Cilantro, Moral Truth, and Justification

Preamble: 

I've been working on this paper for longer than I care to admit but I have to turn it in at some point. I've written about 4 or 5 different versions of it all with different solutions or non-solutions to the puzzle I present. Anyhow, a few notes:

(A) For some reason the footnotes didn't post to the blog so some of my clarificatory points aren't here. Here are two of the important ones. 

     (1) The anti-realist position I'm concerned with is error theory (there are no moral facts and moral propositions have cognitive content). 

     (2) In the last section I talk a lot about "evidence". What counts as evidence in moral arguments would require its own paper so I make some assumptions about what counts: moral judgments, intuitions, principles, and emotions. I'm happy to include other candidates. 

(B) For non-philosophers all you really need to know to understand this paper is what moral anti-realism is. In the simplest terms it's the view that there are no moral facts. Everything is, like, just your opinion, maaaaaaaan!

Cilantro, Moral Truth, and Justification

Appetizers: Anti-realism About Gustatory Facts 

At dinner tables around the world, there is perhaps no issue more divisive than whether cilantro is or is not a delicious garnish. It is the gustatory domain’s own abortion debate. There’s little middle ground and each side views the other as irredeemably wrong. In more reflective moments, most would agree there are no objective facts about the deliciousness of particular foods.  Abe can claim that cilantro is objectively delicious while Bob claims that cilantro is objectively disgusting but the fact of the matter is that there is no fact of the matter! Granting this assumption, is there any way that we could make sense of the idea that either Abe or Bob’s belief is better justified than the other? 

For the moment, I’m going to assume that there isn’t. It seems as though Abe and Bob could offer justifications for why cilantro is subjectively delicious or disgusting but I doubt any of these reasons would convince a third party of cilantro’s objective gustatory properties. Abe and Bob could insist that their arguments and reasons support objective gustatory facts but we’d dismiss their claims as category mistakes—they’re confusing their personal preferences for objective facts about the world. Any argument they give for objective gustatory facts about the world is better interpreted as facts about their subjective gustatory preferences being projected onto the world.

Now consider an analogous moral case and substitute your favorite moral propositions and their opposite for the gustatory ones. For example, Abe claims that it is an objective fact that slavery is a morally good institution while Bob claims the opposite—i.e., that it is an objective fact that slavery is a morally bad institution. If in the cilantro case anti-realism about objective gustatory facts leads us to accept neither competing belief is better justified than the other then it seems that consistency requires that anti-realism about moral facts lead us to also conclude that neither Abe nor Bob’s beliefs regarding slavery is more justified than the other.  Just as there are no objective facts about the deliciousness of cilantro, there are no objective facts about the moral badness or goodness of slavery, and so one position cannot be more justified than the other. Any argument is merely a projection of the interlocutor’s personal preferences or explainable by appeal to facts about their psychology.

There may be some extreme anti-realists out there that are willing to bite the bullet and concede the point.  However, I’m willing to bet that many anti-realists would deny that all moral beliefs are equally well-justified even if moral beliefs can't be objectively true or false. If I'm right then these anti-realists need an account of justification that doesn't depend on the notion of truth. Is this possible?

The framework for this paper is to examine the relationship between moral anti-realism and justification. Suppose we accept that MORAL ANTI-REALISM IS TRUE: There are no objective moral facts. On what bases can we then evaluate competing moral claims? Is justifying objective moral claims analogous to trying to justify objective gustatory claims? That is, since there really are no facts of the matter, one claim is just as well-justified (or unjustified) as the other. The puzzle for the anti-realist is to reconcile the following two assertions: MORAL ANTI-REALISM IS TRUE with NOT ALL MORAL CLAIMS ARE EQUALLY JUSTIFIED.  I will argue that, if we adopt an externalist theory of justification, a Peircian fallibilism offers a potential solution to the puzzle. Before proposing my solution, I will consider and evaluate other attempts to reconcile the two assertions.

A Quick Word on Theories of Justification

Before proceeding we’re going to need to take a brief look at theories of justification and pare down the scope of my inquiry.

Two Theories of Justification

One way to analyze the concept of justification is along internalist/externalist lines. Internalists argue that a belief is justified so long as the believer is able to provide some sort of argument or supporting evidence when challenged. Externalists argue that a belief is justified if it was generated by a reliable belief-forming process, where "reliable" means that the process generates more true than false beliefs in the long run. For example, beliefs formed by visual perception are justified on the externalist view because visual perception generates more true beliefs than false beliefs in the long run.  So, my belief that there is a computer in front of me is justified because it was formed by my seeing it—which is a reliable process. It’s more likely that I’m actually seeing a computer than I am hallucinating it. 

I wish to side-step taking a definitive position on the internalist/externalist debate and suggest that both types of justification are plausible in ethics. We think that a moral belief is justified via normative reasons (internalist) but we also think particular ways of arriving at moral beliefs confer justification. For example, we think that moral judgments arrived at through careful reasoning and/or reflection are more justified than those produced by unreflective emotional knee-jerk reactions. And so it's plausible to think the reliability of the process that produces a moral belief is at least partially relevant to the belief's (relative) justification. For the remainder of this paper, I will grant myself that assumption and constrain the scope of justification to externalist justification. A full treatment of an internalist model in regards to my inquiry requires a paper unto itself—although I suspect internalist theories may have similar problems

Round 1: Externalist Justification Isn't Possible if There Are No Moral Facts

The simple argument against the possibility of an anti-realist account of externalist justification goes something like this. 

P1. Reliability is cashed out in terms of whether a process produces more true than false beliefs in the long run.

P2. Anti-realists deny that moral propositions can be true or false.

C1. So, there's no way to evaluate the reliability of a process when it comes to moral beliefs because the very attributes that we require to measure reliability aren't available.

C2. So, on the anti-realist model all moral beliefs are equally justified (or unjustified).

In short, anti-realists deny the very attribute (truth) required to measure reliability. If we can't know which processes are more reliable than others there is no externalist ground to say one moral belief is better justified than another.  But, again, surely some moral beliefs are better justified than others…but how? 

Reply

Consider the inference rule modus ponens . We know modus ponens to be a reliable belief-forming process from using it in other domains. It is content neutral. Its reliability credentials have been checked out so all we need to do is import it (and similar content-neutral processes) into the domain of ethics. Anti-realists can say that moral conclusions arrived at through modus ponens (or other combinations of formal rules of inference) are more justified than those that aren’t. 

Counter-Reply

Modus ponens and other valid argument structures are contingently reliable processes. That is, if the inputs (i.e., premises) are true then so too will be the outputs. The problem is that the anti-realist has denied the possibility of true inputs in the moral case. If inputs can be be neither true nor false then the conclusions are also neither true nor false. And worse yet, the same argument structure can yield apparently contradictory outputs.

Consider the following examples:

Ethics 1

1E. If you abort a fetus it is wrong. (Neither true nor false).

2E. I aborted a fetus. (Neither true nor false).

3E. Therefore, what I did was wrong. (Neither true nor false)

Ethics 2

1E*. If you abort a fetus it isn't wrong. (Neither true nor false).

2E*. I aborted a fetus. (Neither true nor false).

3E*. What I did wasn't wrong. (Neither true nor false).

It appears as though importing valid argument structures into ethics doesn’t give a solution to the puzzle of reconciling MORAL ANTI-REALISM IS TRUE with NOT ALL MORAL CLAIMS ARE EQUALLY JUSTIFIED.

Round 2: Content-Generating Processes

Perhaps the problem here is the content neutrality of the above processes. We need processes that justify initial moral premises as well as yield conclusions. We have some familiar plausible candidate processes that might confer justification: reflective equilibrium, rational reflection, rational discourse, coherence with existing beliefs, idealizing what a purely rational agent would want, applying the principle of impartiality, universalization, to name a few.

Notice also that we think that some cognitive processes for ethical judgment don’t confer justification—i.e., are unreliable. For example, if I form a moral judgment when I'm extremely angry I might come to reject that belief once I calm down and employ one of the above methods instead. So, a belief arrived at as a consequence of a temporary acute emotional reaction is not well-justified.  

