From the APA: epistemology

By Massimo Pigliucci

Tucker defines dogmatism as “if it seems to S that P, then S has prima facie non-inferential justification for P.” Right, so he is not talking about anything like what most people mean by “dogmatism.” Keep that in mind. Moreover, “seems” above does not reflect a mere belief on the part of S, but a forceful feeling of truth. For instance, it seems to me that there are other people in this room, or that 2 + 2 equal 4. That kind of seeming.

[Sociological note to self: unlike education — see previous post — epistemology appears to be of almost exclusive interest to male-gendered philosophers. Go figure.]

Tucker differentiates between “seemings” and sensations, as it should be obvious from the example of the 2 + 2 = 4 above. He draws this distinction more precisely on the basis of neurobiological evidence concerned with people who have “seemings” but not the corresponding sensation, and vice versa, which I find a good example of how a philosophical (conceptual) distinction makes sense of puzzling empirical data.

Broadly speaking, it appears that Tucker is saying that “dogmatism” based on “seemings” is justified when the person experiencing the seeming is in a position to have a strong, likely correct, intuition of what is going on. I’m happy to agree that this is very sensible, but I maintain that to call this “dogmatism” is a cheap trick to justify an attention-grabbing title in a talk that would otherwise not be quite so remarkable.

The second talk is by Kay Mathiesen (University of Arizona) on “groups as epistemic agents.” She argues that group-level epistemic beliefs are not necessarily the same thing as the sum of the epistemic beliefs of the individuals making up a group. Ok, I’m skeptical of this one too...

The example presented is that of two parents faced with the question of when their daughter can date. The mother seems to think that 14 is a sufficient age, the father goes for 18. They decide to present a unified front and tell their daughter that 16 is acceptable. Since neither of the two people actually thinks 16 is the answer, the “group” made up of the two parents holds to a different belief than either individual member of the group. This is certainly a good point, but I would most definitely not call this a case of “belief,” a term that immediately brings to mind very different kinds of situations. The author herself agrees that “belief” may not be the best term here, suggesting “holding a position” as an alternative. But if we are talking about holding a position rather than a belief, then in what sense is the group behaving as an epistemic agent? Where is the epistemology here?

[Incidentally, although I have no time to go into it in this post, the commentary by Michael Hicks from Brooklyn College was absolutely superb and characterized by incredible clarity. He managed — in my opinion — to drive a stake through the heart of Mathiesen’s argument.]

The final talk of the session was by Julianne Chung (Yale) on “hope, intuition and inference.” This is a response to an earlier paper by Jonathan Weinberg criticizing philosophers’ use of their “intuitions” as part of their arguments. (I must say that while not a complete skeptic about philosophical intuition, I certainly am not moved by, say, David Chalmers’ intuitions about zombies and what they tell him — but not me — about the hard problem of consciousness.) Weinberg characterizes the philosopher’s reliance on intuition as “hopeless” in the sense that it is not likely to bring about reliable inferences, for a variety of reasons including the lack of inter-subjective agreement on what the intuition actually suggests (again, see my counter-intuition that zombies don’t tell us anything about consciousness, contra Chalmers).

Chung characterizes intuition as “snap inference” in which we do not expressly list all the premises or make the argument explicit. The claim is that we could, however, do so if called upon. I don’t think this is necessarily the case, and that therefore one can make (either positive or negative) generalizations about intuitions and the related category of thought experiments.

For Chung, thought experiments illuminate the consequences of certain assumptions about whatever problem is at hand. I would not disagree as a matter of general proposition, if one adds the caveat that thought experiments may illuminate the problem, as has indeed been the case in both science and philosophy (think of both Galileo’s conceptual demonstration that the Aristotelian way of thinking of falling bodies is wrong, and Einstein’s insight into the nature of light by imagining himself riding a light wave and looking at a parallel one; in philosophy I think a good example is John Searle’s “Chinese room” experiment, which seems to me conclusively to show that there is something amiss with the functionalist view of the material basis of consciousness — raising also serious doubts about a simple computational account of the mind). Unfortunately, thought experiments can also be profoundly misleading, so they are by no means an unqualified good.