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Puzzling Knowledge and Knowing Puzzles

It's late, but I've just reread Brian Weatherson's Puzzle About Knowledge, and I finally think I understand what he's driving at as far as knowledge being true belief, not warranted true belief. It's the stress that is sometimes placed on the word know that seems to be puzzling him (stressing "know" changes the acceptibility of claims about knowledge), and he intuits that the unstressed version (where, for instance, you can get away with saying that nine people know they have a virus even though four of them believe they have a virus for the wrong reasons) is closer to the semantic meaning, so most of the time when people say "know" they intend nothing more than believe something that happens to be true, regardless of their reasons for believing it. My intuition says the opposite: almost all the time people intend "know" to mean justified true belief, but the fact that pragmatically true belief is good enough most of the time allows it to piggy-back on the intended meaning; what people are doing when they stress know, IMO, is emphasizing that they don't intend to allow this common bit of sloppiness. For instance, in Brian's example if the boss asks does Molly know she has the virus, what do you think his reaction would be if you replied "Yes, because she says her horoscope told her so." I think that's just as likely to provoke a "Whaddaya mean she knows she has it?" as Brian's scenario is to provoke a "Whaddaya mean she doesn't know she has it?" and it will do little good to point out that she does have it, she believes she has it, and for the most part that's all there is to knowing. The point is that as soon as you start relying on the difference between true belief and justified true belief, by attributing knowledge where people have the former but not the latter, you invite confusion, and it's not just late 20th century epistemology that causes it.

Taking Knowledge Frivolously Frivolously

In Taking Knowledge Frivolously, Brian Weatherson offers a frivolous argument that knowledge = true belief (not, as is often supposed by philosophers, that knowledge is justified true belief). I'm not exactly sure what Brian's motivation for dropping the requirement of justification from the equation, despite having read his previous Puzzle about Knowledge, but I'd like to offer a frivolous counter-example.

Brian supposes the following scenario: Bob bets the barman that Frank is too drunk to know where his car is. Frank heads out to where he usually parked his car, forgetting that today he parked it in a different place. Unbeknownst to anyone, some joyriders stole Frank's car from where he parked it, and left it where he usually parked it. Frank takes them to the place he usually parks, and there is the car; therefor, according to Brian, the barman ought to win the bet. I.e. although Frank's belief about where his car was was completely unjustified, it turned out to have been true, so we ought to say that Frank knew where his car was.

Suppose, instead, that although Frank usually parks on Elm Street, today he is so drunk that he heads in the opposite direction, towards Main Street, thinking that he's heading towards Elm. When they get to Main Street, the joyriders have left the car there. "Here it is, right on Elm where I left it, " announces Frank. So, it would seem that according to Brian's argument, Frank knew where his car was...although even after finding the car, Frank still doesn't know where he  is. Ought Bob still pay the barman?

I think all this shows is that while under the ordinary course of things when we say "know" we don't particularly care whether somebody's belief is justified, that's because most of the time we expect that it is. Whenever we have reason to suspect that's not the case, however, we become more circumspect about what it means to know something. Whether it's the case of someone who is drunk, or a hypochondriac, or a pathological liar, we are rightly hesitant to ascribe knowledge to the fool who always cries that it's noon, just because at the moment it does happen to be noon.

As I suspected...

...there's been a fair bit of resistance to the term "Bright" already, some from people who might otherwise be sympathetic (e.g. some of the folks on Crooked Timber), some from creationists and their apologists (like this guy, Michael Rea) with whom there can be no accomodation anyway. Like Dennett, I agree with Dawkins when he says ?it is absolutely safe to say that if you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked). . .?, although I might take care to point out that otherwise smart people can have stupid beliefs, or keep themselves wilfully ignorant of facts supporting positions that they don't agree with. (To argue, as Rea does, that a position must be respectable if a lot of people, including "well-educated and otherwise reasonable, honest, and sound-minded individuals", hold it is, well, ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked. Not only is that fallacious reasoning, but counter-examples are obvious--so obvious that it's clear that Rea doesn't count as reasonable, honest, and sound-minded on the topic.)
Still, judging by the reaction I've seen so far, "Bright" does seem to be overreaching.

Are you "A Bright?"

