Moral luck and the peculiarity of blame – Simon Blackburn

Jonardon Ganeri – interview

Jonardon Ganeri says in an interview  that Dignaga, Sriharsha and Gangesha should be as well known as Plato, Aristotle and Descartes. HERE is the interview.

Getting It Right – Ernest Sosa

Below is an  article by Ernest Sosa on ‘knowledge’ appeared in The New York Times. (To read the original article please CLICK HERE).

What is it to truly know something? In our daily lives, we might not give this much thought — most of us rely on what we consider to be fair judgment and common sense in establishing knowledge. But the task of clearly defining true knowledge is trickier than it may first seem, and it is a problem philosophers have been wrestling with since Socrates.

One approach suggests that knowledge is a form of action, comparable to an archer’s success when he consciously aims to hit a target.

In the complacent 1950s, it was received wisdom that we know a given proposition to be true if, and only if, it is true, we believe it to be true, and we are justified in so believing. This consensus was exploded in a brief 1963 note by Edmund Gettier in the journal Analysis.

Here is an example of the sort used by Gettier to refute that theory. Suppose you have every reason to believe that you own a Bentley, since you have had it in your possession for many years, and you parked it that morning at its usual spot. However, it has just been destroyed by a bomb, so that you own no Bentley, despite your well justified belief that you do. As you sit in a cafe having your morning latte, you muse that someone in that cafe owns a Bentley (since after all you do). And it turns out you are right, but only because the other person in the cafe, the barista, owns a Bentley, which you have no reason to suspect. So you here have a well justified true belief that is not knowledge.

After many failed attempts to fix the justified-true-belief account with minor modifications, philosophers tried more radical departures. One promising approach suggests that knowledge is a form of action, comparable to an archer’s success when he consciously aims to hit a target.

An archer’s shot can be assessed in several ways. It can be accurate (successful in hitting the target). It can also be adroit (skillful or competent). An archery shot is adroit only if, as the arrow leaves the bow, it is oriented well and powerfully enough. But a shot that is both accurate and adroit can still fall short. Consider an adroitly shot arrow leaving the bow with an orientation and speed that would normally take it straight to the bull’s-eye. A gust of wind then diverts it, but a second gust puts it back on track. This shot is both accurate and adroit, but it fails to be apt. A shot’s aptness requires that its success be attained not just by luck (such as the luck of that second gust). The success must rather be a result of competence.

This suggests the AAA account of a good archery shot. But we can generalize from this example, to give an account of a fully successful attempt of any sort. Any attempt will have a distinctive aim and will thus be fully successful only if it succeeds not only adroitly but also aptly.

Of course, a fully successful attempt is good overall only if the agent’s goal is good enough. An attempt to murder an innocent person is not good even if it fully succeeds. Aristotle in his “Nicomachean Ethics” developed an AAA account of attempts to lead a flourishing life in accord with fundamental human virtues (for example, justice or courage). Such an approach is called virtue ethics. Since there is much truth that must be grasped if one is to flourish, some philosophers have begun to treat truth’s apt attainment as virtuous in the Aristotelian sense, and have developed a virtue epistemology, which also turns out to solve problems like that posed by Gettier. (Aristotle himself in VI.2 of the “Nicomachean Ethics” upholds attaining truth as the proper work of the intellect.)

Virtue epistemology begins by recognizing assertions or affirmations. These can be either public, out loud, or to oneself in the privacy of one’s own mind. An affirmation could have any of many and various aims, and it could even have several at once. It could aim at misleading someone, as when it is a lie. Or it could be aimed at showing off, or at propping someone up, or at instilling confidence in oneself as one enters athletic competition.

A particularly important sort of affirmation is one aimed at attaining truth, at getting it right. Such an affirmation is called alethic (from the Greek term for truth). All it takes for an affirmation to be alethic is that one of its aims be: getting it right.

Humans perform acts of public affirmation in the endeavor to speak the truth, acts with crucial importance to a linguistic species. We need such affirmations for activities of the greatest import for life in society: for collective deliberation and coordination, and for the sharing of information. We need people to be willing to affirm things publicly. And we need them to be sincere (by and large) in doing so, by aligning public affirmation with private judgment. Finally, we need people whose assertions express what they actually know.

Virtue epistemology gives an AAA account of knowledge: to know affirmatively is to make an affirmation that is accurate (true) and adroit (which requires taking proper account of the evidence). But in addition, the affirmation must be apt; that is, its accuracy must be attributable to competence rather than luck.