Moral psychology and social psychology are littered with experiments where either the subject or the environment are manipulated to produce judgments that the subject would reject upon learning of the manipulation. This seems to hint at an answer: Beliefs that have been formed by processes that involve manipulation of the environment and/or the subject’s mood are less reliable/less justified than processes that don't involve any obvious manipulations. 

The Same Problem?

This account implies that some processes are more likely to "get it right" than others. But what is it to “get something right” if there's no target for epistemic rightness (i.e., truth)? This seems to be the same problem from Section 1 all over again. If moral beliefs can neither be true nor false, in what way can we say that one process yields more true outputs than another? Sure, we might systematically reject judgments produced by some processes in favor of others, but why  prefer the outputs of one process over another if we can’t say that judgments from one is more likely to be true than another? The grounds for thinking judgments from one process are more justified than those from another seem to be that the judgments from one process are more likely to be true than another.

Round 3: Analogy with Scientific Justification and Fallibilism as a Possible Solution

Harmon argues that there is an important disanalogy between explaining ethical judgments and scientific judgments. We can’t explain why a physicist believes there is a proton without also postulating that there is something “out there” in the world causing the physicist’s observation, which is in turn interpreted as a proton. A moral judgment, on the other hand, can be explained merely by appeal to a subject’s psychology. We needn’t postulate any thing or moral properties “out there” that cause a subject to have a moral belief that x. 

Let’s accept Harmon’s argument. Despite the fact that the causes of scientific and moral judgments might differ, there may be ways in which justification functions similarly between both.

Scientists habitually couch their arguments and conclusions with language that is fallibilist.  Claims and conclusions are presented as provisional, based on the current available evidence and methods. The history of scientific discovery is one of revised and overturned conclusions in light of new evidence and recursive, self-correcting improvements in the scientific method itself.  

From the point of view of internalism vs externalism about justification, we might consider new data as a kind of internalist justification for a claim because they are reasons to believe one thing rather than another. Research methods, on the other hand, can be viewed as instances of the externalist’s processes that confer justification. The idea that some processes are more reliable than others is a familiar idea in scientific research. Claims that derive from methods (i.e., processes) that avoid possible known biases are more reliable and hence more justified than methods that don’t.

For example, the placebo effect is a well-known occurrence in medical science. If patients think they are receiving treatment—even if they aren’t—patients report subjective measures (e.g., reduced pain/discomfort) significantly more positively than non-treatment (i.e., control) groups. We also know that if the researcher knows which patients are in the treatment group and which aren’t, this can influence both the way the researcher asks the patient questions and how they interpret data (they’ll bias toward a positive interpretation). For these reasons we think that the results from medical research that are placebo-controlled and double-blinded are more reliable than those that aren’t. 

In short, data from a study that employs a more reliable process (e.g.,. double-blind, placebo controlled) is more justified than the data from a study that didn’t do either of these things. The more a process avoids known errors, the more justified its conclusions—despite the fact that the blinded study’s conclusions might also eventually be overturned. There is always the background understanding that new and better methods might come about and generate incommensurate data and/or conclusions but this doesn’t undermine the current relative justification that the current methods confer on the outputs beliefs. 

Analogously, moral and social psychology has produced a vast literature showing all the ways we think our moral thinking can go awry.  We know that a cluttered desk can cause us to pass harsher penalties than we would otherwise, that a temporary heightened emotional state greatly influences our judgments, that the feeling of empathy can lead us awry,  and that implicit biases can play important roles in our judgments—to name a few. In short, there are many ways in which it seems like both our basic hard-wiring and various forms of personal and environmental manipulation can cause us to make judgments that we, upon learning of the manipulation or the bias, would likely reject in favor of a judgment arising from unmanipulated deliberation or one of the familiar gold-standard methods of moral reasoning .

Perhaps an anti-realist can think of the activity of moral thinking not as one that aims at discovering some objective truth, rather one that seeks to avoid known cognitive errors and insulate against manipulation. In so far as our judgments derive from methods that avoid (known) cognitive errors and biases, our moral claims are better-justified. This however doesn’t entirely solve the puzzle. We still need to answer why we should choose the output of one type of process over another.  It’s easy to say that the manipulated judgment is “wrong” or is “mistaken” but how do we say this without appeal to truth? “Error” implies a “right” answer. One might just as easily say that the correct judgment is the manipulated or biased one and we are systematically mistaken to adopt the reflective judgment made in a cool dark room. 

The Main Challenge to The Anti-Realist: The moral anti-realist needs some general criteria to explain why we (ought to) systematically endorse judgments from one process rather than another. That we do isn’t enough. We must give an account of why one confers more justification than another.

Peirce, Methods of Inquiry, and The “Fixing of Opinion”

Before suggesting a possible criteria to answer the challenge, I want to sketch out a Peircian analysis of methods of inquiry since it inspired my suggestion. I’ll fill in other details later as they become relevant. Pierce argues that the “fixing of opinion” or “the settlement of opinion” is the sole object of inquiry (Peirce, p. 2-3).  While we needn’t commit to Peirce’s exclusivity claim regarding the purpose of inquiry, Peirce provides useful insight into why we might think some processes confer greater justification than others. I take him to be proposing two related desiderata for our methods of inquiry: that they produce beliefs that are (a) relatively stable over time and (b) relatively impervious to challenge.  The anti-realist can distinguish between processes’ justificatory status to the degree that they they achieve (a) and (b).

This possible anti-realist response to the challenge of justification is not without difficulties. I will explore two related ones. First, it isn’t clear that stability of beliefs is a condition for justification. As standard examples of recalcitrant and dogmatic Nazis or racists show, in fact, we have reason to believe stability might have little to do with justification. Second, I will need to show that stability marks something we think matters to justification: namely, the absence of cognitive errors and inclusion of all relevant evidence. This is the fallibilist aspect of the proposal: Stability needn’t be a proxy for truth tracking, however, it is a reasonable proxy for believing that we are avoiding errors. This is part of the answer but not all of it. 

Peirce notes, stability can be achieved various ways—not all of which we’d think confer justification. The second part of this fallibilist model of justification has to do with the degree to which a process excludes relevant evidence thereby making it susceptible to challenge. Thus, for Peirce, long-run stability requires that the method of inquiry take into account all relevant sources of evidence. A method that excludes forms of evidence will produce beliefs that are more likely to eventually be overturned or require that people be unable to make inferences from one case to another or from one domain to another.  Piece compares 4 methods of inquiry, which aim to produce stable beliefs. In so doing he illustrate how this second criteria (i.e., imperviousness to challenge) works with the first (i.e., stability) to produce a theory of justification.

To achieve stability of belief in the method of tenacity one dogmatically adheres to his chosen  doctrines by rejecting all contrary evidence and actively avoiding contradictory opinions. Coming into contact with others, however, necessarily exposes him to different and conflicting views. This method can’t accommodate ever-present new data without giving up on rationality and the ability to make inferences. Unless we live like hermits, the “social impulse” against this practice makes it unlikely to succeed. The method of authority is the latter method but practiced at the level of the state and with the addition of social control. This method fails to achieve long term stability in that it cannot control everyone's thoughts on every topic. This isn't a problem if people are unable to make inferences from one domain of inquiry into another, but to the extent that they are, stability will be undone and doubt will emerge.

The above two methods have an important common feature in regards to how they achieve stability. In both cases, when I need to decide between two competing beliefs, the method tells me I ought to pick the one that coheres with what I already believe. In other words, there will be cases where I will have to “quit reason” by rejecting contrary evidence and inferences. The above methods for arriving at beliefs systematically exclude relevant evidence in generating beliefs. 

Now, compare these methods with something like wide reflective equilibrium or rational discourse. With these methods, how do we determine what to believe?  Rather than exclusively referring back to what we or the state/religion already endorse, when these methods confront new evidence they adjust output beliefs accordingly.  In the long run, the supposition is that (for example) reflective equilibrium and rational discourse will lead to more stable beliefs than the above two methods because the outputs include the best available total evidence rather than reject it.

Reply to the First Challenge

Let’s restate the first challenge: Stability on its own doesn’t seem to confer justification. There are many way methods of inquiry by which we might achieve stable beliefs, not all of which confer justification. When we defend stability as a justificatory property, the concern is that we’re begging the question: when a process generates stable beliefs that we approve of, we think stability is good; when it generates beliefs we disagree with, we think stability is bad.

To reply to the challenge, let’s consider, for example, reflective equilibrium. With (wide) reflective equilibrium we suppose that by finding an equilibrium between everyone’s principles and considered judgments, in the long run we arrive at a view that no one could reasonably reject (because it also takes their views into account). Stability, on this method, arises as a consequence of taking everyone’s principles and considered judgments into account; i.e., it doesn’t obviously exclude any evidence that might, in the long run, diminish the stability of the beliefs the method produces. And so the critic of stability has a point that stability on its own might not confer justification. What matters is why the view is stable. It’s assumed that a moral view derived from processes that take into account competing view points are stable for the right reasons: they are less impervious to challenge. And they are less impervious to challenge because they don’t exclude evidence (widely construed).

Reply to the Second Challenge

The second challenge is to give positive reasons of thinking long-term stability confers justification. When we make knee-jerk judgments or manipulated judgments we end up with beliefs inconsistent with our other beliefs, and so we have reason to conclude we’ve made an error somewhere—either in endorsing an inference, a judgement, a general principle. Conversely, with a process like reflective equilibrium or rational discourse we eliminate inconsistencies in the long run. By proxy, we’re also eliminating errors in either our inferences, judgments, or general principles; i.e., things that undermine justification. In the long run, the supposition is that, some methods of inquiry (e.g., reflective equilibrium) will lead to fewer and fewer errors, in turn contributing to more and more stable beliefs.

This also helps answer a problem I raised in the first section of the paper.  A reliabilist account of justification has truth built in and so doesn’t help an anti-realist explain how following a valid argument structure can confer justification. If the inputs don’t have a truth value, then neither will the outputs and so one output is just as justified as another. A fallibilist approach provides a solution. Failure to follow a valid argument scheme undermines justification because it indicates an error in reasoning. And so, deliberative belief-forming process that don’t follow valid schemes are making errors and in that respect their outcomes are less justified than those that do. 

Elimination of errors is part of the answer to why we think beliefs derived from one process are better justified than beliefs derived from another. Long-term stability of output beliefs is partly a proxy for absence of errors and so, to the degree that a process generates stable beliefs we have reason to think those beliefs are less likely to contain or be the product of errors. 

The second part of the answer is similar to the reply to the first challenge: Processes that attempt to exclude classes of evidence or deny certain inferences aren’t going to be stable. There’s an analogy with science: a research method that regularly has its conclusions overturned because it fails to take into account certain sources of evidence is a process that generates beliefs that are less stable in the long run. The beliefs are less stable because important classes of evidence aren’t taken into account or controlled for (for example, various cognitive biases). Similarly, a moral reasoning process that fails to take into account certain sources of evidence (e.g., competing arguments, the fact that we are prone to certain cognitive errors) is also going to generate beliefs that less stable, and by extension, less justified.

Conclusion

The puzzle for the anti-realist is to reconcile commitment to no moral facts with the view that some moral beliefs are more justified than others. If we take an externalist account of justification, a Peircian fallibilism offers a possible solution to the puzzle. Why should we think the the outputs of one process are more justified than another if their output can’t be true? Some processes generate beliefs that are relatively more stable and impervious to challenge in the long run than do other process. Stability, on this model occurs as a consequence of taking into account all the relevant data and avoiding cognitive errors in generating output beliefs. By doing so, outputs are less likely to be overturned by excluded evidence. Stability also is a proxy for absence of error. If a process produces beliefs that are systematically over-ridden, it must be because the outputs are inconsistent with other judgments, beliefs, or inferences. Processes that systematically generate inconsistencies indicate errors, which in turn also undermine stability. 

I’d like to close with the following thought experiment. Suppose both realists and anti-realist agree on which processes confer greater relative justification than others. Would the realism/anti-realism debate matter much? Aren’t comparatively well-justified beliefs (and actions) what we’re really after in ethics?

The Reliability of Blogs vs Conventional Media: A Response to David Coady

Response to David Coady's “An Epistemic Defence of the Blogosphere”

Preamble/vocab for non-philosophers:  
I wrote this for a class so, although I've tried to avoid it as much as possible, there are a few technical words which I'll explain here:

Epistemic reliability: A source is epistemically reliable if it produces/conveys more true beliefs than false beliefs.  Epistemic just means having to do with knowledge.

Knowledge that is vertistic: knowledge as true belief.

I think that's it!  

Intro

“. . . [W]henever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right." (Padover, 1939, p. 88). The implication here is the widely shared belief that a well-functioning democracy isn't possible without the public knowing what's going on in their government. Of course, this assumes that the information the public receives is likely to be true, which in turn depends on the reliability of the sources from which it is acquired by the public.

In the internet age, the blogosphere has emerged as a popular source for political news and commentary. Given its rise in popularity it's worthwhile considering its epistemic benefits relative to those of the conventional media and whether the blogosphere positively contributes to our democratic practices. Goldman (2008) takes the negative view arguing that the blogosphere is a less reliable source of information than the conventional media and therefore does not benefit our democratic practices. In “An Epistemic Defence of the Blogosphere,” David Coady argues for the positive position and counters Goldman's three main lines of argument against the epistemic reliability of the blogosphere (relative to that of the conventional media). Coady argues contra Goldman that the blogosphere (a) doesn't undermine professional journalism, (b) doesn't lack balance in any detrimental way, and (c) isn't parasitic on the conventional media. Finally, Coady concludes that the blogosphere benefits our epistemic well-being and improves our democratic practices.

I will briefly outline Coady's main argument then I will argue that both Goldman and Coady are mistaken to focus their attention on evaluating the relative epistemic reliability of the blogosphere because (a) no meaningful distinction can be made in terms of reliability and (b) whatever current distinction there is will likely soon evaporate. I conclude that (c) even if we assume that one or the other class of media is more reliable this doesn't matter one fig given the wide range of reliability within each class; what matters is whether the citizenry is able to distinguish between good and bad arguments and good and bad sources. A citizenry with low cognitive abilities will easily be mislead by the sensational and find themselves sucked into epistemic black holes--despite the existence of some reliable sources, conventional or otherwise.

Outline of Coady's Argument:

(P1) Although the blogosphere might undermine professional journalism, it doesn't follow that it harms the “epistemic prospects” of the citizenry because political questions shouldn't be the exclusive domain of experts--we ought also appeal to 'the wisdom of the crowds' (i.e., bloggers).

(P2) The conventional media's ostensible virtue of balance actually excludes genuine balance because it omits points of view that aren't those of the dominant parties. The blogosphere, on the other hand, can accommodate every micro-perspective. This is an epistemic benefit to the citizenry.

(P3) Despite Goldman's argument that the blogosphere isn't independent from the conventional media, the dependance relation also runs the other way. The conventional media often turns to blogs as sources because blogs can do things the conventional media can't or doesn't do (like close examination of public documents, in depth analysis, etc...). These activities, which are most typical to the blogosphere, are an epistemic benefit to the citizenry.

(C) It follows from (P1), (P2), and (P3) that the blogosphere provides an epistemic benefit to the citizenry because it does things that the conventional media can't or doesn't do much of.

It Don't Mean Stink if You Don't Know How to Think
Instead of focusing on the central argument I will attempt to make the case that this debate over the relative epistemic benefits of the blogosphere and conventional media, while interesting, is of minimal importance. If our chief concern is epistemic well-being and good democratic decision-making, what really matters is the general level of critical thinking in the citizenry. An important part of the debate between Goldman and Coady hinges upon there being a meaningful distinction between journalists in the conventional media and bloggers. To begin making my case, I'll try to show that this distinction cannot be sustained.

Coady gives several criteria to mark the distinction:

(a) Journalists are paid while bloggers are not; (b) journalists are part an institution and therefore subject to institutional norms (for better or for worse) while bloggers are not; (c) journalists have access to “the halls of power” to collect information while bloggers' principle form of research consists in close examination of publicly available documents; (d) journalists have their information filtered in a way that bloggers don't.

With the exception of perhaps (d), I suggest that these criteria do not establish a strong demarkation between the two categories because there are many obvious counter-examples to each of the criteria. Regarding (a), many bloggers are well-paid and make a living off of sponsorships and ads. In fact, many bloggers aspire to this. Regarding (b), many academics and professionals have blogs. When they blog in their capacity as academic and professional, just like journalists they are also subject to strong professional and institutional truth-telling norms, in these cases do they suddenly cease to be bloggers? That's unlikely. Coady himself gives a counter-example to (c), and presumably as individual blogs grow their audience and opinion-making power, this distinction will be obliterated. Access to the halls of power is a poor demarkation criteria.

The last criteria is (d) is perhaps the most promising as a demarkation criterion. The concentration of corporate power and friendly ties to those in power suggest that the conventional media is subject to a type of filtering to which blogs are not. That said, as Coady himself indicates, there are examples of bloggers also gaining face-to-face access to politicians. It's not unreasonable to suspect this access is because of their favorable disposition or reluctance to criticize the particular politician; i.e., filtering similar to that in the conventional media. Of course, the bloggers are not subject to institutionally-imposed filtering norms, nevertheless it seems that anyone who's going to get face-to-face access—blogger and journalist--gets that access on the precondition of at least some filtering. One would presume that as individual blogs increase their audience and clout so too will their possibility of access increase, in turn further blurring the line between blogger and journalist. The point here is simply that in the long run this demarkation criteria probably going to grow increasingly porous and so isn't going to succeed in drawing a clear line.

Recall why we even care about marking a distinction between the two categories of media. We want to know if the blogosphere is a net benefit for a democracy in terms of its ability to reliably provide true information to the citizenry which will in turn cash out as a benefit to good democratic decision-making. Now, suppose one were to reject my above arguments against a meaningful demarkation, I believe I can still make my case against it: For each category the range of reliability is so wide as to make any meaningful distinction irrelevant in terms of the property we care about: reliability. In sum, the degree to which the two categories (if we presuppose some essential difference) overlap in terms of reliability renders them indistinguishable from each other in this respect.

Consider the conventional media. Who's in this category? Fox News, MSNBC, CBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, Huffington Post, NYT, NPR, PRI, and PBS to name a few. In terms of reliability, anyone who's bothered to look at recent media studies literature will tell you that there's a huge gap between the reliability of say, Fox News and NPR. For example, in several polls testing knowledge of current events, Fox News viewers scored even lower those who don't follow the news (citation). Not surprisingly, the more ideological the news source (regardless of ideology), the worse the participants' knowledge of current events. The group who scored best were those who listened to NPR.

So what's my point besides the fact that everyone should donate and listen to NPR? The point is that in terms of reliability—the property with which are concerned—the range within the category “conventional media” is so wide such that ascribing a reliability score to the category is rendered meaningless. “Conventional Media” captures pretty much any reliability value you choose, depending on the case you're trying to make.

It should come as no surprise that the same argument can be made of the blogosphere. From Alex Jones' Info Wars and the rest of the wacky wonderworld of conspiracy-of-everything blogs to blogs run by elite Ivy League professors, the range of reliability within the blogosphere is vast. The distribution is so wide that to speak of “the reliability of the blogosphere” is essentially meaningless—even more so than for the conventional media. You can make the reliability score fit whatever position you wish to support depending on the cluster of blogs you select.

Essentially, you can pick and choose a conventional source and a blog to make whatever case you want about the relative reliability of each category. One reply might be to average the reliability over all prototypical members of the class but this would do no more than distort what we really want to know: If a citizen gets their news from blogs or conventional media, which one is more likely to reliably report true beliefs? It all depends on which particular source of conventional media we are talking about and which particular blogs she chooses. It'll return to this later.

There are further reasons to be skeptical of any attempt to meaningfully distinguish and make pronouncements about the conventional media and the blogosphere in terms of reliability. Consider a hypothetical situation where there's no blogosphere and only conventional media. Is the conventional media reliable? That is, does it announce more true information than false? It depends. Do we live in North Korea? Or do we live in a Western democracy with strong laws protecting freedom of the press and a low concentration of media ownership? Or do we live somewhere in between? The point here is that there's nothing intrinsically reliable about conventional media. It's reliability is contingent upon many variables many of which are political, legal, and economic. With this in mind, lets return to the central issue: Does the conventional media improve our democratic practices (via epistemic benefits)? The answer and reasons are same as for the reliability question: it depends.

How about if we consider a population where there is only a blogosphere and no conventional media. Is the blogosphere more reliable? Again, it depends. What blogs is a person reading? How are they choosing what blogs they read? Do they pick blogs that confirm their pre-existing ideological biases or do they actively seek out blogs that challenge their point of view? The empirical evidence suggests the former.

The wide and overlapping distributions of reliability within and between the blogosphere and the conventional media as well as the contingent nature of each categories' reliability score all suggest that the reliability issue is of only minimal significance. To true see why lets return to the issue that motivated the whole project to begin with: how can we best ensure that the public is well-informed such that our democratic practices are improved? Coady would have us believe that there mere fact that people have access to a range of positions where they will encounter mutually incompatible points of view implies that “as a result they are able to develop their critical faculties, which in turn helps them make better choices about what and whom to believe” (p. 291).

Unfortunately for Coady, there are journals replete with literature to the contrary. I wish I could share his optimism, but exposure to a plurality of views isn't sufficient if we don't take into account the various conditions under which these views are encountered. For example, consider level of education. The Dunning-Kruger effect shows that those least able to reason are most confident in their ability to do so and most recalcitrant to correction. Johnathan Haidt's research shows that we are recalcitrant to facts that undercut cherished beliefs. Kahan's research shows that our ideological biases determine who we consider to be an expert. The backfire-effect (Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler) shows that in the face of strong disconfirming evidence people will further entrench their beliefs rather than align them with new and better evidence. Even something as objective as doing basic math is distorted by our political biases (Kahan) and the effect is stronger with numeracy! There's also a growing body of literature on how people make media choices and it doesn't support Coady's hypothesis: the majority of the population chooses its media sources based on whether it confirms their existing views. Most people want confirmation and comfort rather than the discomfort of cognitive dissonance when their cherished beliefs and values are challenged.

There are too many studies to list here but the upshot is that (a) encountering disconfirming views on its own is unlikely to confer any epistemic benefit and, even if this weren't the case, (b) the vast majority seek out sources which confirm rather than challenge their views essentially sending them into an epistemic echo chamber. For example, the literature on conspiracy theorists is clear. Anyone who enters this epistemic black hole has little chance of ever escaping: any evidence against the conspiracy is counted as evidence for it.

“With the click of a mouse, you enter the world of conspiracism, and you never have to leave that world,” the University of Utah's Goldberg explained. “You get a situation where you are confirmed, and you don’t have any information that advises you to look in a different direction ... There’s an inner core of people who are committed.” And not only are these people stuck in a feedback loop of confirmation bias and groupthink, but they are actually being radicalized in the process as well, Goldberg maintained.¹

Given massive cuts to education, emphasis on rote learning for standardized tests and its consequences to the critical thinking skills of the general populous, its hard to see how the rise of the conspiratorial and sensational in the blogosphere should be counted as epistemic gain.

The obvious reply is that I am committing the fallacy of confirming instances for surely there are also blogs that are extremely vertistic. True, but there are several confounding factors. First of all, as I've mentioned already, given the human propensity to seek confirmation we should expect that these “good” blogs will be ignored by those who could most benefit from them. Second, I'd wager the conspiratorial, sensationalist, and ideological blogs as a whole have way more traffic than the reliable blogs and that there's little overlap between the audiences. Finally, for those that enter the blogosphere neutral, the gravitational force of the “bad” type of blog is much stronger than that of the “good” type.

