Objectivist conditions for defeat and evolutionary debunking arguments

I make a case for distinguishing clearly between subjective and objective accounts of undercutting defeat and for rejecting a hybrid view that takes both subjective and objective elements to be relevant for whether or not a belief is defeated. Moderate subjectivists claim that taking a belief to be defeated is sufficient for the belief to be defeated; subjectivist idealists add that if an idealised agent takes a belief to be defeated then the belief is defeated. Subjectivist idealism evades some of the objections levelled against moderate subjectivism but can be shown to yield inconsistent results in some cases. Both subjectivisms should be rejected. We should be objectivists regarding undercutting defeat. This requirement, however, is likely to be problematic for a popular interpretation of evolutionary debunking arguments in metaethics as it can be shown that existing objectivist accounts of defeat do not support such arguments. I end by discussing the constraints of developing such an account.     

Modest meta‐philosophical skepticism

Intractable disagreement among philosophers is ubiquitous. An implication of such disagreement is that many philosophers hold false philosophical beliefs (i.e. at most only one party to a dispute can be right). Suppose that we distribute philosophers along a spectrum arranged from philosophers with mostly true philosophical beliefs on one end (high‐reliability), to those with mostly false philosophical beliefs on the other (low‐reliability), and everyone else somewhere in‐between (call this is the reliability spectrum). It is hard to see how philosophers could accurately locate themselves on the reliability spectrum; they are prima facie as well positioned as their peers with respect to philosophical matters (call this the placement problem). In this paper, I argue that the reliability spectrum and placement problem lend support to modest meta‐philosophical skepticism: we have a pro tanto (but not an all‐things‐considered) reason to withhold ascent to philosophical claims.     

Beyond positive or negative: variability in daily parent-adolescent interaction quality is associated with adolescent emotion dysregulation

Previous work on the contribution of family environments to adolescent emotion dysregulation has tended to focus on broad parenting characteristics (such as warmth); however, it is possible that day-to-day variability in parenting may also relate to emotion dysregulation. The current study sought to test whether inconsistency in the quality of daily parent-youth interactions related to multiple indices of emotion dysregulation in adolescents. Two-hundred-twenty-two adolescents (ages 13–16; 53% female) participated with one parent. Adolescents completed 14-days of diary reporting on the quality of interactions with their parent (negative/neutral/positive) and their emotion dysregulation experiences for each day. Analyses reveal that, beyond the effects of average interaction quality, adolescents with greater variability in the quality of their interactions with their parent reported greater average emotion dysregulation across the days of diary recording and demonstrated greater variability in their ratings of daily emotion dysregulation. Findings were not accounted for by parental warmth or hostility, parent-reported trait-level emotion regulation, or day-level associations between study variables. In these ways, greater variability – and not merely greater negativity – during interactions between parents and adolescents was related to adolescent emotion dysregulation, suggesting that consistency in parent–adolescent relationships may be an important dimension of psychosocial risk to consider within families.     

Deceiving suspects about their alibi is equally harmful to the innocent and guilty

A common belief in police officers is that guilty suspects' statements are less consistent than innocent suspects'. This could leave guilty suspects more vulnerable to missing inconsistencies externally induced into their alibis. Source monitoring and cognitive load approaches suggest that untruthfulness rather than guilt should predict proneness to such deception. Manipulating both guilt and truthfulness, we tested these opposing hypotheses. One hundred twenty‐six participants were accused of stealing gift vouchers after wandering about a building. When interviewed several days later, participants rarely detected alterations in their alibi (23–29%). Unexpectedly, for one of three detection measures, untruthful participants detected more manipulations than did truthful participants. Guilt did not moderate detection rates. Manipulations were equally harmful for guilty and innocent suspects, and blindness to the alibi manipulations was not useful for discriminating innocent from guilty suspects. Because blindness effects are easy to elicit in the legal context, techniques that externally induce inconsistencies should be avoided.     

Non-Adjunctive Inference and Classical Modalities

The article focuses on representing different forms of non-adjunctive inference as sub-Kripkean systems of classical modal logic, where the inference from □A and □B to □A∧B fails. In particular we prove a completeness result showing that the modal system that Schotch and Jennings derive from a form of non-adjunctive inference in (Schotch and Jennings, 1980) is a classical system strictly stronger than EMN and weaker than K (following the notation for classical modalities presented in Chellas, 1980). The unified semantical characterization in terms of neighborhoods permits comparisons between different forms of non-adjunctive inference. For example, we show that the non-adjunctive logic proposed in (Schotch and Jennings, 1980) is not adequate in general for representing the logic of high probability operators. An alternative interpretation of the forcing relation of Schotch and Jennings is derived from the proposed unified semantics and utilized in order to propose a more fine-grained measure of epistemic coherence than the one presented in (Schotch and Jennings, 1980). Finally we propose a syntactic translation of the purely implicative part of Jaśkowski's system D₂ into a classical system preserving all the theorems (and non-theorems) explicilty mentioned in (Jaśkowski, 1969). The translation method can be used in order to develop epistemic semantics for a larger class of non-adjunctive (discursive) logics than the ones historically investigated by Jaśkowski.     

A trilemma for naturalized metaphysics

Radical naturalized metaphysics wants to argue (1) that metaphysics without sufficient epistemic warrant should not be pursued, (2) that the traditional methods of metaphysics cannot provide epistemic warrant, (3) that metaphysics using these methods must therefore be discontinued, and (4) that naturalized metaphysics should be pursued instead since (5) such science-based metaphysics succeeds in establishing justified conclusions about ultimate reality. This paper argues that to defend (5), naturalized metaphysics must rely on methods similar to those criticized in (2). If naturalized metaphysics instead opts for the weaker claim that science-based metaphysics is only superior to other metaphysics, then this is insufficient to establish (4). In this case, (4) might therefore be defeated by (1). An alternative is to replace (1) with the view that we should just approach metaphysical questions with the best means available. While this would recommend a science-based approach whenever possible, it would also allow for the continuation of science-independent metaphysics in domains that science has no bearing on and thus reject (3). The paper concludes that none of these alternatives is entirely satisfactory for naturalized metaphysics.     

EXPERIENCE AND EXPLANATION: THE JUSTIFICATION OF COGNITIVE CLAIMS IN THEOLOGY

Abstract. The justification of cognitive claims in theology can be dealt with adequately only if the epistemological issues of metaphorical reference, experiential adequacy, and explanatory progress are seen as crucial problems for the more encompassing problem of rationality in theology. In order to guarantee any claim to reality depiction the theologian will have to argue for a plausible theory of reference on the basis of interpreted religious experience. In this discussion important analogies between the rationality of theological theorizing and the rationality of science are revealed.     

The internal environment of knowledge claims: One aspect of the knowledge-society connection

In the sociology of knowledge, the relationship between society and knowledge —or rather what separates them — remains an unsolved problem. A critical analysis of various solutions that we must look for to this problem suggests the plausibility of a passage between social groups, styles of argumentation and objects of knowledge. An empirical model of decision displacements is proposed on the basis of a corpus of texts and of observations derived from concrete analysis of a laboratory situation.     

Defeasibility and Gettierization: A Reminder

For some of us, the defeasibility theory of knowledge remains the most plausible approach to the Gettier Problem. Epistemological fashion and faded memories notwithstanding, persuasive objections to the theory are very hard to find. The most impressive of those objections to the theory that have hitherto gone unanswered are examined and rejected here. These are objections put forward by Richard Feldman, Richard Foley, and John Turri. While these are all interesting, the objection recently put forward by Turri is, we think, by far, the most serious threat to the theory that we have seen in a long time. A successful reply to it requires a surprising amount of care, as it turns out. If tenable, Turri's objection deals a devastating blow to the theory developed by Roderick Chisholm, Keith Lehrer, Peter Klein, Marshall Swain, Risto Hilpinen, John Pollock, and Paul Moser, among others. Under scrutiny, however, the threat proves illusory. It results from inattention to a crucial, but relatively subtle, aspect of the theory. Interestingly, there is only one source in the defeasibilist literature for a precise account of this crucial feature of the theory: one of the most neglected passages in Peter Klein's work on the issue. That crucial feature is put under the spotlight here. Our response to three major objections to the defeasibility theory requires a brief introduction to the theory as an anti-Gettier weapon, an introduction aimed at countering the numbing simplicity that characterizes most introductions to the topic. Following this brief introduction, those three objections are tackled. We conclude, on that basis, that anybody who fails to notice how resilient the defeasibility theory has proven to be for the last fifty years has a seriously deficient understanding of the current state of play in the debate over the Gettier Problem.