Requiring knowledge to be apt (in addition to accurate and adroit) reconfigures epistemology as the ethics of belief. And, as a bonus, it allows contemporary virtue epistemology to solve our Gettier problem. We now have an explanation for why you fail to know that someone in the cafe owns a Bentley, when your own Bentley has been destroyed by a bomb, but the barista happens to own one. Your belief in that case falls short of knowledge for the reason that it fails to be apt. You are right that someone in the cafe owns a Bentley, but the correctness of your belief does not manifest your cognitive or epistemic competence. You are right only because by epistemic luck the barista happens to own one. When in your musings you affirm to yourself that someone in the cafe owns a Bentley, therefore, your affirmation is not an apt alethic affirmation, and hence falls short of knowledge.

                                                                       * * *

About the author

Ernest Sosa teaches philosophy at Rutgers University and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of many books, including “A Virtue Epistemology,” “Knowing Full Well” and, most recently, “Judgment and Agency.”

Judgment and Agency – Review

Here is a review of Ernest Sosa’s latest book Judgment and Agency (published in Notre Dame Philosophical Review)

Judgment and Agency

Ernest Sosa, Judgment and Agency, Oxford University Press, 2015, 269pp., $44.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780198719694.

Reviewed by Ram Neta, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Ernest Sosa’s book is about the nature of judgment, and the norms that govern it by virtue of its having that nature. More specifically, he aims to develop and defend a metaphysical account of judgment as an exercise of agency; he also aims to delineate the norms that govern judgment as species of broader genera of norms that govern exercises of agency. Along the way, he settles disputes about the nature of epistemic virtues, the role of pragmatic encroachment in epistemology, the interaction between judgments and degrees of belief, the relation between animal justification and reflective justification, the social construction of epistemic categories, the regress of justifications, the point of ancient and modern skepticism, and the deviant causal chain puzzles that beset contemporary causal accounts in the philosophy of mind.

This book is both monumentally important and largely successful. In what follows, I give an outline of its doctrine, and then raise a question about the enterprise.

I’ll begin with agency. On Sosa’s view, a being’s agency consists in that being’s capacity to perform actions freely, or as he sometimes says, by “endeavoring” to perform them. Sosa remains neutral on many of the traditional questions concerning the metaphysics of such endeavoring (e.g.., whether it is compatibilist or not, whether it is fundamental or not). But he intends for such endeavoring — whatever precisely it consists in — to be metaphysically distinct from the teleologically guided operation of an organ or a mechanism. The heart does not endeavor to pump blood in the same way in which I endeavor to write this book review. Of course, we may say that writing this review is (part of) my job, just as pumping blood is part of the heart’s job. But writing this review is my job only by virtue of my having chosen to do it, whereas the heart never chose its job. Endeavoring, for Sosa, is a matter of doing something by choice.

Since agency is the capacity to engage in an endeavor by choice, epistemic agency is the capacity to engage in an epistemic endeavor by choice. An epistemic endeavor is one that, if successful, constitutes some form of knowledge. But all knowledge, as Sosa has argued at length over the course of many books, involves representation that has the following features: (a) it is accurate, (b) it is formed adroitly, i.e., by the exercise of a(n) (at least minimally reliable) competence to form such representations accurately, and (c) it is apt, i.e., its accuracy manifests the competence by the exercise of which it was adroitly formed. (Notice that characteristic (c) implies both (a) and (b): aptness always involves both accuracy and adroitness.) Thus, an epistemic endeavor is an endeavor to represent aptly. And epistemic agency is the capacity to engage in such endeavors by choice.

Judgment is the exercise of epistemic agency. Thus, judgment is an endeavor to represent aptly. Just as endeavors generally can enjoy different kinds of success, so too can judgments enjoy different kinds of success. Judgment enjoys one form of success when it represents aptly, for then the agent does precisely what she set out to do (whether or not she does it because she set out to do it). Judgment enjoys another form of success when the agent exercises her epistemic agency adroitly in the endeavor to represent aptly, for then the agent makes a skillful effort to do what she sets out to do, whether or not she succeeds in doing it. And judgment enjoys the highest form of success when the judging agent’s apt representation manifests the competence by the adroit exercise of which it was formed — in short, it enjoys the highest form of success when the judging agent’s apt representation is itself aptly formed, for then the agent does what she set out to do, and her doing it manifests the skill that she exercised when setting out to do it. This highest form of success is what Sosa calls “full aptness”, and it is the kind of knowledge to which human inquiry typically aspires. As Sosa argues in Part IV of his book, such fully apt judgment has played a starring role in the history of Western epistemology: it is the “scientia” to which Descartes aspired, and it is the kind of knowledge against which the Pyrrhonist’s modes were directed.

