Weekend reading

Epistemology

Lycan's "Epistemic Value"
Enoch and Shechter's "Basic Belief Forming Methods"
Something on Coherentism

Metaethics

Sayre-McCord "Explanatory Impotence and Moral Theory"
Putnam's "Fact and Value" (though I've been warned it's not very good)

Philosophy of Math

Colyvan, The Indispensability of Mathematics

Summing up this week's thinking

This week I tried to bone up on general epistemology. Enoch claims that what justifies inference to the best explanation also justifies something like inference to what is indispensable for deliberation.

When I read Enoch, I came away with three complaints.

1. If you admit normative facts for the sake of deliberation, your explanations of the world will suffer. For example, you have to explain certain things about these normative facts. And maybe our best explanation of some phenomenon is that normative facts don't exist. So the projects of explaining and deliberating are in tension, then.
2. I didn't understand how his justification for inference to the best explanation was a good one. If it's not a good one, is there a better one, and does that better explanation include normative facts? Also, is it possible that we shouldn't try to justify inference to the best explanation, that it's a basic fact?
3. Is believing in normative facts really indispensable for deliberation?

In order to grapple with the second question, I started looking into what philosophers say about justification in general. There is a debate in epistemology about justification and its structure. Does justification ever run out? Do we have to simply accept so unjustified claims? Or maybe we don't, because there are certain statements that are justified without reference to some other belief. Or maybe all we need is a coherent world view, and our beliefs support each other.

Another issue is something that Enoch even brings up in his dissertation: his argument is only for the existence of some normative facts. But what if there are normative facts without there being moral facts? From what I can tell, some philosophers give accounts of knowledge and justification that are explicitly normative. In that case, all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, requires some normative claims. But does the fact that there are epistemic values imply that there are also moral values? Certainly not. Does it lower the cost of accepting moral facts, since we're already admitting some values into our ontology? Arguably yes. Though I think I can think of a pretty good argument (to be fair, I also think I saw it in Hartry Field) that this doesn't help us very much. Because if we are wary of including normative facts for reasons beyond absence of evidence, even if we're "forced" to accept normative facts for justification or knowledge's sake, that doesn't mean we have to be happy about it. And we still might try to minimize the appearance of more facts about the normative realm. (Though I sometimes wonder if we could just admit any old normative facts, and then have moral facts supervene on these any old normative facts.)

I'm emerging from the week excited and overwhelmed. There are big debates in epistemology, and I'm just starting to get exposed to it.

But how necessary is it for my project? It really depends where I go from here. I'm fairly convinced that Enoch's project runs into a bunch of problems, but they're interesting problems. I could try to give another argument that defends moral realism, trying to do what I think his argument can't do.

I'm also a bit frustrated that I can't bring this back to math yet. But hopefully, if I do find a way to defend moral realism that's novel and interesting, I can then turn to math and say "Does this work there?" Then hopefully I'll have something interesting to say about philosophy of math.

Already there's one difference between math and ethics that seems to make a big difference: math is thoroughly integrated into our scientific knowledge. But what I'm looking at now is whether (if not the ethical) the normative is equally as indispensable for the justification of our knowledge. That is, math is necessary for the expression of our knowledge, but values might be necessary for the justification of that knowledge. Whether one of those projects should be privileged is an interesting question as well (and that relates to my first objection towards Enoch).

Questions that I'm reading about right now

Here are the questions that I'm looking to understand better:

What is the structure of knowledge? Is every belief justified, or do we have some unjustified beliefs, or some beliefs that justify themselves? What is the status of inference to the best explanation--if it's justified, how is it justified? Note that Enoch's argument depends on there being a justification for inference to the best explanation.

If one believes that there are some normative facts, does that mean that there will be ethical facts as well? What are the costs of continuing to deny the existence of ethical facts in the face of the existence of some normative facts?

Is explanation more basic than our other needs? That is, if our non-explanation considerations require us to believe something, and explanation requires us to not believe it, does explanation win, and if so why?

Is there a way to use an indispensability/transcendental argument to defend moral realism? How does that relate to our defense of mathematical realism?

More on Sayre-McCord

Here's a bit of rambling (and by rambling, I mean bad) post:

Once it has been granted that some explanations are better than others, many obstacles to a defense of moral values disappear. In fact, all general objections to the existence of value must be rejected as too strong.

The argument seems to be the following: suppose that you have an argument against evaluative/normative claims. You say, "If values were to exist, then YYY. But XXX suggests that YYY is not the case. So values don't exist." Sayre-McCord is saying that such an argument would now be impotent, because we know that some values exist. Since some values exist, the argument fails.

Does this follow? After all, belief is not binary. Some things are reasons to believe something, and others are reasons not to believe. Our beliefs don't have to be clean and cut. We can say, "We believe IBE, believing in IBE requires that we also believe in the existence of some values. We do this despite the rather convincing arguments that suggest that such values do not exist." (Here I'm trying out an argument that I attribute to Hartry Field).

Now, clearly this doesn't always work. If the argument concludes that "No abstract objects could possibly exist ever ever" and then you believe that values exist in order to undergird IBE, and you also believe that values are abstract objects, then your beilefs are in conflict and one of them has to go. And if you are set on IBE, then it seems that the "no abstract objects" argument is going to have to go. But there are other, weaker more subtle arguments, that don't have to lose their force, I think. Think about the argument from disagreement. OK, actually that's a horrible choice because that's an argument tailor made for ethics and not for normative facts more generally. OK. Think about the argument from queerness. Say it concludes that if normative facts existed, then they would be unlike our normal objects, because they would have ought-ness built into them, they are intrinsically motivating or something. And say that we then, following S-M, conclude that normative facts about explanations exist, that values about explanations exist. Why do we believe this? Because our commitment to IBE forces this. But as long as your argument against normative-realism isn't absolute, and just raises the stakes of realism, I see no reason why you can't maintain that argument even after accepting normative facts about explanations.

