Normative Because False!?#

In what is meant to be  “a contribution of major importance to a unified theory of probability and utility” Jeffrey (The Logic of Decision) says about Bayesian decision theory that

Indeed, it is because logic and decision theory are woefully inadequate as descriptions that they are of interest as norms. (p.167)

Now,  here’s a worry I presented yesterday in the seminar and that I’d like to present again, so that other people may consider it and that the ones that heard it can see why it’s worrisome. There are, at least, two questions the claim above prompts:

1) If theory T is woefully inadequate as a description of phenomena F, and yet it is meant to be a normative theory of F, couldn’t it be that it makes absurd demands about F?

2) If it is in virtue of theory T’s woeful descriptive inadequacy towards F that T is an interesting normative theory of F, wouldn’t it be the case that false descriptive theories turn out to be interesting normative theories?

Here are some examples that illustrate both worries. Consider the following theory about human decision making behavior called ‘T1′

T1: For any subject and any decision D at any time t, subject S should fly up into the sky at time t2 if S reaches decision D at time t1.

T1 is woefully inadequate as a description of human decision behavior. If we accept Jeffrey’s diagnosis about  Bayesian Decision Theory, it is in virtue of this inadequacy that T1 is an interesting normative theory of decision making! But you may object, of course, that we have independent reasons to reject T1. The demands that it presents just don’t make sense at all! Point taken. But it will not get us out of trouble.

Consider the ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ principle which seems, to my mind, to offer a very sensible limitation on ANY normative theory: if subject S ought to do X in context C it must be the case that S is able in C to do X. Now suppose that, for some or other reason, whenever humans are in real decision making contexts (e.g., when they are decision where to go for dinner, or whether to watch a movie or do a reading) as opposed to consciously working out in a formal epistemology seminar, they cannot, because of their cognitive architecture, compute an algebra. Decision theory will still claim that humans should distribute their credences over some or other algebra. So it seems that Decision Theory will be claiming that humans ought to do what they cannot do. That seems absurd. Decision Theory should be a bit more informed about human psychology.

So far so good for the first worry. The second one is just as bad (if not worse). Suppose we accept Jeffrey’s claim that it is precisely because a theory T is woefully inadequate as a description that it is interesting as a normative theory. If so, then we seem to get the following argument:

P1 Theory T is woefully inadequate as a description of F.

P2 If T is woefully inadequate as a description of F then T is an interesting normative theory of F.

C Theory T is an interesting normative theory of F.

Now consider theories that give woefully inadequate descriptions of the phenomena they intend to theorize about. Here’s a big group of such theories: the false ones. Consider, in particular, Aristotle’s physics and astronomy. They are both woefully inadequate theories of the behavior of physical objects and planets. So we may run the argument:

P1 Aristotle’s astronomy is woefully inadequate as a theory of the behavior of planets.

P2 If Aristotle’s astronomy is woefully inadequate as a theory of the behavior of the planets, then it is an interesting normative theory of the behavior of the planets.

C Aristotle’s theory is an interesting normative theory of the behavior of the planets.

Now that does seem like a bad result, doesn’t it? That’s why we should worry about Jeffrey’s claim that

Indeed, it is because logic and decision theory are woefully inadequate as descriptions that they are of interest as norms.

The fact that a given theory T about phenomena F delivers a woefully inadequate description of F gives no good reason to take it to be an interesting normative theory of F. Jeffrey is simply wrong about this. And if he is right about decision theory being so woefully inadequate, then we should worry a bit about its theoretical value. In general, I think, all normative theories should worry about being so woefully inadequate!

The Apriority of Some Experimental Philosophy

Some experimental philosophy are apriori, so I claim. (More carefully, the conclusions that these projects draw are apriori.) On the face of it, this claim is rather implausible. If there is one thing that is most distinctive about experimental philosophy, it is the empirical methods that it borrows from psychology, cognitive science, and other allied fields. I want to argue that, however, in order to address a common objection against experimental philosophy, proponents would do better to concede the apriority of some projects that employ experimental methods. Fortunately for them, this concession can be made because there is an important distinction to be drawn between empirical/rational and aposteriori/apriori. The upshot is that both proponents and detractors would do well to note that experimental philosophy come in both apriori and aposteriori varieties.

Here is a rough taxonomy of projects that fall under the “experimental philosophy” umbrella. First, there are projects that are not survey based, but instead involve some observation on the experimenter’s part. Josh Greene’s fMRI works are paradigmatic examples. I think it’s uncontroversial that these are aposteriori. Second, there are “debunking” survey-based projects. These projects often argue against traditional philosophy claims from diversity of opinions. The cross-cultural studies on direct reference and knowledge are paradigmatic examples. I think these are aposteriori too, though I am relatively less confident. Third, there are “positive” survey-based projects. From people’s response to cleverly-designed thought experiments, experimenters draw conclusions about folk concepts. Of this kind of projects, Josh Knobe’s works on the moral component of intentionality are paradigmatic examples. In this post, I will argue that this last kind of experimental philosophy projects are apriori.

The common objection against experimental philosophy is that the responses that they get from ordinary people, which they call “intuitions”, are nothing relevantly like philosophers’ intuitions. Perhaps the folk do not have the relevant concepts employed in philosophical discourse. Perhaps the folk do not offer their considered, reflected judgments as philosophers do. If this objection succeeds, then experimental philosophy ought not have the impact on current philosophical practice that its proponents claims that it should. These so-called “intuitions” are simply not what philosophers ought to admit as evidence for their inquiries—in the same way that the fact that people sometimes say “I don’t believe God exists, I know it!” ought not count as evidence for knowledge not requiring belief.