So, what are we to make of this mess? Is there any way to draw a meaningful distinction between the blogosphere and the conventional media? I'm not sure but if there is any thing distinctive about the blogosphere it is that its possible range of epistemic reliability is wider than that of the conventional media. Conversely, at least in most Western democracies, there are institutional norms that prevent chronic outright fabrication in the conventional media. To be fair, Coady acknowledges as much when he marks the distinction between the epistemic virtues of avoiding false beliefs and acquiring true beliefs. The conventional media might win out over the blogosphere in achieving the former.

Lets return once again to the motivating issue. To the extent that we can even talk about the blogosphere and the conventional media as distinct categories and given the overlapping wide-ranges of reliability values between and within each class, can anything be said about the blogosphere in respect to its role in a democracy? To answer this, let me once again quote Padover: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." (1939, p. 89). In other words, the blogosphere is only a benefit from an epistemic point of view if people have the requisite critical thinking skills such that they can distinguish between good and bad sources and good and bad arguments.

Blogs, like many tools, are proverbial double-edged swords. Some are more epistemically reliable than the best “conventional” news source and some are so epistemically naughty it would make Fox News blush. For the citizen who has the cognitive tools to critically evaluate the quality of sources or luckily stumbles on a network of credible blogs, blogs are a net epistemic benefit. For someone who tumbles down the rabbit whole of conspiracy or strongly ideological blogs, they are not likely to again see the light of reason. The same sword that defends you from harm can also cut you. It depends on the skill of he who wields it.

1 Anatomy of a Conspiracy Theorist. March 15, 2013. http://www.ibtimes.com/anatomy-conspiracy-theorist-inside-new-wave-ancient-tradition-1127679

Gettier Revisited

I've talked about Gettier before and much of what I say here will overlap with what I've already said.  It turns out I'm much more comfortable lecturing on something if I write about it the night before. Hopefully this won't always be the case 'cuz it takes up a lot of time...

Why Should You Care About Gettier?
You should care about Gettier because he showed that (so far) there is no coherent definition of knowledge.  Why should we care about defining knowledge anyway?  Well, because conceivably, there's a difference between simply believing something and knowing something.  What might the difference be?  What does it mean to "know"?  Since the ancient Greeks all the way up until 50 years ago to know something meant 3 conditions were met:

(1)  The subject believes p.
(2)  The subject is justified in believing p.
(3)  P is true.

These 3 conditions for knowledge are collectively known as the justified true belief theory of knowledge (JTB).  Sounds pretty plausible right?

Lets look at counter example to the JTB theory or, as they are now called, Gettier cases:

Gettier Case 1
Suppose Smith and Jones apply for the same job.  When he goes to the bathroom, Smith overhears the boss say that Jones is going to get the job.  Also, while in the waiting room Jones emptied his pockets and put all the contents on the table, counted them (there were ten coins) then put them back in his pocket.  From this information Smith infers the proposition: "the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket."  From the available evidence, the proposition seems like a valid inference.

What actually happens is that Smith ends up getting the job.  Now here's the crazy part: it turns out that, unbeknownst to himself, Smith also has exactly 10 coins in his pocket!  Given what's happened, can we say that Smith knew that "the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket?"

Lets see what the JTB theory says:
(1)  Did he believe that the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket?  Yup.
(2)  Was he justified in believing the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket?  Yup.
(3)  Is it true that the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket?  Yup.

So it seems that according to the JTB theory Smith knew that the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket but something isn't quite right!  Lets look at one more example before we figure out what's gone wrong:

Gettier Case 2
Bob has a friend, Jill, who has driven a Buick for years.  Bob therefore thinks that Jill drives an American car.  He is not aware, however, that her Buick has recently been stolen, and he is also not aware that Jill has replaced it with a Pontiac.  Does Bob really know that Jill drives an American car or does he only believe it?

Lets see how the JTB theory handles this:
(1)  Does Bob believe that Jill drives an American car?  Yup.
(2)  Is Bob justified in believing that Jill drives an American car?  Yup.
(3)  Is it true that Jill drives an American car?  Yup.

According to the JTB theory Bob knows that Jill drives an American car.  But something doesn't seem right about that.  It looks like he just happened to have gotten lucky.

Lets figure out what's going wrong in these cases.

Why Gettier Cases Happen:
Gettier cases happen because of our acceptance of two assumptions about justification.

Assumption 1: It's possible to have a justified belief that turns out to be false.  For example, when I'm at work I can assume that my car is where I left it because I remember parking it and I saw it in its spot as I walked to my building.  Of course it could happen that someone steals my car or that it gets towed. The fact that my belief about my car's location turns out to be false doesn't undermine the fact that I was justified in believing it was where I parked it.

Assumption 2: It's possible to make valid inferences from one justified belief to another.  For example, if I'm justified in believing it's raining then I can make the inference that there are clouds.  Since the initial belief (it's raining) is justified the inferred belief (there are clouds) is also justified.  In fancy talk: If I know that P entails Q and P is justified then I'm also justified in believing Q.

Rejecting (2) would make life really difficult and if logic is to have any value, we need to keep (2).

To see how the interaction of these 2 principles causes Gettier cases lets take a look at an example from Dretske.

Example 3:
Suppose you see a stack of your friend's (John) mail.  The address is in San Francisco.  You reasonably apply assumption 1 and form the belief that John lives in San Francisco.  It turns out however that he lives in LA.  The fact that your belief about where he lives is false doesn't mean you aren't justified in believing he lives in SF.  Based on your false belief that he lives in SF you make a valid inference and form a new belief:  John lives in California.  This is a perfectly valid inference.  Now, you have a justified (via assumption 2) true belief about where John lives.  However, you reached your belief that he lives in California through the false belief that he lives in SF so you don't really know he lives in California.  The inference from the false belief is what undercuts our ability to call the belief "knowledge".  The JTB fails to capture what we mean by "knowledge".

Attempted Rescue of the JTB Theory:
In example 3 what prevents us from calling the belief that John lives in California knowledge is the inference from a false belief (John lives in SF).  In example 1, the belief that "the man who has ten coins in his pocket will get the job" isn't knowledge because it is inferred from the false belief "Jones is going to get the job."  In example 2, the belief "Jill owns an American car" isn't knowledge because because it's inferred from the false belief that Jill owns a Buick.

Do you see the solution?  All we need to do is add a 4th condition to the JTB model.  Now, a person knows p when she:
(a) has the belief that p;
(b) is justified in believing p;
(c) p is true; and
(d) p isn't inferred from a false belief.

Ta da! So long as all four conditions are met, we can say that a person knows p.

Ut oh!  Party Time!
In my other life I'm a party planner.  Every month I plan a wonderful party.  The thing is I need to know which room to rent for the party.  My decision is based on how many attended the previous month's party.  If there are fewer than 40 people at this month's party I rent the standard room.  If there are 40 or more then I rent the large room.

I ask my assistant: how many people attended this month?  He says 78.  I then make the inference from the belief that 78 people attended to the belief that I will need to rent the large room.  This seems like a legitimate inference, right?  78 is definitely greater than 40.  But hold on a tick.  It turns out my assistant miscounted.  There were only 77 guests.  I've just made an inference from a false belief (i.e., violated condition (d)) yet it seems as though we can say that I know I will need to rent the large room.

Not So Fast!
Hold on to your horses.  There's something fishy going on here.  Yeah, OK, strictly speaking you made an inference from a false belief but there was an implied probability judgement.  You know that the margin of error of your assistant's counting is large enough not to matter for the inference; that is, the likelihood of him miscounting by a margin of 35% is very small.  In other words, if the counting is off by a bit it's not going to affect the truth of the inferred belief (in this case that I'll need a large room).  Lets add our 5th condition to the JTB theory:

(e) p has to have a sufficiently high probability of truth in order to count as knowledge.