To put it more clearly: as long as your argument against normative realism isn't definitive, it can be maintained even after accepting some normative facts. You simply say, "In the case of normative facts about explanations we have no choice, epistemically, to accept these values despite their queerness. But there's no similar consideration forcing our hand in morality/ethics, so we remain skeptical of normative facts about ethics because those normative facts would have to be queer."

Was queerness a bad choice? Once you accept that some normative facts exist about explanations, does that remove their queerness? On the one hand we are now saying that we accept abstract objects with to-be-done-ness built into them. But we were forced, kicking and screaming to accept those values. That doesn't mean that suddenly it became any more palatable to believe in them, I don't think it undermines the argument from queerness.

A new argument for moral realism?

Geoffrey Sayre-McCord has an article, "Moral Theory and Explanatory Impotence." In the last section he presents an argument for moral realism. Here's what he writes in his article on moral realism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I find it clearer than what he writes in his article.

Still another reply, compatible with the first two but relying specifically on neither, shifts attention from science and from mathematics and logic, to epistemology itself. To think of any set of considerations that they justify some conclusion is to make a claim concerning the value (albeit the epistemic as opposed to moral value) of a conclusion. To hold of science, or mathematics, or logic, that there is a difference between good evidence or good arguments and bad ones is again to commit oneself evaluatively. This raises an obvious question: under what conditions, and why, are epistemic claims reasonably thought justified? Whatever answer one might begin to offer will immediately provide a model for an answer to the parallel question raised about moral judgments. There is no guarantee, of course, that our moral judgments will then end up being justified. The epistemic standards epistemology meets might well not be met by moral theory. But there is good reason to think the kinds of consideration that are appropriate to judging epistemic principles will be appropriate too when it comes to judging other normative principles, including those that we might recognize as moral. This means that any quick dismissal of moral theory as obviously not the sort of thing that could really be justified are almost surely too quick.

The claim is that inference to the best explanation** presupposes the existence of some facts about which explanation is best. Sayre-McCord claims that this means that we have to believe in some values. The obvious counter is to try to give an analysis of what it means to be the best explanation in terms of non-normative, non-evaluative language. For example, if I were to tell you that values exist because we know that there are facts about which baseball teams are better than others, you would have an easy way to counter this: "THAT'S not what we mean when we say that some baseball teams are better. Rather, we mean that they win more games, not that they are good, or that you ought to approve of them or something." In the same way, we could analyze what it means to be a better explanation and avoid any committment to values.

"The obvious response to this point is to embrace some account of explanatory quality in terms of, say, simplicity , generality , elegance, predictive power, andso on. One explanation is better than another, we could then maintain, in virtue of the way it combines these properties. When offering a list of properties that are taken to be measures of explanatory quality, however, it is important to avoid the mistake of thinking the list wipes values out of the picture. It is important to avoid thinking of the list as eliminmating explanatory quality in favor of some evaluatively neutral properties. If one explanation is better than another in virtue of being simpler, more general, more elegant and so on, then simplicity, generality and elegance cannot themselves be evaluatively neutral. Were these properties evaluatively neutral, they could not account for one explanation being better than another."

Now, under one interpretation this is a horrible argument. After all, what's wrong with the analysis of the baseball team above? Would we say that we're faking, that "winning games" is actually a value-laden attribute? Certainly not, it's dry, evaluatively neutral. So why can't we say that better only means simpler (and other stuff)? To put things more clearly: we're not saying that the best explanation is the simplest one. If that were the case, then Sayre-McCord would be right. Rather, we're saying that you should eliminate the word "best" and replace it with the word "simplest." If you remove the word "best," then there's no more value-ness hanging around inference to the best explanation.

Maybe, instead, he's just making the argument that SOMETHING needs to justify inference to the best explanation. He writes, "any attempt to wash evaluative claims out as psychological or sociological reports, for instance, will fail--we will not be saying that one explanation is better than another, but only that we happen to like one explanation more or that our society approves of one more." So maybe he's just asking what justifies inference to the best explanation as a principle. And even if you replace the word "best" with "simplest" you still need to find a way to justify the principle. And however you justify it will require you to say that "you ought to beileve the best/simplest/prettiest/most predictively powerful explanation." And that will need to be a value claim. Of course, this argument would need to be distinguished from the kind of ought-ness that we find in rationality. If I tell you that you ought to believe that 2+2=4, what I mean is that rationality requires it of you. Granted, there's some sort of normativity there perhaps, and that's another approach to take. But S-M is clearly not trying to make that argument. So he needs to be saying that there is no other good justification of IBE, I think.

In which case this argument is the argument: justification runs out at IBE, and you then need to accept some kind of evaluative fact that you can't otherwise justify in order to accept IBE. This is different than the claim that whatever justifies IBE also justifies normative facts (which is closer to Enoch). Rather, his claim is that if you chase IBE up to it's source, IBE needs to make some sort of evaluative claim.

You could avoid this argument, as I said in the last section of my paper on Enoch, by refusing to justify IBE. Justification needs to run out somewhere, and by giving a bad justification you, arguably, make your job too easy. And also, as Sayre-McCord notes, this is just a model and not an argument.

**Sayre-McCord actually seems to reject inference to the best explanation as a sufficient condition for belief-formation, but he thinks that it's at least plausible to say that it's necessary. Meaning, if something doesn't count in the best explanation, Sayre-McCord is willing to consider that its explanatory impotence would count against it being knowledge.