The Brights are a movement of people "whose worldview is naturalistic (free of supernatural and mystical elements)" and are trying to change the nature of public discourse and perception of such worldviews, by coopting the word "bright" as a noun much as "gay" was coopted to present a more positive, friendly term for homosexual. E.g. not "Are you bright", but "Are you a bright?" They claim Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and James Randi as Brights, which is certainly true; it may even be true that they self-identify with the Brights (Dawkins and Randi evidentally do). Nevertheless, I'm a bit sceptical of the linguistic theory that seems to underpin this cooption; hasn't anyone noticed that while Gay Pride doesn't cause most people to bat an eye, "that is so gay" is now not  a compliment, where once it was? And despite the careful drawing of the noun/adjective distinction, trying to seize bright this way seems a quite a bit more aggressive and likely to raise hackles even among the sympathetic.

On the other hand, my world-view is  naturalistic, free of the supernatural and mystical, and I wouldn't mind having a short-hand description that didn't characterize it totally in terms of what it's not  (atheist, agnostic, unbeliever), and nowadays Epicurean requires just as much explication as would saying "I'm a Bright"--and if the meme takes off A Bright might end up requiring a whole lot less. It still makes me flash on those old Dr Pepper commercials, though....

New: An RSS Feed

I've added an RSS feed to this blog; look for the XML link on the right. By the way, if you're looking for a good, minimalistic, free RSS-feed reader and you happen to be running Windows you could do a lot worse than Effbot News, a Python-based RSS reader. (Don't worry, you don't need to have Python installed: the download comes with enough of the core Python executable to run...and if you do have Python, installing it won't interfere with your regular Python installation.)

The Moebius Matrix

I remember seeing The Matrix for the first time, having no prior knowledge of the movie, and coming out of it thinking: "A big budget Hollywood movie about epistemology! How cool is that?!" Now the image of the Matrix is such a commonplace that philosophers have started using it, at least as a pedagogical tool, as in this game on the Philosophers Magazine website, and on Thoughts, Arguments, and Rants (look at the entry for Sunday). There are even two different books on the subject: The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real and Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix. Apparently there was also a post on the 617 blog about multi-level Matrices, but unfortunately as I write this their archives are unavailable, so I don't know if it has anything to do with what I'm going to talk about.

The basic Matrix argument is that a) you cannot be sure that every experience you have is not a perfect computer simulation and b) this is a live possibility in a way that , say, pure solipsism or the theory that there's an intangible invisible imp on your shoulder is not, in that there is a possible experience you could have which would tend to confirm it: to whit, being unplugged from the Matrix. Of course, the same argument applies to the world outside of the Matrix: the people who unplugged you face the same possibility that they and you are in a higher-level Matrix, which could be confirmed by being unplugged. Obviously this leads to an infinite regress of suppositions, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.

What I would like to consider is the Matrix scenario with a twist: Upon being unplugged from the Matrix, when the unpluggers tell you "Welcome to the Desert of the Real," you respond:
"What do you mean, real? This world that you call real is itself a computer simulation. When you attempt to look in on the Matrix, you're actually being fed images from the real world, where I come from; when you decided to 'unplug' me, I was plugged into your Matrix. Of course, they gave me a drug to erase my short term memory of the experience of being plugged in, so that there's no difference between my memories and what you think my memories ought to be, but there is an experience that either of us could have which would tend to confirm the truth of what I say: being unplugged."
The question about this account is not whether it is plausible (I should hope not), but whether the unpluggers would have any better reason to discount the possibility than we have of discounting the possibility of the Matrix? I don't think so; it has what appear to me to be the same salient features: it perfectly explains what experiences we do have, while suggesting an experience that we could conceivably have which would tend to confirm the theory that they were merely simulated (granted, without closing down the possibility of further experiences that might modify the conclusion). I call this the Moebius matrix because it's (very loosely) a one-sided loop: there's only one reality, despite the two apparent sides, and if you accept the argument then the "real" world is always the one that your consciousness is not currently aware of.

Imaginative Resistance and Cognitive Distance

The following is a comment that I posted to Brian Weatherson's Thoughts Arguments and Rants blog on the topic of imaginative resistance that he posted Monday 6/16. I figured that I'd post it here as well, just so I can refer back to it later if I like, but you really need to refer to Thoughts, Arguments and Rants, Brian's original paper Virtuous Resistance  and Wo's weblog entry In Defense of the Impossibility Hypothesis for the context:

I think you can probably add Bertrand Russell to the list of smart people like Wo who would have problems with the Tower of Goldbach case. I stumbled across this in The Problems of Philosophy this morning (Oxford Univ. Press edition, p.79):
"When Swift invites us to consider the race of Struldbugs who never die, we are able to acquiesce in imagination. But a world where two and two make five seems quite on a different level. We feel that such a world, if there were one, would upset the whole fabric of our knowledge and reduce us to utter doubt."