Who's a Loser Now?
So it looks like we've got our theory of knowledge all figured out.  As long as p meets all 5 conditions then we can count it as knowledge.  Lets take a closer look at the 5th condition and see if it stands up to scrutiny:

The fifth condition is that in order for p to count as knowledge, in addition to the previous 4 conditions it also must have a sufficiently high probability of truth.  Might there be a counter-example?

Suppose there is a lottery with 1 billion tickets.  There's a 1/1 000 000 000 chance that ticket 0 000 000 000 will win.  There's the same chance that ticket 0 000 000 001 will win.  Of each ticket it's reasonable to say that you believe they won't win.  There is a very high probability that ticket 0 000 000 000 won't win but could you say that you know that it won't win?  It seems that no matter how great the odds that it won't win, you can't say that you know it won't win.  It appears as though we have constructed a counter-example to (e):  Even though there is a very high probability that "I won't win" is true I can't say that I know I won't win.

Ok, Lets Try A Different Approach
As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, the cause of the problem for the JTB theory is not that we need additional conditions rather that we have accepted assumptions 1 and 2.  So why don't we reject one or both of them?

Lets Reject the Idea that It's Possible to Have a Justified Belief that Turns out False
Well, first of all, we already saw what happens if we do this: We end up like Descartes rejecting everything except for the fact that we exist (without a body).  Basically, what happens is that the only types of justifications that count are one's where the p couldn't possibly turn out false. That's not going to work too well or at least make knowledge very difficult to come by.

Consider the John in California example.  If we reject assumption 1 then based on the fact that all John's mail is addressed to SF we can no longer say that we are justified in believing he lives in SF. This seems a bit counter-intuitive.  How much evidence would we need before it would be impossible for the belief to turn out false? Aside from the practicality issue, this course seems implausible.

Why Epistemology Matters: Reason Number 2

Introduction
A while back, in an attempt to assuage feelings of doubt, I wrote a post on why the main issues in epistemology matter to Joe and Joanne Shmo.  Here, I will address why what appears to be an insignificant esoteric and abstract issue in epistemology has extremely important consequences to our daily lives and especially our social institutions.

Before reading what I have written click on the link and watch the video:

I said click it!

Ok, so if you didn't have a chance to watch the entire video here is the most relevant point:

72% of wrongful convictions that are later overturned by DNA evidence are a result of eyewitness testimony.

Overview
Let's get the terminology out of the way.  Epistemology is the study of knowledge.  Two of the major questions that are explored in epistemology are (a) what is knowledge? (b) what is it possible to know? (i.e., what are the limits of knowledge).  Apart from these central issues, there are other important issues one of which I mentioned before: when is a belief justified?

It shouldn't come as a surprise to any thinking person that some beliefs are well-justified and others are not so much--or not at all.  So, when is a belief justified and when isn't it?   Establishing some rules or principles for justification before we go out into the world will allow us to avoid falling prey to ideas and beliefs that might be appealing (i.e., confirm our biases) yet are not well-supported.  

Consider Jennifer Thompson's testimony.  Pretty convincing right?  She has pretty convincing support for her belief about who raped her.  If you think that the reasons she cites for her beliefs are strong justification then you are subscribing to a theory of justification called internalism or "current time-slice" theory.

Don't be scurd by the fancy name.  All this means is that for a belief to be justified, the believer or proponent has to, in principle, be able to--at the moment of inquiry--produce some sort of compelling evidence or support for their belief. Otherwise stated, a justifying reason for the belief must be internally accessible to the believer.  In Jennifer's case, maybe it's a memory or are current observation.  Justification for moral beliefs might be an appeal to a commonly held moral principle, for a scientific belief it might be an observation or an inference.  Regardless, the main point of internalism is that the justification for a belief must be accessible to and produceable by the believer.

An externalist on the other hand says that justification has nothing to do with conscious access to reasons and everything to do with the reliability of the process by which the belief was acquired. "Reliability" in this context means "the process by which the belief was acquired produces more true beliefs than false beliefs over the long run."  The externalist or "process reliabilist," as they are sometimes called, doesn't care two hoots about the justifying reasons to which Jennifer has conscious access.  They only care about whether the process (eye-witness testimony, in this case) by which Jennifer acquired her beliefs produces more true beliefs than false beliefs in the long run (i.e., that the process is reliable).

Now, lets consider Jennifer's testimony from the point of view of an externalist.  We know that the process of eye-witness memory and testimony is unreliable, in fact, it's very unreliable.  We know that in the long run, more beliefs that are formed from these processes will turn out to be false than they will turn out to be true. So, if we adopt an externalist model of justification, we ought to reject Jennifer's testimony.  It isn't a justified belief.

Adopting process reliablism as our theory of justification tells us we ought to focus our attention on the reliability of processes rather than reasons.  In the video clip we learn of all the different ways in which the (current) process of eye-witness testimony can fail and how it might be corrected.  It seems counter-intuitive to say we should dismiss Jennifer's testimony, however, by focusing on processes rather than reasons as justification, we can avoid tragic errors.  

Our preferred philosophical theory of epistemic justification has huge practical implications in many domains, and it is made most readily apparent in the court of law.  As a thought experiment, think about the practical consequences to your area of expertise of applying one theory of justification vs another. You'll likely find there are important consequences.

Epistemology matters--and not just to philosophers.  The theory of justification we choose can have implications as to whether people are likely to wrongfully convicted.

Boom goes the dynamite.

Why Study Philosophy? Epistemology Edition

I been having this weird experience of questioning the value of studying philosophy.  Well, not so much for me personally, but for people who are not already interested.  Here's the thing: I, like pretty much anyone who teaches and studies philosophy, am passionate about it.  There's clearly no need to sell me on it.  The problem is that I realized that the things I find interesting and important about philosophy might not be interesting and important to those on the outside.  It's kind of like your favorite food or TV show: It's hard to conceive of why anyone wouldn't find them to be great or at least see the value in them.

Over the summer semester I'm teaching a 101 class.  As with most 101 classes, I begin with epistemology.  Epistemology is the study of knowledge.  Two of the traditional main questions are (1) what is knowledge? (E.g., what's the difference between simply believing something and knowing something) and (2)  what can we know? (E.g., it seems that many beliefs that were previously held to be true can end up being false, so is there a way to systematically decide before hand which are likely to be true or false).  A third issue I include in my class is the issue of justification:  What conditions have to be met before we can say someone's belief is justified.

As I was preparing my lectures I started to ask myself why should Joe-Shmo care about what knowledge is?  Or what we truly can or can't know?  Or what counts as a justified belief?  I was actually in the middle of my lecture today when these doubts came to a head, in my head.

We were discussing whether a person who holds a belief has to have conscious access to the reason why his belief is justified in order for the belief to be justified.  Let's back up a step.  Intuitively, or at least historically, we think that in order for someone to hold a justified belief they have to be able to provide some sort of argument for why they hold the belief.  That is, they have to be able to provide the justification.  If you asked someone "why do you believe X?" and they answered "I don't know but it's justified" most of us would think that this person's belief couldn't possible by justified.  They have no reason supporting why they believe what they believe.  This, by the way, is called "internalism" (the reason why a belief is justified to the believer must be consciously accessible to the believer at the time he is asked to justify the belief).

But hold on a tick. Suppose you do a logic puzzle and the answer turns out to be "yes".  Your belief that the answer is "yes" is justified by the logical proof that you performed.  The process of following the rules of logic yielded the answer.  10 years later someone gives you the same logic puzzle but you don't remember how to do the logic part to get the answer.  You do however remember that the answer is "yes" although you have no idea how you got that answer: in fact, you don't even remember if you even did the proof or if someone else had just told you the answer.  Are you justified in believing that the answer is "yes"?  Most of us would say "yes".  So, it seems that you can have a justified belief that the believer can't in the moment provide a justification for.  This is called "externalism" (the justification for a belief can be external to the believer's consciousness).

