Literary Evidence

This chapter examines the use and usefulness of evidence from ancient fiction for the study of slavery. Although these forms of literature tend to portray slavery and enslaved characters in extreme terms, inseparable from the slave owners’ perspective, they provide evidence for the diverse experiences and expectations of slaves as well as for attitudes towards slaves, enslavement, and the conditions of slavery. The chapter surveys literature in which enslaved characters are unusually salient—Homeric epic, Greek and Roman drama, and the ancient novels—and stresses the tension between the degradation of the enslaved body and the usefulness of the autonomous and rational person.

Scientific Certitude

I’ve been both fascinated and distressed by the arguments raging over how best to respond to the covid-19 pandemic. In particular, I’ve been struck by the way people claim scientific authority for their confident assurances of what needs to be done. And I’m especially intrigued by the scorn they often lavish on those who hold differing views on what science is telling us. The heat generated by the resulting debates is strikingly similar to the heat generated by debates over the science connected with human-caused climate change. And in both cases, the disputants too often presuppose indefensibly naïve views about scientific authority and certitude, apparently unaware that even the allegedly most obvious logical truths lack the certainty attributed to scientific authority in these debates. As a rule, I dislike re-circulating my Editorials, but I think it’s time to resurrect one (modestly tweaked) from a few years ago, addressing precisely this issue (Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 379–386, 2017). …………………………………… “Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.” --Oscar Wilde I’ve often noticed how debates within the SSE community sometimes parallel debates in the political arena, perhaps especially with respect to the passion they elicit and the intolerance and condescension sometimes lavished on members of the “opposition.” Occasionally, of course, the debates in the SSE are nearly indistinguishable from those in the political arena—say, over the evidence for human-caused climate change. But what I find most striking is how the passion, intolerance, etc.—perhaps most often displayed by those defending whatever the “received” view happens to be—betrays either a surprising ignorance or else a seemingly convenient lapse of memory, one that probably wouldn’t appear in less emotionally-charged contexts. What impassioned partisans tend to ignore or forget concerns (a) the tentative nature of both scientific pronouncements and knowledge claims generally (including matters ostensibly much more secure than those under debate), as well as (b) the extensive network of assumptions on which every knowledge claim rests. So I’d like to offer what I hope will be a perspective-enhancer, concerning how even our allegedly most secure and fundamental pieces of a priori knowledge are themselves open to reasonable debate. A widespread, but naïve, view of logic is that no rational person could doubt its elementary laws. But that bit of popular “wisdom” is demonstrably false. And if that’s the case, then so much the worse for the degree of certitude we can expect in more controversial arenas. Let me illustrate with a few examples.[1] [1] I’m indebted to Aune, 1970 for much of what follows.

The Tragedy of the Risk Averse

Those who are risk averse with respect to money, and thus turn down some gambles with positive monetary expectations, are nevertheless often willing to accept bundles involving multiple such gambles. Therefore, it might seem that such people should become more willing to accept a risky but favourable gamble if they put it in context with the collection of gambles that they predict they will be faced with in the future. However, it turns out that when a risk averse person adopts the long-term perspective, she faces a decision-problem that can be analysed as a noncooperative game between different “time-slices” of herself, where it is in the interest of each time-slice (given its prediction about other slices) to turn down the gamble with which it is faced. Hence, even if a risk averse but rational person manages to take the long-term perspective, she will, in the absence of what Hardin called “mutual coercion”, end up in a situation analogous to the “tragedy of the commons”.

The philosopher’s paradox: How to make a coherent decision in the Newcomb Problem

We offer a novel argument for one-boxing in Newcomb’s Problem. The intentional states of a rational person are psychologically coherent across time, and rational decisions are made against this backdrop. We compare this coherence constraint with a golf swing, which to be effective must include a follow-through after the ball is in flight. Decisions, like golf swings, are extended processes, and their coherence with other psychological states of a player in the Newcomb scenario links her choice with the way she is predicted in a common cause structure. As a result, the standard argument for two-boxing is mistaken.

The Epistemology of Disagreement: Why Not Bayesianism?

Disagreement is a ubiquitous feature of human life, and philosophers have dutifully attended to it. One important question related to disagreement is epistemological: How does a rational person change her beliefs (if at all) in light of disagreement from others? The typical methodology for answering this question is to endorse a steadfast or conciliatory disagreement norm (and not both) on a priori grounds and selected intuitive cases. In this paper, I argue that this methodology is misguided. Instead, a thoroughgoingly Bayesian strategy is what's needed. Such a strategy provides conciliatory norms in appropriate cases and steadfast norms in appropriate cases. I argue, further, that the few extant efforts to address disagreement in the Bayesian spirit are laudable but uncompelling. A modelling, rather than a functional, approach gets us the right norms and is highly general, allowing the epistemologist to deal with (1) multiple epistemic interlocutors, (2) epistemic superiors and inferiors (i.e. not just epistemic peers), and (3) dependence between interlocutors.