Now, I find this common objection against experimental philosophy rather unconvincing, but I won’t debate that here. Instead, I want to simply note a dialectical point. To successfully respond to this objection, experimental philosophers need to do enough to show that the responses they get from ordinary people are relevantly like philosophers’ intuitions. The crucial point, then, is this: philosophers’ intuitions are apriori. If ordinary people’s responses are not, then that would seem like a relevant difference. To be more explicit, we can say that the content of ordinary people’s responses are apriori. Of course, experimental philosophers’ collections of those responses, or what we might call their observations of ordinary people’s responses, are empirical and aposteriori.

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.

Zillions of Beliefs?

Here’s a fun one:

1. Anyone who knows basic maths knows that 2+2=4.
2. If someone knows that 2+2=4, then that person believes that 2+2=4.
3. The known proposition in premises 1 and 2 (i.e. that 2+2=4) can be replaced by a very large number of other propositions (e.g. that 2+3=5 or that 5-1=4) while maintaining the truth of the premises.
4. Therefore, anyone who knows basic maths has a very large  number of beliefs (countably-many?).
5. Regular people do not have a large number of occurent beliefs.
6. Therefore, many of the beliefs of regular people are non-occurent.

I’ve heard a few people complain that this idea of a non-occurent or implicit belief is non-sensical or elusive.  If you’re one of those people, which premise do you reject?

Tiebreaker Reasons

The beginning of the term affords opportunities to think about things I normally don’t think about, so here is a topic brought by reading discussions of hiring practices: tiebreaker reasons.

What are tiebreaker reasons? They are the reasons that determines an agent’s decision or judgment when all other reasons are equal. For the intuitive notion, consider the following example. When one says, “Our final two candidates, First and Second, are as good as each other with respect to their research, teaching, and service, but we should hire First because she is from Winnipeg,” one is offering being from Winnipeg as a tiebreaker reason for hiring First over Second. As the name indicates, intuitively tiebreaker reasons should only matter when there is a tie.

Tiebreaker reasons like that one are, I think, often offered in casual conversations. But I worry: are there really tiebreaker reasons? how should tiebreaker reasons be modeled? and ultimately, are tiebreaker reasons epistemically rational to have?

A Bleg Concerning the Utility of Information

Consider the following scenario.

Scenario One (the “control” scenario).  In the morning you tune your television to the Weather Channel and find the forecaster saying (what’s true) that all meteorolgical signs point towards rain in the afternoon.  You trust the forecaster and so you accept the information that all meteorological signs point towards rain in the afternoon.  With this new information you make the rational (by stipulation) decision to take an umbrella with you to work.  As it happens, it does rain that afternoon and you benefit from having brought the umbrella.

Question: was the information that all meteorological signs point to rain useful information with respect to your decision whether to bring an umbrella?  Obvious answer: yes.

Scenario Two (the “experimental” scenario).  

In the morning you tune your television to the Weather Channel and find the forecaster saying (what’s true) that all meteorolgical signs point towards rain in the afternoon.  You trust the forecaster and so you accept the information that all meteorological signs point towards rain in the afternoon.  With this new information you make the rational (by stipulation) decision to take an umbrella with you to work.  But, despite the fact that all signs pointed to rain, it does not rain that afternoon, and so you incur some cost by having brought the umbrella.

Question: was the information that all meteorological signs point to rain useful information with respect to your decision whether to bring an umbrella?  It seems to me that there isn’t an obvious answer here.  After some thought, Heather and I think that maybe we should say something like this: with respect to deciding what to do, that information was useful, but with respect to getting what you want, that information was not useful.

Does that sound right to anyone else?  Anyone have a better idea?  Any thoughts at all?  We’d love to hear them!

The Value of Hammers and True Beliefs

In each hand, you hold a hammer.  As far as their intrinsic qualities are concerned, the two hammers are indistinguishable.  Hence, they would seem to be equally useful for doing things like pounding in nails, tearing down walls, and “fixing” crashed Macintosh computers.  However, the hammers do differ in one respect: the hammer in your right hand belongs to you, the hammer in your left hand belongs to a neighbor, who has explicitly told you that you may not use his hammer.  Here, then, is a question:

Is the hammer in your right hand more useful (to you) than the hammer in your left hand?

I claim the answer is ‘yes’.  But I do not wish to disagree with you if you say that there is a sense in which they are equally useful.  I only wish to claim that there is a sense in which the hammer in your right hand–the one that you have the right to use–is more useful than the hammer in your left hand.  Let us call the sense of ‘useful’ according to which the hammer in your right is more useful than the hammer in your left ‘instrumental-cum-normative usefulness’.  And, if you believe there is such a thing, we can call the sense of ‘useful’ according to which the two hammers are equally useful ‘pure instrumental usefulness’.

That’s enough about hammers.  What about true beliefs?  

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:

Newcomb and Dominance

Hey All,

We never really talk about the Newcomb problem around here (never really == less than 75% of the time), so I thought I’d throw (what I think is) a new substantive line in the ring.

I assume a standard formulation of the Newcomb problem with an infallible predictor, which can be found here.  In the PDF below, I put forth an intuitively appealing argument for two-boxing in the Newcomb problem which employs dominance reasoning. I then suggest a potential issue with this argument as formulated. Much of the thinking that went into this was inspired by, among others, David Wiens, Stephen Campbell, Shen-yi Liao, and Jason Konek.

I’d appreciate any feedback here, especially reformulations of the two-box argument that stick to the intention of the original but employ different notions of dominance.

Some thoughts: Against a Newcomb Dominance Argument

Recalcitrant Credences

The following principle strikes me as plausible:

If S is ideally rational, has the concept of justification, and has credence X that P,

then S believes that she is justified in having credence X that P.

In other words, ideally rational agents believe that all their credences are justified. Any thoughts? I’m sure this has been addressed in the literature, so if you know of any relevant citations, please pass them along!