Such full aptness differs from what Sosa has for many years now called “reflective aptness”. A reflectively apt performance is a performance that satisfies two independent conditions: first, it is apt, and second, the performer aptly represents it as apt. In contrast, a fully apt performance is a performance the aptness of which manifests the competence that the performer adroitly exercises in choosing to perform it. Full aptness, unlike reflective aptness, is not simply the conjunction of first- and second-order aptness; it is rather a condition in which first-order aptness manifests higher-order aptness.

Of course not all representations result from chosen endeavors, and so not all epistemology is the epistemology of judgment. Some representations occur within us as the result of the normal but non-voluntary functioning of our information-processing systems. Indeed, without input from such systems, there would be nothing that could ground the justification of our judgments. Such justification is grounded in representations that are not chosen, and so are not judgments. Such representations are attractions to judge, and they are of greater or lesser force. Because they are representational states (rather than acts) and because they are of greater or lesser force, and because they guide action even in the absence of judgment, we may think of them as degrees of belief. Such states amount to belief (full stop) when they involve a degree of attraction to judge that is, in a particular context, sufficient for judgment in that particular context. Whether a particular degree of attraction to judge is sufficient for judgment in a particular context will depend on various features of that context, including some pragmatic features, and thus there will be some degree of pragmatic encroachment in what degree of attraction counts as a belief. But there will not in addition be pragmatic encroachment concerning which beliefs count as apt or adroit: such terms of epistemic appraisal must serve as common linguistic coin among interlocutors with very different practical interests and must be projectable by a single individual across circumstances that involve very different practical interests.

In sum, belief is degree of belief contextually sufficient for judgment. Such beliefs, or degrees of belief, are assessable along the same variety of dimensions as our freely chosen endeavors (e.g., judgments) are assessable: they can be assessed for accuracy, for adroitness, and finally for aptness. The difference is that the competence that is more or less adroitly exercised in judgment is an agential competence, whereas the competence that is exercised in the formation of degrees of belief is a sub-agential, information-processing competence. While the latter are assessable along dimensions that are epistemic (because relevant to knowledge), these assessments do not carry the same deontic force as assessments of agential competence, just as assessments of the functioning of an organ like the heart or liver do not carry the same deontic force as assessments of agential competence. Deontic assessments concern not what hand you’re dealt by your information-processing systems, but rather what you choose to do with the hand you’re dealt.

But this analogy between one’s information-processing systems and the card dealer raises a question that goes to the heart of Sosa’s project in this book. How, precisely, should we understand the contrast between the freely chosen endeavor of an agent, on the one hand, and the performance of a teleologically guided sub-agential capacity, on the other? The difference is not merely a matter of their degree of complexity since some teleologically guided sub-agential capacities may be extremely complex and contain many other teleologically guided sub-agential capacities within them. Sosa may label this difference in various ways: as a difference in whether the performances are freely chosen by the performer, as a difference in whether the performer is an agent, as a difference in whether the performer is responsible for the performance, as a difference in whether assessments of the performance carry deontic force, and so on. All these labels travel together, but can we say what these labels amount to without moving around in the same small circle of labels? In short, can we explain agency?

Notice that there is nothing reductive about this demand. Perhaps agency cannot be reduced to non-agential terms. But even if this is the case, we might still be able to explain agency in structural terms, by specifying a causal or normative structure in agency that is not present in the operation of non-agential systems or mechanisms. But this is precisely what we do not find in Sosa’s book. Mechanisms, like agents, engage in performances, and these performances are assessable along the5 dimensions of accuracy, adroitness, and aptness. For all that Sosa says, the difference between agents and mechanisms is not a structural difference. But it is, Sosa insists, a difference in their freedom, their responsibility, their agency, their fitness for deontic assessment. And my question for Sosa is: what precisely is added by these latter descriptions? In what way are judges not merely large-scale information-processing systems?

I believe that there is a way to answer this question, but I do not see anywhere in Sosa’s book the resources necessary to implement my own preferred way of explaining agency. And so I conclude with the hope that Sosa’s next book will address this fundamental question.

What Does it Mean to Flourish?- Julia Annas

Julia Annas – a Philosopher who excelled in the area of Greek Philosophy (Particularly Plato and Aristotle)-  talks about the  the notion of ‘Flourishing’.

Testimonial Injustice – Miranda Fricker

Miranda Fricker on testimonial Injustice (epistemic injustice in testimony)

     

Return of Virtue in Later 20th Century – Linda Zagzebski

Call for Papers: 2nd Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Group in India

Submission deadline: August 15, 2015

Conference date(s): December 19, 2015 – December 21, 2015

Conference Venue:

Centre for Science, Technology and Society, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
Mumbai, India

Conference Web page: https://psgi2015.wordpress.com

Details:

Topic Areas

• General Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Social Sciences
• Philosophy of Biology
• Philosophy of Economics

Keynote Speakers:

• Richard Boyd, Cornell University
• Sahotra Sarkar, University of Texas at Austin
• Anjan Chakravartty, University of Notre Dame
• Harold Kincaid, University of Cape Town
• Amita Chatterjee, Jadavpur University
• Federica Russo, University of Amsterdam
• Dhruv Raina, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Purpose of Conference

The philosophy of science, while a relatively new topic of study in the long span of philosophical inquiry, has come to occupy a central place in the discipline. Besides addressing traditional epistemological, metaphysical and ethical questions as applied to the practice of science, contemporary philosophers of science engage fruitfully with foundational questions that arise within particular scientific theories, blurring the artificial boundaries between philosophy and science. As a consequence, the field offers great potential for interdisciplinary interaction between philosophers and scientists, leading to clearer analyses of difficult scientific concepts and the application of new scientific discoveries to traditional philosophical questions.

Despite the importance and dynamism of the field internationally, philosophy of science remains a nascent discipline in India. The community of researchers is small, and students often feel unprepared to tackle a subject that requires knowledge not only of philosophy but also of science. The philosophy of science group was formed with the intention of overcoming these obstacles – to encourage young scholars to conduct high-quality research in the philosophy of science, and to provide a space for the existing philosophy of science community to collaborate and exchange ideas.

Call for Extended Abstracts

We will host a conference with papers submitted by scholars, both young and experienced, interested in the philosophy of science.

• Each day will begin with two or three 1 hour talks from invited speakers, including 15-20 minutes of discussion.
• These will be followed by six or seven 30 minute presentations of contributed papers, including

10 minutes of discussion.

• Submitted abstracts will undergo peer review, in order to ensure a high standard of discourse.
• We expect a broad range of papers in the philosophy of science.

Submissions are invited to the second meeting of the expanded group. Extended abstracts (up to 1000 words) can be submitted on this site:https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=philsci-india2

Deadline for Submission: August 15, 2015.

Notification of Acceptance: September 15, 2015.

Papers should be accessible to an audience of researchers and those keenly interested in doing research in philosophy of science. Papers will be held to the usual high standards of research publications. In particular, they should:

1. explain the significance of the work—its novelty and its practical or theoretical implications; and
2. include comparisons with and references to relevant literature.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• semantic and syntactic models for scientific knowledge,
• realism and anti-realism,
• nature of method(s) in science (including social science),
• reasoning in science,
• causality,
• nature of space and time,
• complex systems,
• philosophy of biology,
• philosophy of economics,
• philosophy of technology
• experiments and simulations in science, and
• science and ethics.

Organizing committee

Jayaraman­– Co-chair (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India)

Bijoy Mukherjee – Co-chair (Visva-Bharati, Shantiniketan, India)

Prasanta Bandyopadhyay (Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, USA)

Prajit Basu (University of Hyderabad, India)

Manjari Chakraborty (Visva-Bharati, Shantiniketan, India)

Amita Chatterjee (Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India)

Sreekuamar Jayadevan (Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur, India)

Stephen Jayard (Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune, India)

Priyedarshi Jetli (Mumbai, India)

Philose Koshy (Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India)

Tarun Menon (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India)

Smita Sirker (Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India)

CFP also available at : http://philevents.org/event/show/17777

Further Inquiries:

psgi.conference@gmail.com

https://psgi2015.wordpress.com

Why is Death Bad for You?

Most would think that death is bad. But why exactly is it bad? Once we attempt to answer this question, it take us to a whole host of puzzles. Here is an interesting talk on this by Shelly Kagen in his characteristically interesting fashion.

Why Philosophy of Biology?