The virtues of illusion

Conclusion The moral is plain enough. For purposes of distinguishing an object from surroundings of similar lightness, one needs to have a receptive system that is sensitive to small wavelength differences. For signalreception and identification purposes, one needs to have a receptive system engendering a few basic categories that can ignore minor variations and lump stimuli together into a small number of salient, memorable equivalence classes. With elegant economy, our visual systems does both by drawing on the same neural resources. The system of qualitative classification that this involves need not match any analogous set of structures outside the organism in order to provide real advantages to the animal that uses it. The hues that we human beings see express our system of coding wavelength information rather than some set of properties of reflecting surfaces. But the form of the coding is not just a bit of non-functional adornment freeloading on the serious business of visual information processing. We must see it, rather, as supplying the means by which a rich amount of sensory information can be rapidly and efficiently represented by cognitive machinery of limited capacity [Miller, 1957]. With color, the medium is the message.This is a revised version of Hardin [1990], with permission of SPIE.     

The virtues of epistemic conservatism

Although several important methodologies implicitly assume the truth of epistemic conservatism, the view that holding a belief confers some measure of justification on the belief, recent criticisms have led some to conclude that epistemic conservatism is an implausible view. That conclusion is mistaken. In this article, I propose a new formulation of epistemic conservatism that is not susceptible to the criticisms leveled at earlier formulations of epistemic conservatism. In addition to withstanding these criticisms, this formulation of epistemic conservatism has several benefits. First, this formulation has the benefits of earlier formulations of epistemic conservatism, that is to say it makes sense of our intuitions about justification in regard to both memory beliefs and beliefs for which we have forgotten our evidence. Second, it provides a good way of responding to the skeptic’s challenge concerning the possibility of possessing knowledge of the external world posed by the Alternative Hypotheses argument. Third, it provides responses to both forms of a new skeptical problem plaguing basic knowledge structure theories, the Problem of Easy Knowledge formulated by Stewart Cohen. I argue that given the many benefits of this formulation of epistemic conservatism and the fact that it is not vulnerable to the criticisms that undermine earlier formulations of epistemic conservatism, this formulation of epistemic conservatism is a plausible view to maintain.     

The epistemic virtues of consistency

The lottery paradox has been discussed widely. The standard solution to the lottery paradox is that a ticket holder is justified in believing each ticket will lose but the ticket holder is also justified in believing not all of the tickets will lose. If the standard solution is true, then we get the paradoxical result that it is possible for a person to have a justified set of beliefs that she knows is inconsistent. In this paper, I argue that the best solution to the paradox is that a ticket holder is not justified in believing any of the tickets are losers. My solution avoids the paradoxical result of the standard solution. The solution I defend has been hastily rejected by other philosophers because it appears to lead to skepticism. I defend my solution from the threat of skepticism and give two arguments in favor of my conclusion that the ticket holder in the original lottery case is not justified in believing that his ticket will lose.     

Philosophical virtues

It has been suggested that philosophers should adopt a methodology largely inspired by mathematics and that the “mathematical” virtues of rigor, clarity, and precision are also fundamental philosophical virtues. In reply, this paper argues that some excellent philosophy lacks these virtues and that too much emphasis on the mathematical virtues excludes potentially valuable forms of philosophical discourse and makes the profession less diverse than it should be. Unduly restrictive conceptions of philosophical argumentation should be avoided. On a contributory conception, philosophy should try to make a positive contribution to human emancipation where possible. The paper argues that it is possible and desirable for epistemology to contribute in this way and that the mathematical virtues are less significant in this context than the emancipatory virtues of what one might call “liberation philosophy.” These include irony, reflectiveness, imagination, contrarianism, and worldliness.     

The seven virtues of simple type theory

Simple type theory, also known as higher-order logic, is a natural extension of first-order logic which is simple, elegant, highly expressive, and practical. This paper surveys the virtues of simple type theory and attempts to show that simple type theory is an attractive alternative to first-order logic for practical-minded scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. It recommends that simple type theory be incorporated into introductory logic courses offered by mathematics departments and into the undergraduate curricula for computer science and software engineering students.