which are not "intrinsically credible," or worthy of belief). For instance, it seems to me that I know that I am currently perceiving a black and red object. But, in order to know that such a proposition is true, it doesn't seem sufficient to grasp the contents of the proposition itself - or, the proposition itself doesn't seem to be intrinsically worthy of belief. Rather, it seems that it is only because I also grasp the subjective experience to which the proposition corresponds, that I can know that the proposition itself is true. So, in that case at least, just knowing the objective content doesn't seem to be sufficient to know that the proposition itself is correct. (In my own terminology, I'd say that this suggests that all self-evident propositions may be knowable, but that not every proposition that we know is self-evident - if a self-evident proposition is one which we can know that is true just by knowing the meaning or the content of the proposition itself.)<br /><br />Best,<br /><br />NickAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-50228978248285317782015-11-08T09:00:44.648-05:002015-11-08T09:00:44.648-05:00Philosophy covers a lot of subjects, so I'm no...Philosophy covers a lot of subjects, so I'm not sure there will be a unified correct approach. <br /><br />In the case of morality, an alternative option - which I take you disagree with, but it's an alternative - is that radically different aliens do not have moral beliefs at all, even if they have some set of norms more or less analogue to morality. <br />As for humans (or relevantly similar aliens), a subvariant of this alternative is that even if no single consistent set of moral beliefs, all consistent such sets overlap in at least all or nearly all of the cases humans can understand (alternatively: the cases humans actually have considered), and many more. In particular, there is no Ideally Coherent Caligula (ICC), even if there are possible ideally coherent agents that have no moral beliefs and may go around torturing people for fun, evaluating the behavior as positive for himself (or positive according to some system of norms other than morality). <br /><br />Under that interpretation, epistemic conservatism (or something in the vicinity, perhaps more complicated) might work reasonably well for morality. Angra Mainyuhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16342860692268708455noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-60904998579515634422015-11-07T13:22:40.647-05:002015-11-07T13:22:40.647-05:00I never like putting things like this in terms of ...I never like putting things like this in terms of justification of belief, because I always worry about it covering more subtle, yet still important, differences. I think epistemic conservatism, for instance, can be given a much stronger defense if we are talking not about justifications of particular beliefs but pragmatic vindication of postulates of inquiry, or if the idea is not that we are justified by default in believing whatever seems intuitive but that there is actually a <i>tertium quid</i> between beliefs that are justified and beliefs that are unjustified (e.g., beliefs that are still 'under investigation'). And I think one could also argue that we might be dealing with a division that should be seen not as domain-general but as varying from domain to domain -- e.g., Newton's fourth Rule of Reasoning in Philosophy in the <i>Principia</i> can be seen as an epistemic conservatism rule for physics, and one might think it makes a lot of sense for physics and not for, say, finance.<br /><br />But, that aside, my general sympathies lie with the objective warrant approach. The way you've stated it suggests to mind the Stoic theory of cataleptic (or kataleptic) impressions: that there are at least some cases where seeming true and being true are connected in a substantive and <i>necessary</i> way, although, of course, this need not be an immediately obvious way. The Skeptics, of course, always argued that all impressions were acataleptic. (And as the Skeptics held to your Option 1 for belief in a strict sense of judging true, and your Option 2 for belief in the looser sense of 'what you're treating as apparently true in your practical life', perhaps the ancient dispute provides a supplementary reason for thinking that your three options do identify all the possibilities, or at least all the possibilities that are likely to come up without getting into complicated subtleties and weird ideas people don't usually come up with.)Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.com