Was Goldman a Closet Internalist?

I am teaching a class on epistemology and metaphysics. We are reading the paper where Alvin Goldman first proposed reliabilism, “What is Justified Belief?”. Upon re-reading, there is a part of his discussion that I just find puzzling, and not at all what I expected given the caricature in my head that reliabilism is the prototypical externalist theory.

In section III, Goldman considers a case that I think is quite similar to the clairvoyant case that people tend to bring against reliabilism:

Suppose that Jones is told on fully reliable authority that a certain class of his memory beliefs are almost all mistaken. His parents fabricate a wholly false story that Jonese suffered from amnesia when he was seven but later developed pseudo-memories of that period. Though Jones listens to what his parents say and has excellent reason to trust them, he persists in believing the ostensible memories from his seven-year-old past. Are these memory beliefs justified? Intuitively, they are not justified. But since these beliefs result from genuine memory and original perceptions, which are adequately reliable processes, our theory says that these beliefs are justified.

Goldman then goes on to consider various revisions to account for this unintuitive result. At some point he even admits that the problem raised by this cases suggests a fundamental change to the reliabilist theory is necessary, and sketches one such change.

What puzzles me is not his concession that the result in the case is unintuitive, but his further concession that a fundamental change is necessary. Isn’t the standard externalist response just to bite the bullet? That is, I thought externalists would say simply: yes, although it is unintuitive, in fact there are things we know that we don’t know we know and even things we know that we think we don’t know. So it is strange that Goldman is moved by the example to make a big concession. This fact leads me to think that, at least at the time when he first proposed reliabilism, Goldman might have been a closet internalist.

Tooley on Laws of Nature and Counterfactual Support

So I was looking over Dan’s reconstruction of Tooley’s argument below, and I’m still somewhat worried about its validity.

Dan mentioned that I thought there might be some funny business with premises (3) and (10) (on his first reconstruction):

(3) It is a nomological truth that all salt, when in water, dissolves.

(10) It is true that if this piece of salt were in water and were not dissolving, it would not be in the vicinity of a piece of gold.

Dan’s certainly right that there’s no straight-up contradiction here (like there would be if (10) was stating a material conditional).  However, something still feels very odd about the line of argumentation being taken.  What originally bothered me was the fact that, in (10), we are using a putative law to support a counterfactual about what would happen in a situation in which that law (or, rather, the law from which it is derived) is violated.  And I’m not convinced that any law can support a counterfactual like this.

This is a problem because Tooley is trying to draw a distinction between two classes of nomological truths (the laws proper and the logical consequences of laws).  He is arguing that the second class cannot support certain counterfactuals which the first class can – and that, therefore, they must be treated differently.  However, if he demonstrates this by pointing to a certain class of counterfactuals which are not only problematic for the second class, but for the first class as well, then he’s failed to draw the distinction.

So, I’ve been convinced by Dan that Tooley’s argument demonstrates that nomological truths like (L) all salt, when in water and near gold, dissolves in water. have difficulty supporting certain counterfactuals.  However, I haven’t been convinced that laws proper don’t face the very same difficulty.  On my understanding of things, if I can show that a plain jane law faces similar difficulties with the same kind of counterfactual, then I will have undermined Tooley’s distinction.

Tooley’s Laws of Nature and Counterfactual Support

In “The Nature of Laws”, Michael Tooley argues that some proper subclass of the nomological truths are laws of nature, since laws should support counterfactuals and not all nomological truths do that.

He says, “If one says that all nomological statements support counterfactuals, and that it is a nomological truth that all salt when both in water and near gold dissolves, one will be forced to accept [that if this piece of salt were in water and were not dissolving, it would not be in the vicinity of a piece of gold], whereas it is clear that there is good reason not to accept [that].”  (Last line in first paragraph of section 3.)

Time Travelers and Their Temporal Parts

In Four-Dimensionalism, Ted Sider gives the following definition of a temporal part (p. 59):

x is an instantaneous temporal part of y at instant t =df (1) x exists at t, but only at, t; (2) x is part of y at t; and (3) x overlaps at t everything that is part of y at t.

I am a little puzzled about how to apply this definition to temporal parts of time travelers. Following Lewis, let’s distinguish external time (physical, objective) and personal time (subjective, “inner”). Intuitively, I think that different instants of personal time correspond to different temporal parts. I will explain why I believe that this intuition is incompatible with Sider’s definition of a temporal part, and it would be great if someone could tell me whether I am right.

Does knowledge convert reasons to your reasons?