Three Transparency Principles Examined

This paper derives, from Richard Moran’s work, three different accounts of doxastic Transparency—roughly, the view that when a rational person wants to know whether she believes that p, she directs her attention to the truth-value of p, not to the mental attitude she has vis-à-vis p. We investigate which of these is the most plausible of the three by discussing a number of (classes of) examples. We conclude that the most plausible account of Transparency is in tension with the motivation behind Transparency accounts: it is disconnected from the deliberative stance.

The Ontological Argument

William Rowe claims that Anselm’s ontological argument, as restated by Alvin Plantinga, begs the question because, in order to know the truth of the key premise—“It is possible that God exists in reality”—we must know, independently of the argument, that God exists in reality. This chapter argues that Rowe focuses on Plantinga’s restatement of Anselm’s argument at the expense of Plantinga’s own version of the argument, and that Plantinga anticipates and addresses Rowe’s objection. Although Plantinga concedes that a rational person could reject his argument’s central premise, it might be possible to build on Plantinga’s argument by adding a further step derived from Iris Murdoch, which shows that the existence of God is not only possible but necessary, and therefore actual. This reconstruction is not an ontological argument in its purest form, but a fusion of elements from ontological, moral, and cosmological arguments for the existence of God.

Probability theory and epistemology

The primary uses of probability in epistemology are to measure degrees of belief and to formulate conditions for rational belief and rational change of belief. The degree of belief a person has in a proposition A is a measure of their willingness to act on A to obtain satisfaction of their preferences. According to probabilistic epistemology, sometimes called ‘Bayesian epistemology’, an ideally rational person’s degrees of belief satisfy the axioms of probability. For example, their degrees of belief in A and -A must sum to 1. The most important condition on changing degrees of belief given new evidence is called ‘conditionalization’. According to this, upon acquiring evidence E a rational person will change their degree of belief assigned to A to the conditional probability of A given E. Roughly, this rule says that the change should be minimal while accommodating the new evidence. There are arguments, ‘Dutch book arguments’, that are claimed to demonstrate that failure to satisfy these conditions makes a person who acts on their degrees of belief liable to perform actions that necessarily frustrate their preferences. Radical Bayesian epistemologists claim that rationality is completely characterized by these conditions. A more moderate view is that Bayesian conditions should be supplemented by other conditions specifying rational degrees of belief. Support for Bayesian epistemology comes from the fact that various aspects of scientific method can be grounded in satisfaction of Bayesian conditions. Further, it can be shown that there is a close connection between having true belief as an instrumental goal and satisfaction of the Bayesian conditions. Some critics of Bayesian epistemology reject the probabilistic conditions on rationality as unrealistic. They say that people do not have precise degrees of belief and even if they did it would not be possible in general to satisfy the conditions. Some go further and reject the conditions themselves. Others claim that the conditions are much too weak to capture rationality and that in fact almost any reasoning can be characterized so as to satisfy them. The extent to which Bayesian epistemology contributes to traditional epistemological concerns of characterizing knowledge and methods for obtaining knowledge is controversial.

Guilty Minds

This chapter examines the puzzling question of why an otherwise rational person would voluntarily confess to a crime, knowing full well that the state will punish in return. Even more puzzling is the phenomenon of false confessions, where an individual inexplicably confesses to a crime she did not commit, in some cases believing in her own guilt. Psychoanalysis gives us important insights into these irrational phenomena. The focus in this chapter is on the ways in which certain deceptive and degrading police interrogation tactics may override a suspect’s conscious rational decision-making powers by enlisting unconscious needs, aggressions, and guilt. Three interrogation tactics are of greatest concern: false sympathy, degradation, and trickery. As this chapter shows, false sympathy and degradation exploit deep-seated, unconscious desires for absolution and punishment that undermine the voluntariness of a suspect’s self-incriminating statements. Similarly, police trickery can take unfair advantage of a suspect’s need to rationalize unconscious guilt for a crime he did not commit. By drawing attention to the risks associated with these methods, psychoanalysis ensures that the most egregious practices can be eliminated from our criminal justice system. Psychoanalytic insights into unconscious processes advances the law’s own best ideals of fundamental fairness in the criminal law.