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.

Responding to some of a commenter's points

But is it necessary for numbers to exist for me to be able to use them in my explanations of the world? In physics, we talk about the world as if there were a big three-dimensional grid running through it, but it doesn't actually exist.

It's absolutely necessary for numbers to exist in order to use them in my explanations of the world...unless it's not. What I mean is that the burden of proof is on the "fictionalist" to show that belief in the existence of numbers isn't necessary for their use in science. This is because it kinda seems that mathematical truths make explanations better--our explanations of the world would be worse if we didn't have math and didn't think that numbers existed. But, hey, if you can give a convincing account of how science uses math in a way that doesn't commit you to their existence, power to you. Hell, you might even think of calling your book "Science Without Numbers."

I find your examples somewhat problematic, in that leaky pipes and protons are both objects in the physical world, which numbers clearly are not. I think part of the issue is figuring out what it means for mathematical or ethical things to exist, but I don't know if thinking about pipes will really help with that. You mentioned gravity in a previous post, and that's closer, but maybe something like color or the principles of musical harmony would work better? (Depends what parallels you want to draw.)

This argument doesn't follow through; it stops before finishing. Because it's obvious that there are differences between protons and numbers. Sure, protons are physical objects, and (according to most) numbers are not. But so what? Do only physical things exist? Can you argue that, or do we just assume that from the start?

Asking what it means for non-physical objects to exist is a fair point. Here's the way the indispensability argument for mathematical objects works: Whatever it means for something to exist, we do know that being an indispensable part of our best explanation is sufficient for us to say that something exists. And numbers pass that test. You still probably need some sort of account of what existence means (does it just mean that the facts are true independent of human thinkers? does it mean that we can disagree? does it mean that we can know facts about them? etc.), but that's not essential to the argument. Of course, you could come back and counter "Well then, I have a different principle for how to determine what things exist" and we'll have to see how that one fares.


The question is, would it matter if you actually observed a cat burning in the real world? If I made an animation of children burning a cat (even a really crude one), or just talked about burning a cat, you would have the ethical observation that burning cats is bad. It seems then more like a making aware of something that you already know, rather than something you learn from observation (it crucially doesn't matter whether or not anybody has ever burned a cat). In science, on the other hand, I can talk about flying pigs as much as I want, but you won't get any biological insight out of it. Ethics seems to only require thought experiments, which makes it much easier to claim that it is simply an analysis of human thought processes, rather than of the world "out there".

...unless that's not true. I think we should distinguish between intuitions and observations, both in science and in ethics. A physicist might perform a thought experiment and come to some conclusion about what is possible or not possible. A biologist could do that too. So could an ethicist, reasoning out what situations were bad. But what your claim depends on is that there is no role for observation in ethics--that's exactly what's at issue here. And I do recognize that observation doesn't play the role in ethics that it does in science. Like I've said, there are no ethics laboratories, and it doesn't make sense for a guy in a lab coat to run a few tests to figure out if something is ethical or not. At the same time, it does seem possible to me that through observing the world one would reach ethical conclusions that one wouldn't reach from the armchair.

For example, suppose that you've never seen a guy rip off a customer in business. You think about it, imagine it, and say "Hmm, that doesn't seem SO bad." And that's fine, until you witness some guy get ripped off. When you observe him getting cheated, you realize that there was cruelty where you didn't expect it, and you conclude that the action was unethical. Now, why doesn't this count as observation? "Well, if you had thought through everything carefully enough, you could've reached that conclusion from the armchair. You just needed to think a little bit more clearly, and then you would've realized that it's cruel." But that seems like an unfair standard to hold ethics to for a couple of reasons. First of all, maybe the cruelty was extremely non-obvious, and needed observation to show it to you. Maybe the cruelty comes from the knowledge the businessman has that through some complex transaction this will ruin his customer's financial life. Second, it seems that there are scientific observations where you COULD'VE figured it out from the armchair in a similar way. Maybe we should be told that if we thought carefully enough about our own way of learning language we should be able to figure out a perfectly good psychological or linguistic theory. But that seems unfair. But isn't that what we're asking of ethics--to rely only on intuitions and never on observational insight? But observation is helpful, just as helpful as it is in the sciences (well that's an exageration, but at least observation doesn't seem totally irrelevant).


My temptation as a non-philosopher is to view this as a psychological question--different people are satisfied with different levels of proof. I believe, for example, that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969. I also know people (otherwise normal and intelligent) who believe this is not the case. Clearly, we each believe ourselves to apply reasonable standards of proof in determining what is in fact the case. I don't know that this really transfers to math and ethics, but it might. (For example, in people's different reactions to the idea of triage in epidemics--some people can't get past the gut reaction, while others are willing to entertain the idea of trade-offs. There was a NYT article about triage today, which made me think of this.)

But there is a wholly separate question from the psychological one, which is the question of justification. We might be interested in human reasoning as something to understand and explain, but what about understanding what human claims and principles of reasoning are justified? That's the philosophical question. (I might as well copy and paste the opening paragraphs from Frege's "Foundations of Arithmetic," because I'm trying to make exactly the same point.)

Two questions

1) Are we able to give a good justification for inference to the best explanation (or any other principle that justifies our inductive inferences)? If we're not able to give a good justification, then how do we defend our choice to believe in inference to the best explanation? If we simply have to shrug our shoulders and take some things as primitive and given, then can we also take something else as primitive that would give us ethical facts? How can we do this while not also allowing facts about sorcery to gain validity?

(Note: what Enoch did was try to justify inference to the best explanation, and it turned out that his justification of inference to the best explanation also plausibly would include inference to what's necessary for deliberation, and this included some normative/ethical facts. So this question could be restated in the following way: is Enoch's the best justification for inference to the best explanation? It doesn't seem very good. If we can provide a better one, will it also justify ethics? If there is no good justification (which could be OK) then how do we prevent anarchy?)

2) What is the strength of the following argument: in order to believe in inference to the best explanation you have to believe that some explanations are better than others. This means that you have some criteria for what makes an argument best. But why should you believe in the best explanation? Implicit in inference to the best explanation is that you ought to believe in the best...nevermind, this isn't going anywhere. I'll come back to number 2 later.