Revising, rewriting, adding...

I definitely did not think I would still be doing this much work on it so close to the deadline, but here I am. Anyway, almost done; it's due tomorrow at 2 PM.

Reply to Critic, II Ctd.

I did a poor job of responding to this criticism last time, so let me try to handle it again. The reason why the criticism lands is because, in my account, I never explicate what is wrong with a paradoxical or self-defeating reason. Without such an account I leave myself wide open for misinterpretation, and I think that the objection that I considered last time is a kind of misinterpretation. So first I'll do the negative work and explain why that objection fails to land, and that will (hopefully) lead me into a positive account of what's wrong with paradoxical reasons.

Allow me to begin with the case of skepticism about the external world, a case that the objector raised. Here's the case that he raises. Suppose that we have some theory about the external world that implies that we have knowledge of that world. And then suppose that the evidence from our senses shows us that the evidence we have is compatible with us being fundamentally mistaken about our beliefs from the external world, and based on this tension we come to doubt that we have any knowledge of the external world. What's happened in this case is that we started without a belief in skepticism about our knowledge, and we end up with such a skeptical position. In between comes beliefs based on external world evidence; meaning, what got us to reject a belief that we have knowledge of the external world is a tension in our belief about the external world.

There seems to be nothing paradoxical about that. And the reason why there isn't anything paradoxical or self-defeating about that is because there's nothing that requires you to continue to believe something that motivated you to some further belief. To give another example, you might have an entire train of thought, the problems in each link of the chain motivating you to accept the next theoretical step, but that doesn't mean that you have to keep on believing the old theory, even though without it you wouldn't have made the progress that you made!

This is supposed to cause trouble for my argument about self-defeating reasons, since the argument seems to depend on the faulty premise that one must continue to believe something that was a motivating consideration.

This, however, is a bad analogy. In order to have the proper analogy you need to talk not about beliefs or knowledge that is discarded in the reasoning process, but rather reasons and norms. And once you focus on the actual reasons for skepticism that show up in the external world case, things become clarified. What is you reason for doubting that you have any knowledge of the external world in the above case? The reason is not your beliefs, but rather the tension in your beliefs. So you have a belief that you have a reason, something along the lines of "I ought not believe that I have knowledge of an area when my being completely wrong is consistent with the evidence." And there's nothing paradoxical about that at all.

Let's say that we wanted to construct a case that's really analogous--not fake analogous--to my case of rejecting epistemic norms for internal epistemic reasons. Many cases suggest themselves, and they're all pretty wacky. Suppose that the first rule of hockey was "There are no rules in hockey." Isn't this funny? Here's another one: a book that tells you on the first page, "Don't believe a single thing--including this sentence--that you read in this book." Isn't that odd? I've got one more: Suppose that you had a moral code, and one of the maxims in your moral theory is "To be moral is immoral." In all these cases you have the normative theory eating itself, more or less. And these all feel weird, precisely in the way that the external world/perception case does not.

OK, but this fails to ease our concerns, because we still haven't landed on precisely what is wrong with a self-defeating reason. Here's one suggestion of what I'm committed to (thanks to BN for the suggestion): "A thinker must be able to retain the reasons for her belief even after a change in view prompted by accepting that belief." Now, we need to be precise, because we're not interested in what the thinker concludes upon reflection after having made a judgment right now. What we're actually interested in is whether this counts as an epistemic reason to doubt epistemic realism at all. The suggestion is that my argument depends on the view that, in order for something to count as a reason, the thinker must not know that it won't disappear in the future.

If that's what I'm committed to, so be it. That would mean that I'm committed to what Thomas Nagel famously called "timeless reasons", which means that I'm committed to the view that reasons are timeless. This is a formal requirement on reasons, that requires something to be effective at all times in order for it to count as a reason at all. If that's all it takes to get epistemic realism, then fine.

But I'm not sure that I'm even committed to that, or at least nothing quite as strong as that. All I need is that, for a reason to be a reason at all, there's no way that it could be paradoxical in this sense, not that at no time in the future will this reason disappear. Now the challenge facing me is to get precise about what exactly is wrong with such a reason.

I'll start by making a distinction between formal and substantive considerations against a reason. A formal consideration against a reason is a consideration that counts against it counting as a reason at all. For example, in Nagel that a consideration is not consistent with a metaphysical conception of oneself as equally real across time counts against something being a reason at all. If it's not timeless, then it's not even a reason. A substantive consideration is a reason that stands in opposition to some reason, always countering it.

Let me begin by offering a formal account of why a self-defeating reason is not a reason. A reason must give us a clear directive on how to alter our behavior, and something that fails to do this does not count as a reason at all. According to this standard, a self-defeating fails as a reason because it offers no clear directive due to its self-defeating nature. Just as we do not know whether to believe the Cretan when he says that all Cretans are liars, we do not know whether any reason that resembles a Cretan in this way--it only counts in favor of something if it doesn't, it only doesn't count in favor of something if it does--counts as a reason at all.

Here's a substantive account of what's wrong with a self-defeating reason. Suppose that epistemology gave us an epistemic reason to doubt that epistemology gave us reasons at all. I'm assuming that this doesn't fail to count as a reason at all; suppose that it's a consideration against belief in epistemology. Here's something that seems generally true: you only have reason to promote X if all the propositions whose truth it presupposes are true. Now, what does it mean for a reason to presuppose a truth? By that, all I mean that if that proposition were false then there wouldn't be a reason. These are familiar; if it's not true that this property belongs to someone else then it wouldn't count as stealing and there wouldn't be a reason to avoid taking it for yourself. Anyway, what does a reason to doubt epistemic realism depend on? If it's an objective reason, then it depends on the truth of the proposition that there's are objective reasons. And so you have a direct contradiction in your epistemology: on the one hand you have a reason that there are no objective episteimc reasons, but you also think that its true that there are objective epistemic reasons. This explanation is completely general, it applies to any system of norms, and seems to make it impossible to make any progress on the issue.

Now, here's a good objection against this last paragraph: "A contradiction isn't exactly a great situation for epistemology either!" But now we're just running in circles. I AGREE that it's not good for epistemology to have contradicitons of any sort, but I just disagree that this can be construed into any clear epistemic reason. This provides a strong non-epistemic reason, perhaps, to reject epistemic realism. All that I'm saying is that epistemic realism is epistemically optional; it's up to you if you think that there's some non-epistemic reason for rejecting epistemic realism. Just don't pretend that this has anything to do with truth. It doesn't--otherwise it would be an epistemic reason!

In short, the example brought by the objector fails. I might rely on the formal requirement on reasons, argued for by Nagel, that reasons are always timeless. I might say that there's an even more minimal formal requirement. Or I might say that there's a substantive impasse that's necessarily brought by internal anti-realist reasons. I don't really care which one the reader likes, but I have three solid responses to the objection.

Revising

Here are the three things that I need to improve in chapter one:

1) Response to objection that alleges that one can still remove the burden of epistemic norms for an objective reason, that is lack of coherence of the system. (See two post ago)

2) Response to objection that alleges that there's nothing wrong with the "self-defeating" reasons (see one post ago).

3) Elaboration on how these issues effect the expressivist and constructivist. (I might punt on this one, I'm not sure I know enough about these positions to take an authoritative stance on them, but we'll see how the week goes.)

BN didn't have too many substantial objections to Chapter Two. That chapter needs a bit of cleaning up here and there, and its role needs to be clarified a bit in the structure of the thesis as a whole, but it's not a top priority.

The main section I need to work on in Chapter Three is the final argument, that alleges that there's nothing wrong with lacking an explanation for how moral intuitions line up with the moral truth. This section just needs development so that my point becomes more clear.

Finally, the framing of the entire thing needs a bit--but not much--work.

Reply to critics, II

Still focusing on Chapter 1, here's another objection, that I think lands a little bit harder on my argument than the previous objection I considered.

OBJECTION: "You argue, perhaps correctly, that any reason for epistemic anti-realism would either be a reason external to epistemology, or internal to epistemology. You then argue that an external epistemic reasons makes no sense, and that an internal epistemic reason doesn't make any sense either. External epistemic reasons would have to be epistemic reasons that don't draw on epistemology, so I'll give you that one. But internal reasons seem OK to me. You say that such reasons would be paradoxical or self-defeating in nature, since they would be reasons that say "Don't listen to me!" or "What I say doesn't really matter."

But let's give this a closer look. It seems as if you're assuming that a thinker must be able to retain the reasons for her belief even after a change in view prompted by accepting that belief. And that doesn't seem to be generally true.

Consider the case of skepticism about the external world. Suppose you think that you have a theory about how perception works--light bounces off stuff, hits eyes, gets processed--and suppose that same theory tells you that you could be dreaming. You also think that this fact undermines your claims to knowledge of the external world. Now, once you no longer believe that you know what the external world is like, you've also lost your grounds for accepting the particular theory of perception. But that doesn't undermine the skeptical position. So: it looks as if it's not generally required for you to retain your reasons for belief even after the change accepting that belief prompts."

REPLY: This is a complicated case that the objector raises, and we owe it to him to go through it carefully and slowly. I think that doing so reveals that the objection fails to hit the mark.