In their forthcoming—and I must say excellent—paper “Knowledge and Action”, John Hawthorne and Jason Stanley defend the following principle:

The Reason-Knowledge Principle (roughly)
Where one’s choice is p-dependent, it is appropriate to treat the proposition that p as a reason for acting iff you know that p.[1]

Importantly, Hawthorne and Stanley say that this principle is to be situated within a decision-theoretic framework according to which knowledge that p requires credence 1 in p. The reason is somewhat obvious: if it is possible to know that p without having credence 1 that p, then any plausible decision theory will predict that there are cases where it is not appropriate to treat the proposition that p as a reason for acting even though one knows that p.  In any case where the expected value/utility of A is greater than that of B, but the expected value/utility conditional on p of B is greater than that of A, it is inappropriate to treat p as a reason.  In such a case, treating p as a reason would presumably require preferring B to A, which contradicts standard decision theory. On the other hand, if one’s credence in p is 1, then it cannot be the case that the expected value/utility of A is greater than B and vice versa for the conditional-on-p expected values/utilities of A and B. Hence, Hawthorne and Stanley require that knowledge that p requires credence 1 that p, thereby blocking any such cases.

This raises an obvious objection, an objection which Hawthorne and Stanley explicitly consider:

Intuitions: Role and Reliability

At Thoughts Arguments and Rants, Brian Weatherson gives a new argument for the reliability of intuitions. His main idea is that, given how many falsehoods are counterintuitive, there is a strong prima facie case for intuition being reliable. To deny this prima facie case, one must either deny that there is a fact of the matter about the reliability of intuitions or that there is a singular notion of intuition, but both of these options look bad. I found both Weatherson’s argument and the ensuing discussion in comments thought-provoking, so here are some of my thoughts.

My main point will be that it only makes sense to talk about whether intuitions are reliable with respect to what one thinks their role is in philosophical enquiry.

Think about a different case first. Suppose I claim that the Bush administration is reliable in interpreting military intelligence data. Well, there is that whole Iraq thing. But think about the good cases: they haven’t invaded Fiji on false intelligence, or Madagascar, or Sealand, or many other nations. The Bush administration’s interpretations are in fact correct in most cases. Boring, in the sense that these interpretations simply agrees with commonsense, but correct nonetheless. Therefore, I claim that the Bush administration is reliable in interpreting military intelligence data.

Help with an example

I’m reworking some sections of my sovereignty paper and am stuck trying to think of a case that adequately illustrates a point I’m trying to make. Read on if you’re interested in helping.

philosopher makes mistake

In “How to Define Theoretical Terms” (1970), David Lewis says the following. Take a theory T that introduced a new term ‘t’. Replace ‘t’ in T with an appropriate variable to form an open sentence R`. Lewis now claims that ‘t’ is correctly defined as follow:

t = the unique x such that R`

Note the uniqueness requirement. If there are multiple realizations of R` (that is, variable assignments that satisfy R`) differing in what they assign to x, then ‘t’ is denotationless. Van Fraassen (1997) argues that, provided only that T is consistent and has an infinite model, such will always be the case.

Plantinga on Whether Belief that God Exists is Properly Basic

Alvin Plantinga argues for the following two claims (Warranted Christian Belief, 186-190):

(1) If God exists, then basic belief that God exists is probably properly basic.

(2) If God does not exists, then basic belief that God exists is probably not properly basic.

Let’s assume that he’s right about (1) and (2). However, from (1) and (2) Plantinga infers that

(3) To answer the question of whether basic belief that God exists is properly basic, we must answer the question of whether God exists.

Here is what Plantinga says when he makes the inference:

And this dependence of the question of warrant or rationality on the truth or falsehood of theism [the dependence stated in 1 and 2] leads to a very interesting conclusion. If the warrant enjoyed by belief in God is related in this way to the truth of that belief, then the question whether theistic belief has warrant is not, after all, independent of the question whether theistic belief is true. So the de jure question we have finally found [of whether basic belief that God exists is properly basic] is not, after all, really independent of the de facto question [of whether God exists]; to answer the former we must answer the latter. (191, bold added)

There seem to be two importantly different readings of (3)—and, similarly, the bolded line above. On the first reading, (3) is unimportant. On the second, the inference from (1) and (2) to (3) is fallacious.

personal and doxastic justification

In their “The Basic Notion of Justification” (Phil. Studies, 1989), Kvanvig and Menzel incredibly attempt to defend the equivalence (J) by appeal to the lambda calculus:

(P) S is justified in believing p

(D) S’s belief that p is justified

(J) (P) ≡ (D)

Kent Bach and my friend Clayton hold that (P) involves the notion of personal justification — roughly, the kind of justification that is a property of responsible cognitive agents — while (D) involves the notion of doxastic justification — the kind of justification that is a property of justified beliefs. According to them, these are distinct notions and so (J) is a false equivalence; there are cases where an instance of (D) is true of some person, but the relevant instance of (P) is not, and vice versa.

Kvanvig and Menzel give a counterargument which I think is wrong. They begin by assuming that the logical form of (D) is as follows: