Terry Horgan

In “Generalized Conditionalization and the Sleeping Beauty Problem,” Anna Mahtani and I offer a new argument for thirdism that relies on what we call “generalized conditionalization.” Generalized conditionalization goes beyond conventional conditionalization in two respects: first, by sometimes deploying a space of synchronic, essentially temporal, candidate-possibilities that are not “prior” possibilities; and second, by allowing for the use of preliminary probabilities that arise by first bracketing, and then conditionalizing upon, “old evidence.” In “Beauty and Conditionalization: Reply to Horgan and Mahtani,” Joel Pust replies to the Horgan/Mahtani argument, raising several objections. In my view his objections do not undermine the argument, but they do reveal a need to provide several further elaborations of it—elaborations that I think are independently plausible. In this paper I will address his objections, by providing the elaborations that I think they prompt.

We argue, primarily by appeal to phenomenological considerations related to the experiential aspects of agency, that belief fixation is broadly agentive; although it is rarely voluntary, nonetheless, it is phenomenologically agentive because of its significant phenomenological similarities to voluntary-agency experience. An important consequence is that epistemic rationality, as a central feature of belief fixation, is an agentive notion. This enables us to introduce and develop a distinction between core and ancillary epistemic virtues. Core epistemic virtues involve several inter-related kinds of epistemic rationality in belief fixation. Other “habits of mind” pertinent to belief fixation constitute ancillary epistemic virtues. Finally, we discuss the relationship between both kinds of virtues, offering a unified account of epistemic virtuousness.

Moral judgments are typically experienced as being categorically authoritative – i.e. as having a prescriptive force that is motivationally gripping independently of both conventional norms and one's pre-existing desires, and justificationally trumps both conventional norms and one's pre-existing desires. We argue that this key feature is best accommodated by the meta-ethical position we call ‘cognitivist expressivism’, which construes moral judgments as sui generis psychological states whose distinctive phenomenological character includes categorical authoritativeness. Traditional versions of expressivism cannot easily accommodate the justificationally trumping aspect of categorical authoritativeness, because they construe moral judgments as fundamentally desire-like. Moral realism cannot easily accommodate the aspect of inherent motivational grip, because realism construes moral judgments as a species of factual belief.

© Mind Association 2018Gila Sher’s Epistemic Friction is a bold and ambitious book, with many interesting things to say not only about knowledge, truth, and logic but also about matters ontological. It often requires the reader to construe it hermeneutically, but repays the effort of doing so.She coins the expression ‘epistemic friction’ to refer to constraints on a system of knowledge, coming from both the world and the mind. She says, ‘The world as the object or target of our theories restricts what we can truly say about it, and the mind restricts our theories both voluntarily and involuntarily’. Borrowing terminology from Shapiro, she describes her project as foundation without foundationalism. ‘The key idea’, she says, ‘… is that there is no inherent connection between grounding our system of knowledge in reality and...

Two philosophical questions arise about rationality in centipede games that are logically prior to attempts to apply the formal tools of game theory to this topic. First, given that the players have common knowledge of mutual rationality and common knowledge that they are each motivated solely to maximize their own profits, is there a backwards-induction argument that employs only familiar non-technical concepts about rationality, leads to the conclusion that the first player is rationally obligated to end the game at the first step, is deductively valid, employs premises all of which are prima facie highly plausible, and is prima facie sound and )? Second, if there is such an argument, then is it actually sound, or is it instead defective somehow despite being prima facie sound? Addressing these two questions is our project. We present a backwards-induction argument that is prima facie sound; we argue that it is an instance of the notorious sorites paradox, and hence that the concepts of rational obligatoriness and rational permissibility are vague; and we briefly address the potential consequences of all this for the foundations of game theory and decision theory.

I raise skeptical doubts about the prospects of Bayesian formal epistemology for providing an adequate general normative model of epistemic rationality. The notion of credence, I argue, embodies a very dubious psychological myth, viz., that for virtually any proposition p that one can entertain and understand, one has some quantitatively precise, 0-to-1 ratio-scale, doxastic attitude toward p. The concept of credence faces further serious problems as well—different ones depending on whether credence 1 is construed as full belief (the limit case of so-called partial belief) or instead is construed as absolute certainty. I argue that the notion of an “ideal Bayesian reasoner” cannot serve as a normative ideal that actual human agents should seek to emulate as closely as they can, because different such reasoners who all have the same evidence as oneself—no single one them being uniquely psychologically most similar to oneself—will differ from one another in their credences (e.g., because they commence from different prior credences). I argue that epistemic probability, properly understood, is quantitative degree of evidential support relative to one’s evidence, and that principled epistemic probabilities arise only under quite special evidential circumstances—which means that epistemic probability is ill suited to figure centrally within general norms of human epistemic rationality.

In the formation of epistemically justified beliefs, what is the role of attention, and what is the role (if any) of non-attentional aspects of cognition? We will here argue that there is an essential role for certain nonattentional aspects. These involve epistemically relevant background information that is implicit in the standing structure of an epistemic agent’s cognitive architecture and that does not get explicitly represented during belief-forming cognitive processing. Since such “morphological content” (as we call it) does not become explicit during belief formation, it cannot be information that is within the scope of attention. Nevertheless,it does exert a subtle influence on the character of conscious experience, rather than operating in a purely unconscious way.

In Chapters 4 and 5 of his 1998 book From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis, Frank Jackson propounds and defends a form of moral realism that he calls both ‘moral functionalism’ and ‘analytical descriptivism’. Here we argue that this metaethical position, which we will henceforth call ‘analytical moral functionalism’, is untenable. We do so by applying a generic thought-experimental deconstructive recipe that we have used before against other views that posit moral properties and identify them with certain natural properties, a recipe that we believe is applicable to virtually any metaphysically naturalist version of moral realism. The recipe deploys a scenario we call Moral Twin Earth.

Inspired and informed by the work of Russ Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel in their 'Describing Inner Experience', we do two things in this commentary. First, we discuss the degree of reliability that introspective methods might be expected to deliver across a range of types of experience. Second, we explore the phenomenology of agency as it bears on the topic of free will. We pose a number of poten-tial problems for attempts to use introspective methods to answer var-ious questions about the phenomenology of free-will experience -- questions such as this: does such experience have metaphysical-liber-tarian satisfaction conditions? We then discuss the prospects for over-coming some of these problems via approaches such as Hurlburt's DES methodology, the so-called 'talk aloud' protocol, and forms of abduction that combine introspection with non-introspection-based forms of evidence