>>>Originally, I was planning to get a cool new blog template in shape before worrying about any of that mundane posting stuff. However, it took way longer than expected just to get someone to fix the bugs with my installation of WordPress. Also, I’ve been putting off doing this post for way too long…<<<

Earlier this month--3 May, to be exact--I went to my first real philosophy conference. Not presenting, just going. Sure, I had gone to an undergrad conference hosted by SUNY-Oneonta, but with apologies to all the cool people I met there (sorry Corrin, sorry Vita, sorry Brian) it wasn't a real conference, I wasn't seeing professional philosophers in action.

Now that I've spent a paragraph letting my self-centeredness get some fresh air, I will try to say something actually of use to other people, or at least the small minority of other people who care about philosophy.

The conference in question was the Wisconsin Epistemology Conference, organized by Juan Comesaña. It took place in Madison on the 3rd and the 4th, though I only saw the 3rd. The topics of the day were epistemology of disagreement, and the internalism-externalism debate. Those interested in putting in the extra work to understand this post can find the papers here.

Disagreement

First, epistemology of disagreement. That’s a “hot new field” in contemporary academic philosophy, dealing with questions of whether and under what circumstances rational disagreement is possible. A specific claim often put up for discussion is (roughly) “if two people have access to exactly the same evidence, they must come to the same conclusion if they are rational.” Presenting on the topic was Earl Conee, who attacked a form of that claim. Though I had read his paper in advance, I hadn’t been able to reconstruct his main argument until I got a chance to question him on it. As I came to understand it, the argument was this:

Consider a situation where two people who’ve shared all their evidence, but still disagree on some issue. Now suppose they have some substantial reasons to think they are both rational in their views on the topic. We aren’t assuming they are ultimately right on this, since that would beg the question against one view on disagreement. We’re just assuming that they have enough reason to be justified in seeing their disagreement this way. Now, it seems that if you are rational to believe that you are rational to believe something, this at least gives you a reason to believe that something. Therefore, both parties will have a reason to think they are right about the primary issue on which they disagree. But in absence of some overriding reason to the contrary, this will mean they are both in fact rational to take their differing positions.

Once I understood the argument, I pointed out that someone who thinks informed rational disagreement is impossible will think that the people in this imagined scenario have missed something, that there will be factors preventing the jump from “having some sort of reason” to “being rational” (such factors would most naturally be having much stronger contrary reasons). In other words, there will be a reason they are wrong to both think themselves rational, it’s just that they’re missing it. Conee’s response was to say he’d like to know what exactly those things are supposed to be, that the imagined people have missed.

Whether Conee’s argument is a good one depends on where the burden of proof is supposed to lie. He seemed to imply that the burden of proof will be on the critic who insists something will have been missed in the imagined scenario. A very obvious counter-reply is that it’s Conee’s argument, it’s up to him to show that it works. There’s something deeper going on here though, I think. Conee was presenting a thought experiment, with the details simplified, as simplifying details always makes cases easier to discuss. There’s a risk, though, of letting simplifications become merely a “for the sake of argument” thing, they can become established in our thinking to the point where we believe it is how things must turn out, unless given information to the contrary. Given all my worries about how philosophy is done, I think I’ll immediately jump to the conclusion that this problem is likely widespread in philosophy.

Internalism-Externalism

The internalism-externalism debate had two big presenters Richard Feldman, an internalist, and Alvin Goldman, an externalist. This section had a number of points of interest, ranging over not just who was right, but also what the point was and even what the debate was supposed to be about. I’ll do my best to explain what was going on with each of these issues and then comment on them.

Feldman’s presentation was actually just about trying to figure out what the internalism-externalism debate was supposed to be about. Notable comment that only came later: he mentioned a textbook he had written, which discussed ideas normally classed as “internalist” or “externalist,” but which had avoided using those words. For what it’s worth, ideas normally classed as internalist were called “evidentialist,” basically views that emphasized evidence and justification. Views that would be called “externalist” were called “nonevidentialist,” and were specifically listed as “the causal theory” (a good belief is caused in an appropriate way by the fact), “truth tracking” (we want mechanisms for belief that track the truth across other ways the world might have been), “reliablist” (good beliefs are produced by reliable mechanisms), and the “proper function” view (a good belief is produced by properly functioning cognitive capacities).

In his presentation, Feldman ended up proposing the following criteria for the internalism-externalism distinction:

An epistemological theory is internalist if and only if it if it implies that
(1) epistemic justification strongly supervenes on mental states ["supervenes" means you can't have a difference in one without a difference in the other]
(2) epistemic justification is necessary for knowledge

Comesaña had the official job of responding to Feldman, and suggested a different way of defining the debate. Some of the counter-examples to Feldman’s criteria puzzled both Feldman, myself, and possibly others, but one was clear enough: what do you say about a theory that says something’s justified if God necessarily (as in he could not do otherwise in a very strong sense) decrees that it’s justified. It seems Gods decrees are external, yet it’s stipulated that on the imagined theory of justification, they could not have been otherwise, so supervenience is fulfilled: there’s no risk of a difference in the one thing without difference in the other, because there’s no risk of difference in the one thing (superveniene is a one-way relationship). In a sense, I think, there was supposed to be an analogy between the concept of God’s necessary decrees and any necessarily true but impersonal principles of justification.

I don’t have a copy of Comesaña’s remarks to look at, but if IIRC his proposal was that, straight-up, all factors contributing to justification would have to be internal for internalism to be true. Then Goldman, in his presentation, suggested other definitions of internalism, in terms of accessibility and being mental, and further suggested that if internalists want a fallback position from saying that everything contributing to justification or whatever is internal, they should go for “most.”

Most of the straightforward arguing about internalism and externalism was suppred by Goldman’s paper. He argued that principles that make someone justified given a certain state of affairs and the grounding for those principles must be external to us, so internalism is false. Though Goldman was trying to improve on what had gone before, the approach was not entirely new. Comesaña himself had said similar things in a provocatively titled paper “We Are (almost) All Externalists Now.” The contents of that paper reared their head in Comesaña’s response to Feldman, who’s alternate proposal for how to set up the debate seemed motivated by a desire to make that argument work. The issue was whether necessary truths, external to people, should count against internalism. Comesaña, keeping with the theme of his previous paper, also suggested that Feldman himself was an externalist, despite his claims to the contrary.

There were also discussions of what the whole point was. Feldman opened his talk by saying that he hadn’t set out to advocate internalism per se, that he wasn’t claiming we have good reason to think internalism true and therefore should look for a way to make the details work. Rather, he said, he thought a version of evidentialism that required internalism was true. Comesaña alluding to something Feldman had said elsewhere, said we should give the internalism-externalism debate a rest, and said he agreed, but that “we won.” Responding to Feldman on evidentialism, Goldman made a point that though an externalist, he hadn’t wanted to exclude evidence from theorizing about knowledge. As a bit of background, I know Comesaña has a paper coming out trying to combine evidentialism and reliablism.

Okay, now, what to make of all this? First, when I got the papers for the conference, Feldman’s paper was initially my favorite. It was clearly written, and tried to clear up a possibly confused debate. Given how confused some debates in philosophy are, this seems like a very good thing. Watching things play out at the conference, though, while I think it clarified things for me, didn’t seem to make much progress in gaining general clarity. Comesaña and Goldman kept pressing arguments that turned on a semantic point, trying to define the debate in a way that made Feldman an externalist and was rejected by Feldman. What’s the point of this? My impression was that while Feldman indeed wasn’t an internalist by Comesaña’s definition, he did have a version of internalism that he did advocate and which some people in the room probably rejected, why resist debating that? It smacks of letting concern with winning debates eclipse concerns about whether anyone wants to debate the thing or whether there’s any point to the debate.

Importantly, the way Comesaña wanted to set up the debate, it wasn’t clear it had anything to do with the initial sources of the debate, which had to do with evidence and reliable belief formation and such. Maybe he thought accepting externalism, in his sense, could pave the way for accepting reliablism, but if so he didn’t argue for this. It’s important not to disparge everything he and Goldman have said on externalism, clearly the idea of combining evidentialism and reliablism in a theory of knowledge is an interesting one (which is why I mean to spend some time scrutinizing what Comesaña and Goldman have written on the subject). It’s just that it would make a lot more sense ask, “given evidentialism, we also have motivations for reliablism or some such?” rather than having reliablists trying to prove their opponents are secretly externalists.

Looking at this debate from the outside, it would be tempting to think it was an example of philosophers being unable to notice when they’ve gotten in a completely pointless debate. Having attended the conference and seeing people raise the question of what the point was, I’m more inclined to think the problem was that people saw the pointlessness of the issue, but couldn’t stop discussing it. The temptation may have been thinking that with just one more paper, the issue could be laid to rest, but with everyone doing that we spin our wheels forever.