My guess (it doesn't really amount to a theory) is that something like Wo's concept of distance in belief space applies, except that distance shouldn't be measured in degree of credence but something like degree to which it enters into our daily working set of beliefs (which is some function of how long/how much effort it takes to recall and reassure ourselves of its truth). E.g., my credence in Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is quite high, having learned two different proofs of it in my undergraduate days, but my imaginative resistance to a fiction where it's not true is rather low--lower, anyway, than my imaginative resistance to 7 plus 5 does not make 12--I think because it takes some time and effort to recall the proofs to mind and deriving the consequences of its falsity are similarly "distant" and difficult. If this idea is right, I'd predict two things: that imaginative resistance would (ceteris paribus) be lower towards stories that only imply the impossible without outright stating it (because it takes work to tease out the implication, making the impossibility more distant); that people who deal with and rely on certain concepts more frequently and heavily will have greater imaginative resistance to impossibilities regarding them, so that e.g. my complexity theorist friends might have imaginative resistance towards a story that makes Godel's Incompleteness Theorem false that approaches mine towards the Tower of Goldbach.

I think that the conceptual effort/distance idea goes some way towards explaining why time-travel paradox stories don't meet much imaginative resistance, but it does have a problem with the lack of resistance you and Tamar have towards the Tower of Goldbach. I find it hard to believe that you and Tamar don't rely on arithmetic enough to find 5+7=12 virtually effortless and immediate, so there has to be some other explanation. Maybe that's where metaphysical theories about mathematics come in: maybe for some people metaphysical theories that would permit its negation are "close" enough to the daily working set of beliefs to overcome the resistance.

Proper Names as Descriptions

There's something that strikes me as a little odd about Bertrand Russell's theory (in The Problems of Philosophy) that proper names are really descriptions of the object in question. For example (at least for people who didn't know Julius Caesar personally), according to Russell if you have a thought involving Julius Caesar, the name Julius Caesar really stands for a description along the lines of 'the founder of the Roman Empire', 'the man who was assassinated on the Ides of March' or 'the man whose name was Julius Caesar ', although the exact content of the description will vary from person to person. The only constant is that the object described will be the same object for everyone using the name correctly.
What strikes me as odd is this: almost without exception, any and all of the individual pieces of that description could be wrong as a matter of empirical fact--and yet we would still intend in using the name that it stand for that particular person, and moreover would be understood by others as doing so. For instance, one could easily imagine the following conversation:
Trurl: "I was wondering whether I should read one of Bertrand Russell's books the other day, and I was thinking about starting with the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding ; what do you think?"
Klapaucias: "Who?"
Trurl: "You know, Bertrand Russell, the French philosopher who wrote Prologomena to Any Future Metaphysic  and Ecce Homo "
Klapaucias: "Bertrand Rusell was English, and he didn't write either of those. He did  write The Problems of Philosophy  and the Principia Mathematica ."
Trurl: "Right, him. So do you think I should read his books or not?"
Klapaucias: "Definitely."
I think the above exchange makes perfect sense (although it would also make sense if Klapaucias asked whether Bertrand Russell was really the philosopher whom Trurl meant, and not Kant, Nietzche, Hume, or someone else entirely) and the reason that it makes sense is because of the single exception--the one that we can't be wrong about. Of all the descriptions that might come to mind when we think of Russell, the one that we really mean in most cases is 'the man whose name was Bertrand Russell.' Everything else that we might believe about him can easily be amended in the light of new information, but that Bertrand Russell's name was not really Bertrand Russell is impossible to understand except in a context something like Bertrand Russell's name used to be something different before he changed it, or the man known as Bertrand Russell to some people was known as George Smith to others (and in either case one could maintain that whatever else his name was, it was also Bertrand Russell).

Recent Reading

The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
I Think, Therefore I Laugh by John Allen Paulos
The Joy of Philosophy: Thinking Thin versus the Passionate Life by Robert C. Solomon
An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy by Roger Scruton
The View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel
Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufman