Fake Barn Country

Fake Barn Country has not been at all active lately. It's gone through, and recovered from, lulls in the past, and I hope that it will revitalize once again in the near future. But I'm sad to announce that I will not be a contributor when that occurs. I'm leaving Brown this fall -- I've transferred to Rutgers to finish my Ph.D. My advisor, Ernie Sosa, is moving there full-time, and I'm going with him.

So, farewell, FBC, and thanks for everything. This really has been one of my most valuable resources for getting ideas off the ground. If the Brown bloggers do decide to pick things up again, they can count on me as a regular reader and commentor.

If you want to follow me around elsewhere online, try my personal blog, where I hope to be doing more philosophical discussion. See also my philosophy website.

Posted by Jonathan Ichikawa at 03:38 PM | Permalink | | Comments (748) | TrackBacks (0)

Some epistemologists deny closure for knowledge. Dretske is the representative example. (Mark Kaplan was at Brown last week with an anti-closure view, too.) Dretske thinks that I may know that p, and know that p entails q, and believe q on that basis, and yet my belief that q may fail to be knowledge. It's nice to be able to take this line in certain skeptical arguments. After all, something is going to have to go in Dretske's case here:

1. I know it's a zebra.
2. I know that its being a zebra entails its not being a painted mule.
3. Closure
4. I don't know it's not a painted mule.

But I don't think this can work. Here's a simple argument; I'd be surprised if it's original, but I don't know the literature in this area as thoroughly as I might. Let me stipulate a new term zebra*, which means: zebra that is not a mule. Zebra* builds in more relevant alternatives than zebra; that creature's being a mule is definitely a relevant alternative if I want to know whether it's a zebra*. This means that on the relevant alternatives view, in some contexts, such as the ordinary going-to-the-zoo context, if I see an animal, it might be pretty easy to know that it's a zebra, but much more difficult to know it's a zebra*. All the while, of course, I know that necessarily, all and only zebras are zebra*s. This, I take it, is unacceptable. If it is easy to know that necessarily, all and only As are Bs, then it cannot be easy to know that something is an A if it is hard to know that it's a B.

What do you think?

Posted by Jonathan Ichikawa at 04:38 PM | Permalink | | Comments (214) | TrackBacks (0)
Epistemology

...of linking to funny things instead of doing substantive philosophy, this fafblog post is notably reminiscent of some parts of this FBC post's thread.

I mean to do some substantive philosophy here soon, honest.

Posted by Jonathan Ichikawa at 12:39 PM | Permalink | | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

I've recently discovered, and been greatly enjoying, Dinosaur Comics. I just came across this one, which is about the identity theory of mind.

Posted by Jonathan Ichikawa at 06:53 PM | Permalink | | Comments (786) | TrackBacks (0)

Brian Weatherson is hanging up his Online Papers in Philosophy hat. The site has been moved (back) to Brown, where I'll be maintaining it.

Here it is.

This first update's a big one -- it's a couple of weeks' worth. There are some cool things there, including a paper by Eric Funkhouser and Shannon Spaulding on one of my favorite topics, imagination and motivation. Timothy Williamson has several new papers, including one on the semantics of pejorative terms. Also, the most influential paper of my philosophical career, Ernie Sosa's "Dreaming and Philosophy" is newly online.

Posted by Jonathan Ichikawa at 01:46 PM | Permalink | | Comments (395) | TrackBacks (0)

Just wondering what people think about this schematic principle.

(SP) Necessarily, If X is a necessary condition for Y, then for any set of conditions S sufficient for Y, S includes X.

Posted by John Turri at 02:55 PM | Permalink | | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)
Philosophy

If indicative conditionals are truth-functional, then they're the things we learned about in logic class. If A, B comes out true just in case B is true or A is false (or both). This view seems crazy, because there are lots of apparent counterexamples, like if President Bush is a woman, then President Bush is Martha Stewart. This conditional is intuitively a very bad conditional, but on a truth-functional account, it comes out true, since President Bush is not a woman.

But some philosophers, like Frank Jackson and David Lewis, think that the truth-functional account is correct for the truth conditions of indicative conditionals; Jackson thinks the Bush conditional is true. Now obviously, there's something wrong with it. Jackson says the problem is that it's unassertable. One of the (non-truth-constituting) rules for indicative conditionals is that we should assert them only when they are robust with respect to the antecedent. That is, we should assert them only when we'd be prepared to continue to accept them upon learning the antecedent. The Bush conditional fails to be robust with respect to the antecedent; if we learned that President Bush is after all a woman, we'd reject the conditional.

This is supposed to explain why we judge conditionals like the Bush conditional to be bad, even though they're true. The obvious question is: why not build robustness into the truth conditions, instead of mere assertability conditions? Jackson's answer is confusing.

Continue reading "Jackson on truth-functional indicative conditionals" »

Posted by Jonathan Ichikawa at 07:19 PM | Permalink | | Comments (14) | TrackBacks (0)
Indicatives

In 'Weighting for a Plausible Humean Theory of Reasons' (forthcoming in *Nous*; on the web in manuscript form at http://www.wam.umd.edu/%7Emschroed/Schroeder%20Weighting.pdf), Mark Schroeder presents us with Aunt Margaret, who has an all-consuming desire to recreate a particular scene from the November 2001 *Martha Stewart Living* catalogue -- *on Mars*. As Schroeder spells it out, on the Humean Theory of Reasons (HTR), reasons are those things that promote that which one desires. So HTR says that Aunt Margaret has reason to build a Mars-worthy spacecraft. (Schroeder agrees with this conclusion; his task is to explain why our intuitions seem to say otherwise and thus defend HTR.)

Continue reading "Oughts, Reasons, and Abilities" »

Posted by Michael Young at 09:46 PM | Permalink | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
Practical Reasoning

Ok, one last post on Edgington on counterfactuals. I'm looking at section 10.3, pp. 314-25. Edgington argues for a unified treatment of indicatives and counterfactuals. The degree of belief in an indicative of the form if A, B is the believed conditional probability of B given A. Probabilities change over time, so, says Edgington, "we have plenty of use for the judgement that it was probable that such-and-such -- it was to be expected -- but it no longer is." This, says Edgington, is what counterfactuals are about. Here's her example:

My present [belief that someone else killed him, given that Oswald didn't] and [belief that no one else killed him, given that Oswald ddn't] are in the vicinity of 1 and 0 respectively. Nevertheless, I think that before the killing, it was very improbable that [someone else did it] on the assumption that [Oswald didn't]; by my present epistemic lights, p([someone else does it] given [Oswald doesn't]) was low and p([no one else does it] given [Oswald doesn't]) was high, before the killing; in accepting [If Oswald hadn't done it, no one else would have], I endorse a hypothetical b'(N given O), which could be expressed, before the killing, by "If Oswald doesn't do it, no one else will".

Suicidal Barbie:

Continue reading "A challenge to counterfactuals as past conditional probabilities" »

Posted by Jonathan Ichikawa at 07:33 PM | Permalink | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
Counterfactuals

Lewis and Stalnaker both think that counterfactuals with conceptually impossible antecedents are trivially true. It seems this is a fairly common view; Timothy Williamson casually relied on it in one of his Blackwell-Brown lectures last fall. Why think it's true? Are there arguments?

Here's a reason to think it's false. Counterexample: a false counterfactual with a conceptually false antecedent. If I were a female bachelor, I would be married.

This strikes me as obviously false. Contrast it with something like this: If I were a female bachelor, I would be female.

That one strikes me as obviously true. Am I right?

Posted by Jonathan Ichikawa at 03:39 AM | Permalink | | Comments (35) | TrackBacks (1)
Counterfactuals