Anyhow, as you can see, it all gets very abstract very fast.  As we got bogged down in this I noticed some of the students tuning out.  It was it this point I had my little internal panic attack.  Does what I have devoted my life to have value to anyone outside of the profession?  Why should these people care about this?

Answer 1
One common response (aside from "who cares) to these seemingly esoteric debates is subjectivism: Whatever counts as justification for you is fine and whatever counts as justification for me is fine. There are a couple of problems with this:  First of all it's not a solution: it's surrender.  The second is that no one seriously believes this.

Everyday we are bombarded with information.  Why do we choose to believe some of that information reject other parts of it?  We don't randomly decide what to belief and what not to (well....actually, most of the time we just go with whatever confirms our biases but lets restrict this to deliberative inquiry).  If someone came to us for advice on what they should and should not believe, no one would think it's good advice to say "it doesn't matter why you believe something--just believe whatever you like."

Here is why epistemology matters:  Ultimately we have to figure out how we are going to live our lives. The decisions we make will directly influence the quality of our lives.  But the decisions we make are a direct result of what we [choose to] believe and don't [choose to] believe.  If we have no principled way to distinguish between something we have good reason to believe and something for which we don't, we will very easily make poorly informed decisions about how to live our lives and how to treat others which will in turn directly impact the quality of our life.

In short, your beliefs are more likely to be true if they have good justifying reasons supporting them. But if you have no principles or rules for what distinguish a good justification for a bad one (or none at all) you'll be in for a rough ride.  Before you can act you must have beliefs and the "truthiness" of your beliefs will determine the quality of your action and its likelihood of producing the desired result.  For this reason, it's important for everyone to study the properties of good and bad justification.

If you don't at least spend some time thinking about what you can and cannot know and to what degree of certainty before entering other domains of knowledge, you might be on a fools errand.  If you seek knowledge about something which is impossible know, yet you failed to reflect on this beforehand, you just wasted (part of) your life.

Answer 2:
Beyond the general answer to why epistemology matters let's return to why we should care about the abstract and esoteric issue of internalist justification vs externalist justification.

Click on the link and watch the video:

Ok, so if you didn't have a chance to watch the entire video here is the most relevant point:

72% of wrongful convictions that are later overturned by DNA evidence are a result of eyewitness testimony.

Consider Jennifer Thompson's testimony.  Pretty convincing right?  She has access to all the justifications for her belief about who raped her.  From the point of view of internalism, she is justified in her belief.  Now, lets consider the same situation from the point of view of an externalist.  We know that the process of eye-witness memory and testimony is unreliable, in fact, it's very unreliable.  So, if we adopt an externalist model of justification, we ought to reject Jennifer's testimony.  It isn't a justified belief.

Our preferred philosophical theory of epistemic justification has huge practical implications in many domains, and it is made most readily apparent in the court of law.  As a thought experiment, think about the practical consequences to your area of expertise of applying one theory of justification vs another. You'll likely find there are important consequences.

Epistemology matters.

Ok, I feel a bit better now.  Back to grading reflections.

Gettier: The Challenge to the Traditional Conception of Knowledge

Introduction and Context
Gettier's "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" is considered to be one of--if not the most--important articles of 20th Century philosophy.  Pre-Gettier, the standard definition of knowledge (since at least Aristotle) was "justified true belief".  Pretty much everyone we've studied so far held this account of knowledge to be correct (with the exception of Goldman who wrote post-Gettier and was focused only on justification).  In his groundbreaking article, G-money provides several counter-examples to the long-standing traditional account.  Let check it aus...

The Traditional (JTB) Account of Knowledge
At its core the traditional account of knowledge has 3 necessary and sufficient conditions:

S knows that p if and only if
(a)  p is true,
(b)  S believes that p, and
(c)  S is justified in believing that p.

(Recall from the previous post that 'S' stands for 'any subject/person' and 'p' stands for 'any proposition/assertion that can be true or false, but not both.)

Gettier's Objective
Gettier's main objective is to show that the traditional conditions for knowledge in the JTB model aren't sufficient (aren't enough).  In other words, in some cases, meeting the 3 conditions isn't enough for something to count as knowledge--there need to be additional conditions.


The Set Up:  Why Gettier Cases Happen
Before looking at Gettier's actual examples, lets take a look at the general structure that will underpin his attack: Gettier cases (i.e. counter-examples to the JTB model) work against the traditional account of knowledge because of the interaction between 2 widely accepted epistemological principles.  So long as we accept both principles, we'll end up with Gettier counter-examples to the JTB model. 

The first principle is that (A) it's possible to have a justified belief that is false.  Most people accept this.  Often we have very good reasons for believing things that at some later point we learn to be false.  The only way to reject this is to say that the only justified beliefs you can have are ones that, under no possible circumstances, will ever turn out to be false.  Since all sorts of unexpected things can happen in life, this bar is too high for all but Descartes and his followers.


The second part of the set up involves an assent to logical inference.  That is, most of us believe that (B) some beliefs can be justified by prior beliefs.  A classic example would be 

If I have good evidence for the belief that (p) it's raining, then I can infer that (q) there are clouds.
Or If if have good evidence for the belief that (p) Jill drives a Ford, then I can infer (q) that Jill drives an American car.

In cases where I know p, I can also be justified in knowing q. In other words,  every time I have good reason to think p is true, I can legitimately infer that q will also be true.  So, if I'm justified in believing p, and q obviously follows from p, then it seems I am also justified in believing q. 

Let me repeat that cuz it's super important: If q clearly follows from p, and I'm justified in believing p, then it follows that I'm also justified in believing q.

The traditional account along with just about everyone, professional philosopher or not accepts that we can make legitimate inferences.  What the Gettier cases show is that accepting both (A) and (B) gets us into trouble if we also want to hold on to the tradition definition of knowledge. 

Case 1:  The Oasis
Suppose we're walking in the desert.  Up in the distance I see an oasis (this is the 'p').  I turn to you and say "there's an oasis over there."  Now, since (p) I see an oasis, I make the inference from believing that I see an oasis to (q) there is an oasis "over there."

(If I see something, then I reasonably infer that it exists).

As it turns out, I'm actually seeing a mirage not an oasis.  Now, here's the crazy part: just behind the dune I'm pointing at there is an actual oasis.  So our situation is that I've met all the criteria for the traditional definition but I don't seem to have knowledge!  Most people would say that I don't know there is an oasis over there.  Consider

(i)   I have a true belief (there really is an oasis "over there"--it's just not the one I think I'm seeing);
(ii)  I believe that there is an oasis "over there" (I inferred it from the fact that I see an oasis which is actually a mirage);
(iii) I'm justified in believing there is an oasis "over there" (I don't know that I'm seeing a mirage rather than an actual oasis)

In this case, it looks like I have a bonafide justified true belief but we probably don't want to say that I know that there is an oasis over there.  Oh! Snap!

Case 2:  The Job and the Coins
Suppose Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job.  Suppose also that Smith has strong evidence for the following proposition:

(d) Jones is the man who will get the job and Jones has 10 coins in his pocket. (This is the p)

Maybe Smith's evidence is that the owner of the company (who is also in charge of hiring) told him Jones would get the job.  Also, Smith, himself, counted the coins in Jones' pocket while they were in the waiting room.

The next assertion (e) follows logically from (d) (in philosophy we say "it is logically entailed by d")

(e)  The man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket. (This is the q.  We can say that e obviously follows from d)

I don't think anyone would disagree that if we have strong justification for believing that d is true then we can also be justified in believing that e is true.  Smith believes (e) and is justified in believing (e).

Now here's where it gets crazy again.  Suppose that contrary to all the evidence that Smith had for Jones getting the job, Smith himself ends up getting the job.  And, to top it off, Smith, unbeknownst to himself, (because he never bothered to count) also has ten coins in his pocket.  This means that (e) is true (the man who got the job--Smith--has 10 coins in his pocket) even though (d) (from which (e) was inferred) is false!