Let's start by saying what it would take to ruin my argument. In order to ruin my argument, you would have to show that internal epistemic reasons can give us reason to reject epistemic norms. I've claimed that they can't, because self-defeating norms fail to give one a reason to believe something. But this objection alleges that this is not true, and that such a reason, though "self-defeating" in some uninteresting sense, are capable of telling you "reject epistemology!" or "don't believe epistemic realism!" So this is what we need to consider.

The objection alleges that my argument goes like this...

(1) A thinker must be able to retain the reasons for her belief even after a change in view prompted by accepting that belief
(2) Therefore, if a person has a reason to reject epistemic realism, then they must still have such a reason even AFTER rejecting epistemic realism
(3) This, however, is impossible.
(4) So we can project back and say that a person never had an epistemic reason after all.

...and that (1) is false. So let's first consider whether (1) is really false, and then we'll consider whether the objector has got my argument right.

Is (1) false? Well, we would have to show that a person need not retain a belief after a change prompted by accepting that belief. The example brought is from perception, so let's deal with that case. Suppose you have a theory of perception that tells you how you gain perceptual knowledge, and something in your theory of perception tells you that you have reason to doubt perception--your understanding of perception entails that everything could seem the same to you if you were dreaming--and so you reject...well, now let's be careful. What are you rejecting? Are you rejecting your theory of perception, or are you rejecting the belief that your observations are trustworthy? The objector needs the former, but the skeptical argument needs the latter.

I think, personally, that the perceptual case is awfully confused as raised by the objector. Why not focus on an easier case? You have a book that urges you to believe many things. One of the things that the book urges your to believe is the following sentence: "Do not believe anything written in this book." The objector wants to say that we have no problem understanding what this means. After all, the book tells us to reject everything written in it, so if we trust the book then we should reject everything written in it. Only after do we realize that--Surprise!--our reason was undermined. This seems strange. Imagine if you were told, "Believe that p, though you won't have any reason to believe that p five minutes from now." This seems odd.

This reminds me of the discussion in "Possibility of Altruism" of a person plotting against oneself. There are a lot of examples that go against what the objector alleges. Here.

In short, I think it's far from clear that (1) is false, and the example marshaled by the objector certainly doesn't prove that.

But let's say that the objector is correct, and that (1) ought to be rejected. Is it true that my argument relies on this premise? I'm going to think about this a little bit more. I'll continue this train of thought tomorrow. But I think that this is enough to remove the objection from my argument.

ON SECOND THOUGHT: The above response was confused. I think that a proper reply will show that there's a difference here between beliefs and reasons, and I'll argue for that tomorrow.

Reply to critics, I

Maybe someday I'll be a world-famous philosopher and have an opportunity to reply to critics who find my work deeply engaging and paradigm-shifting. For now, my critic is my advisor who is pretty skeptical of my arguments. So here's my attempt to respond to the concerns that he raises. He attacks my central line of argument in the first chapter, which is really pretty crucial to my argument.

OBJECTION: "You say that there can be no internal epistemic reasons to reject epistemology, because any reasons would be self-defeating or paradoxical. Any such reasons, you claim, would be akin to a person who says 'Don't believe what I am saying!'

But here's one way someone might resist this argument, and I don't think that it appeals to any particularly epistemic norms. A system of norms must provide some guidance; if it doesn't, accepting that system does not allow one to guide one's behavior or belief-formation. Hence, incoherent systems are thereby shown to be such that one can't adopt them."

REPLY: This certainly seems to make sense--what good to us is some incoherent system?--but I want to move carefully through this point. Let's first consider if the objector is alleging that some norm requires us to reject epistemic realism, or if the believer is under some sort of obligation to reject epistemic realism.

Here's one thing that this objection could be saying: we have epistemic reason to reject any system of norms that is incoherent. The fact that a system of norms is incoherent gives us an epistemic reason to believe that it is false. This, I think, is a fairly weak objection. I think that there is something very confusing about obeying a norm that loses its force as soon as you believe it. (The reader does object to my contention that we can't follow paradoxical norms, but I'll take that up later). Anyway, that's not what this objection was claiming to do--it was suggesting that we don't have to rely on epistemic norms in order to reject epistemic realism, since it's incoherent.

I'll attack another straw man, as long as I'm at it: one might say that there's a requirement that goes above and beyond epistemology such that it can pass judgement on epistemology from outside it. That is, perhaps the norm(s) of coherence, that state that we have reason to reject any system of norms that is incoherent, stands outside epistemology and is prior to it. This, however, would merely place some other set of norms above epistemology. Of course, this is possible, but two things should be noted. First, the objector is usually motivated by a kind of queasiness about norms-realism in general, and it's unclear why he would feel more comfortable with accepting one system of norms governing belief rather than some other. Further, by assumption I am considered "epistemology" to cover all norms governing belief that are truth-related. (There's a debate in epistemology about the value or aim of epistemology, but we all know that epistemic reasons are more truth-related in some regard than any other system of norms governing belief, and it's that sense that I want to invoke here). So, according to my defintions and usage of epistemology, such an objection would actually concede epistemic realism to me.

Perhaps the objector might mean that there are non-epistemic (even for my usage) norms that give us reason not to accept epistemology as real. And I concede this in the thesis. Incoherence gives us a strong, non-epistemic reason to reject a system of norms, for they are of no practical use to us whatsoever. How are we supposed to be guided by norms if they're incoherent?

The objector, however, does not rest. He still claims that he has an objection. But I've exhausted the possibilities while considering that there is some sort of norm that the objector wishes the believer to respond to. Such a norm would either have to be epistemic or non-epistemic; if epistemic, I object on the grounds that such a norm would be paradoxical and self-defeating; if non-epistemic, I concede the point. What else could the objector mean?

Allow me to put some words in the objector's mouth. He writes, "A system of norms must provide some guidance; if it doesn't, accepting that system does not allow one to guide one's behavior or belief-formation. Hence, incoherent systems are thereby shown to be such that one can't adopt them."

Perhaps, then, what he means is that it is constitutive of a system of norms that they be able to guide belief or action. Anything system that is incoherent fails to be a system of norms. And so epistemology, if it is incoherent, fails to be a system of norms.

This is an interesting objection, but I don't think it's a very good one. Here's why I'm not swayed by this objection. Somebody smart once said that in philosophy there are only two kinds of replies to objections: "Who says?!" and "So what?!" First, I'll concede that part of what it means to be a system of norms is that it is able to guide belief or action. The question is, what's the cut-off between saying that a system of norms fails to guide belief-formation WELL, and that a system of norms fails to guide belief-formation AT ALL? If the idea of a system of norms that tells you to both do something and not to do it seems like a problem for you, then why is it only that MASSIVE tensions do the trick. After all, it's a fairly common occurrence where one norm of etiquette tell you not to do something, and another tells you to do that very thing. That doesn't mean that we can't accept that system of norms anymore. But if the idea was that an inconsistent system can't count as a normative system, then why don't we reject etiquette at the first sign of trouble? The reason, I think, is because inner tensions and conflicts are the signs of a bad system, one that doesn't help us very much. But this just means that we're offering a non-epistemic reason to reject a system of norms.

Let me put the point again: The question is whether coherence is definitional of something counting as a system of norms. I'd concede that guiding behavior is definitional of something counting as a system of norms, but I don't think that coherence is. That is because coherence, I think, has to do with how well a system guides behavior. But how do you tell the difference between whether a system is just failing to guide belief well, or whether it's failing to guide anything at all? This is a really tough question. (Part of the problem is that meaning is normative in some sense as well, which is an interesting twist, I think...)

I don't think it matters much. There's a good way to reply to claims that something is constitutive of something else, and that's because such an argument usually only succeeds in hiding normativity, not eliminating it. Here's how it works in this case: suppose that it's constitutive of a system of norms that it be coherent. So epistemology fails as a system of norms, and so I reject it. Fine. Call a system of norms that fails to be coherent a nystum of sorms (or whatever). It turns out epistemology is a nystem of sorms, not a system of norms. I claim that this is fine for epistemology, though, and I continue to appeal to these things as reasons for my beliefs. Then you say "Why, that's stupid, those don't count as anything that could guide your belief" and I say, "Why not?" And it's precisely at this point that you have to give me a reason of some sort or another.

In short: I chased down the objection so that it can't be giving me any normative reason to reject epistemic realism. Then, I considered the idea that it fails to count as a system of norms as a matter of meaning, but then I showed how this is just hiding a norm of belief at some other level, and I decided that this line of objection doesn't sway me. You need objective normativity guiding belief somewhere in the equation.

But there's a more challenging objection that the objector raises against me. This one alleges that there's nothing wrong with a reason being "paradoxical" or "self-defeating" in the sense in which I use it. Such a norm is only self-defeating in the sense that it defeats its own system, but that this is a perfectly understandable thing to say. I will consider that in my next post, coming in 25 hours (religious norms are guiding my action in this case).

Draft finished

Anyone who's interested in reading a draft, I've got one.

Taking Great Philosophers Out of Context: Wittgenstein Edition

"Doubt itself rests only on what is beyond doubt."

-Wittgenstein, "On Certainty"

That, together with Putnam's quote, could be taken to stand for most of what I argue, I think.