Social Epistemology by Goldman Alvin; Whitcomb Dennis; & Dennis Whitcomb

Author:Goldman, Alvin; Whitcomb, Dennis; & Dennis Whitcomb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Notes

* Thanks to Cian Dorr, Andy Egan, John Hawthorne, Agustín Rayo, David Christensen, Alan Hájek, Jim Pryor, Philip Pettit, Tom Kelly, Roger White, Sarah McGrath, the Corridor Group, and audiences at CUNY, the University of Michigan, Australian National University, the University of Sydney, the 2006 Formal Epistemology Workshop, and the 2006 Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference.

1 See also Hájek (2003, 311), to which I owe both the above example and also the notion of subject-matter-restricted expertise. Rich Thomason has pointed out that this way of restricting expertise to a subject matter can be at most a rough approximation. For there is no limit to the sort of evidence that might be relevant to the evaluation of weather-propositions. As a result, to treat the forecaster as an expert in the above sense is to potentially defer to her on the evaluation of any sort of evidence.

2 Compare to the motivation given in Hall (1994) for the move from the Old Principal Principle to the New Principal Principle.

3 The above definition is appropriate only if countably many potential credence functions are in play, in which case it entails the following requirement: P (H | advisor’s prob for H is x) = x. In the more general case, a fancier reformulation is in order. Such a reformulation might invoke a conception of conditional probability that allows for probabilities conditional on probability-zero propositions (Popper 1952, Renyi 1955). Or it might invoke integrals over probability densities. I suppress such elaborations here and in subsequent discussion. Thanks here to Grant Reaber.

4 See van Fraassen (1984), van Fraassen (1995), Goldstein (1983).

5 Some defenses of the original version are explored in van Fraassen (1995).

6 Such limited principles include “Reflection Restricted”, from Jeffrey (1988, 233), and “Confidence”, from Hall (1999, 668).

7 Here for simplicity it is assumed that one’s total evidence is the strongest proposition one believes with certainty. If that assumption is relaxed, one would have to take as basic the notion of an agent’s total evidence, and modify the proposal accordingly. Thanks here to Bas van Fraassen.

8 For a similar proposal, along with criticisms of the present one, see Weisberg (2005, Section 5).

9 This example is a retelling of the “prisoner in the cell” case from Arntzenius (2003).

10 See also Schervish et al. (2004).

11 I owe this point to Peter Railton.

12 I borrow this example from van Inwagen (1996, 141).

13 I owe the term “epistemic peer” to Gutting (1982) by way of Kelly (2005), though I use it in a different way than they do. See note 21.

14 Note that in setting up the problem, the initial assumption is that you count your friend as your epistemic peer. That contrasts with some presentations, in which the initial assumption is that your friend is your epistemic peer. The former assumption is appropriate, however. For example, one sometimes is reasonable in thinking wise advisors to be foolish. Evidence, after all, can be misleading. In such cases, one is reasonable in being guided by one’s assessments of the advisor’s ability, even if those assessments are in fact incorrect.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.