How does this affect the traditional theory of knowledge?  Well, it looks like

(i)    Smith has a true belief (e)
(ii)   Smith believes (e)
(iii)  Smith is justified in believing (e) is true.

Even though all the conditions are met for the traditional definition of knowledge, we probably don't want to say that Smith knows.  Why?  Are intuitions tell us that well, the belief is only true by accident and so it shouldn't count Smith was justified in believing (e) because it obviously follows from (d), but that's not why (e) turns out to be true! But the traditional theory only stipulate that the 3 conditions be met--it doesn't say anything about how.  So, this example seems to show that the traditional theory fails because we don't want to say that Smith really knew that the successful job applicant would have ten coins in his pocket.

Case 3:  The Ford and Mr. Brown
Suppose that for the last 5 years, every workday, Jones has picked up Smith in a Ford to go to work. Most of us would agree that Smith is justified is believing that

(f)  Jones owes a Ford.

Now suppose Smith has another friend named Mr. Brown.  At random Smith selects 3 place names and constructs the following propositions:

(g)  Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Boston;
(h)  Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Barcelona;
(i)   Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Brest-Litovsk.

All of these (g, h, i) are entailed by (i.e., follow from) (f).

Wut?  Hold the phone...how do (g, h, i) follow from (f)?...

Aside:  Formal Logic
This particular examples requires a little bit of knowledge about formal logic.  Don't be scurd.  It's not as bad as you think.  At first it seems weird to say that g, h, i are all follow from (f), but they do, and I'll explain.

Consider the following example:

I have 2 legs.  It's true right?  Now consider this next proposition:

I have 2 legs or I have 2 horns.  Also true, right?  Why?

In an "or"-statement (called a "disjunction" in fancy philosophy-talk), so long as one part is true, the whole statement is true.  So, in this case, so long as it's true that I have 2 legs, it doesn't matter what I put on the other side of the "or" because the entire disjunction will still be true.  For example, I can say "either the earth is a sphere or unicorns that fart rainbows exist".  Because the first part of the disjunction is true, it doesn't matter if the second half is false (or true), the net result is the same; the entire disjunct is true.  In a disjunction, only one side needs to be true for the entire disjunction to be true.

Ok, that should be enough to get us through the rest of this Gettier case...

Case 3 Continued
Now where were we?  Oh, yes.  We were saying that the disjunctions (g, h, and i) all obviously follow from (f).  That is, if (f) is true, we can also infer that (g, h, and i) are also true because we know that one side of the disjunct is true (and that's all that's needed for the whole disjunction to be true).  So long as we know that "Jones owns a Ford," it doesn't matter one hoot what we add to it in an "or" statement.

Smith could have said "Jones owns a Ford or sharktopus will eat every UNLV student."  Since the "Jones owns a Ford" part is true, it doesn't matter about the truth of the sharktopus part--the entire disjunctive clause is still true as a whole.

The bottom line so far is that since Smith has strong evidence for (f), he can infer (g, h, i) and be justified in believing (g, h, i).   Finally, we should note that Smith has no idea where Brown is.  He just randomly picked places for (g, h, i).

Here comes the tricky part.  Who needs the quickee-mart?  Imagine two further conditions for our little situation.  First, it turns out that Jones doesn't own a Ford!  Unbeknownst to Smith, Jones sold his Ford yesterday and now drives a Prius.  Second, it turns out that Brown is actually in Barcelona (the place in h)!  It follows that (h) is true!  (But not for the reasons that Jones thinks it is).

If these two new conditions are true then
(i)  (h) is true (because Brown is in Barcelona not because Jones owns a Ford),
(ii)  Smith believes (h) is true (but for the wrong reason--because he believes Jones owns a Ford),
(iii) Smith is justified in believing that (h) is true (because he had good evidence to believe that (f) Jones owns a Ford and (h) follows from (f)).

Again we have an example where someone has met the 3 traditional criteria for knowledge, yet we would not want to say that Jones knows that (h) either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona.

Possible Objections
One attempt to rescue the traditional model is to add a fourth stipulation.  Notice that in Gettier's examples the problem seemed to be that an inference was being made from a false belief.  So, in Case 1, we inferred "there's an oasis over there" from the false belief "I see an oasis."  In case 2, we inferred that the man who got the job would have 10 coins in his pocket from the false belief that Jones, who has ten coins in his pocket, would get the job.  In case 3, we inferred that either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona from the false belief that Jones owned a ford.  In order to correct that problem, it seems we should add a fourth condition to the traditional model of knowledge:

(iv)  S does not infer a truth from a falsehood.

Problem solved right?  HA!  This is philosophy!

Gettier Reply
Suppose I run an annual event and for planning purposes I need to know how many people attended this year so I can rent a room for next year.  I really only care if there were more or less than 40 people.  If it's more than 40 then I need to rent a big room, if it's less, then the standard room will do.  I ask one of my co-organizers how many people attended the event.  He says there were 78 people.

At this point it seems that I can legitimately make the inference from "there were 78 people" to "there were more than 40 people at the event"; i.e., I know there were more that 40 people.  As it turns out, my co-organizer got it wrong, in fact, there were only 77 people.  It still seems, however, that I am able to legitimately say that I know there were more than 40 people.

So?  Well, this example shows that, contra (iv), you can make an inference from a falsehood and still have that inferred belief count as knowledge.  Doh!

Counter-reply
But not so fast.  When you inferred that there were over 40 people based on the co-organizer's assertion about 78 people, there's an implied probability judgment.  You know that the probability of someone miscounting by about 35% is virtually impossible.  You know that even if they're off by a few, there will still be more than 40 people and so the number the co-organizer cites doesn't have to be exact for you to make the inference.  A proposition just has to have a high probability of being true.  So, we add a fifth condition:

(v)  p has to have a sufficiently high probability of truth.

Now we've got it! Right?

Getter Reply 2:  Lottery Paradox
Suppose a billion ticket lottery.  Of ticket number 0000000000 there's a 1 in a billion chance that it will win.  So, you say (reasonably) that you believe it won't win.  You can say the same of ticket 0000000001 that you believe it won't win either.  In fact, you can say of every ticket that you believe it won't win.  But if you bought a ticket and said I know this ticket won't win, people would say, no, you don't know that.  One of the tickets will win.  You have a very high probability belief that the ticket won't win, but you don't know that it won't win.  This proves that, contra (v), you don't need to have a sufficiently high probability of truth for knowledge.

Anyhow, this back and forth can go on for a while, but in the end, philosophers have given up on trying to rescue the traditional model from Gettier by using extra conditions.

Conclusion: Why the Gettier Problem Can't be Overcome
As I said near the beginning (in the set up section), the production of Gettier cases relies on the acceptance of two principles: (A) You can be justified in believing something that turns out to be false, and (B) the justification of some beliefs can be other justified beliefs (i.e., we can make logical inferences).

Lets Try (A)
Any solution to the Gettier problem will involve rejecting one of these principles.  Suppose, for example, to get out of the "oasis" problem, we reject (A).  But now, if we actually see a real oasis, we can't say we know there's an oasis because there's always a chance (no matter how small) that it is a mirage or that we are hallucinating.  

As the lottery paradox shows, it doesn't matter how small the chance is, we still can't say we know it's an oasis so long as there's an infinitesimal chance that we could be wrong.  Well, rejecting (A) isn't going to work...how about (B)?

Lets Try (B)
Suppose, in order to escape the Gettier problems we reject (B).  Recall, the problem arose because we made the inference from a false believe.  Well, now we're just going to ban inferences.  But if we do this, then if I actually do see a mirage I'm not allowed to make the inference that "there's a mirage over there"!  And if Jones actually does get the job, Smith can't make the inference that "the man who gets the job will have 10 coins in his pocket."  Well, that's gonna suck! 

Because no one (except very extreme skeptics a la Descartes) wants to abandon either (A) or (B) philosophers have given up trying to rescue the traditional model of knowledge. 

Holy crap!  Progress in philosophy! (If you count discarding a theory as progress).