Michael Huemer

Removing a single grain from a heap of sand does not convert the heap to a non-heap. This principle entails that if a million grains of sand make a heap, then one grain of sand makes a heap. This paradox arises from the vagueness of language. Vague language is used to express vague thoughts. Vague thoughts are thoughts that are neither fully satisfied nor fully unsatisfied by certain states of the world, but instead may be satisfied to varying degrees. Strictly speaking, vague thoughts do not express propositions. Nevertheless, we often appropriately pretend that they do, because they come close enough to expressing propositions. This causes logical problems when we also incorporate into our reasoning the very facts that prevent our thoughts from expressing propositions.

In general, the observation of an A that is B supports “All A’s are B.” Therefore, observation of a purple shoe supports “All non-black things are non-ravens.” This is logically equivalent to “All ravens are black.” So purple shoes provide evidence that all ravens are black. This seems crazy. The solution is to recognize that whether an observation of an A that is B supports “All A’s are B” or not depends upon how the observation was gathered – e.g., whether it was gathered by selecting randomly from the class of A’s, or selecting randomly from the class of B’s.

The teacher announces a surprise quiz next week, one whose particular date won’t be predictable in advance. It can’t be given on Friday, since then the students would know on Thursday night that it was coming the next day. But then it can’t be on Thursday, since then students would know on Wednesday night that it was coming the next day. And so on. So the quiz cannot be given on any day. The solution is to introduce intermediate degrees of belief. Each day that the quiz does not occur, the students increase their credence that it will occur the following day, up till Thursday night, when they should still be unsure whether the quiz will come on Friday or instead be cancelled.

The preceding paradoxes exhibit several kinds of problem that also beset human thinking in more ordinary cases. These include: hidden assumptions, neglect of the small, confusion, black-and-white thinking, oversimplification, inappropriate idealization, and inference from partial data. In solving paradoxes, we should not give up apparently self-evident principles, such as those of classical logic. The world is not inconsistent or incomprehensible. Human reason is fallible but correctable with effort.

You are given a choice between two indistinguishable envelopes, each containing money, one with twice as much as the other. It can be argued that each envelope has an expected value of 5/4 the value in the other envelope; thus, whichever envelope you have, you should prefer the other. The paradoxical reasoning confuses variables with constants. A correct analysis would assign a coherent probability distribution to each possible way of distributing money across the two envelopes. This leads to both envelopes having the same expected value.

Evidentialism holds that all epistemic justification derives from evidence. This thesis can apparently be refuted from the following three premises: (1) e is evidence for h only if the epistemic probability of h given e is higher than the prior probability of h; (2) epistemic probability satisfies the axioms of mathematical probability theory; (3) a proposition is epistemically justified whenever it is sufficiently probable. Given any threshold for “sufficiently probable” and any coherent probability distribution, some propositions must have a sufficiently high prior probability to count as justified. Given premise (1), this prior probability is not itself evidence for the proposition in question, nor does it reflect evidence for the proposition, nor do the facts explaining the high prior probability constitute evidence for the proposition. Hence, it represents a form of non-evidential epistemic justification.

In Appearance and Explanation, McCain and Moretti raise three objections to Phenomenal Conservatism: the problem of explaining defeaters, the problem of reflective awareness, and the bootstrapping problem. I address all three problems and then raise three objections to Phenomenal Explanationism: the problem of necessary truths, the problem of unreflective observers, and the problem of excessive flexibility. I conclude that there is no need to supplement Phenomenal Conservatism with Explanationism.

"In this book, Michael Huemer and Bryan Frances debate whether - and how - we can gain knowledge of the world outside of our own minds. Starting with opening statements, the debate moves through two rounds of replies. Frances argues that we lack knowledge because, for example, we cannot rule out the possibility that we are brains in vats being artificially stimulated in such a way as to create an illusion of living in the real world. Huemer disagrees that we need evidence against such possibilities in order to gain knowledge of the external world, maintaining instead that we are entitled to presume that things are as they appear unless and until we acquire specific grounds for thinking otherwise. The authors go on to discuss how one should think about controversial issues wherein the experts persistently disagree. Frances argues that we should generally withhold judgment about such issues, or at least greatly reduce our confidence. Huemer agrees that people are often overconfident about controversial issues but tries to carve out exceptions wherein one can rationally hold on to controversial views. Accessible whilst also detailed and substantial, this thoughtful debate is suitable for readers at all levels – from those encountering the topic for the first time through to those deeply familiar with the issues."

The standard view on explicit theory of mind development holds that children around the age of 4 years start to ascribe beliefs to themselves and others. At this age they begin to master FB tasks in which they have to ascribe a mistaken belief to someone else. The emerging competence in FB tasks goes hand in hand with the developing ability to master various tasks that also require the understanding of different perspectives, like the alternative naming game, false sign or identity tasks. Mental Files Theory allows to explain this developmental synchrony. It also helps to explain why older children struggle to understand that beliefs about an object depend on how one is acquainted with it (aspectuality), and why these difficulties disappear once children master second-order belief tasks at age 6. In this chapter, I focus on children’s developing mental file management, and how this accounts for the developmental synchrony of tasks that require taking into account different perspectives. In addition, I address several challenges for this view from the literature.

In this chapter, the author uses the film Minority Report as a means of reflecting on the age‐old topic of free will. Traditionally, having free will is thought to require two things: alternate possibilities and self‐control. Soft determinism is the view that determinism is true, and yet we have free will anyway. It is not rational to embrace hard determinism, since hard determinism, in conjunction with norms implicit in reasoning, leads to a conclusion that rationally undermines hard determinism itself. A determinist (hard or soft) would instead interpret minority reports as evidence of the pre‐cogs’ fallibility ‐ perhaps the future is predetermined, but sometimes one of the pre‐cogs makes a mistake about what is going to happen. One might take this as grounds for abandoning the Precrime system ‐ until one remembers that any criminal justice system is fallible.

The litmus test for the development of a metarepresentational Theory of Mind is the false belief task in which children have to represent how another agent misrepresents the world. Children typically start mastering this task around age four. Recently, however, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief control tasks. Pragmatic accounts assume that the TB task is pragmatically confusing because it poses a trivial academic test question about a rational agent’s perspective; and we do not normally engage in such discourse about subjective mental perspectives unless there is at least the possibility of error or deviance. The lack of such an obvious possibility in the TB task implicates that there might be some hidden perspective difference and thus makes the task confusing. In the present study, we test the pragmatic account by administering to 3- to 6-year-olds TB and FB tasks and structurally analogous true and false sign tasks. The belief and sign tasks are matched in terms of representational and metarepresentational complexity; the crucial difference is that TS tasks do not implicate an alternative non-mental perspective and should thus be less pragmatically confusing than TB tasks. The results show parallel and correlated development in FB and FS tasks, replicate the puzzling performance pattern in TB tasks, but show no trace of this in TS tasks. Taken together, these results speak in favor of the pragmatic performance account.

America’s legal system harbors serious, widespread injustices. Many defendants are sent to prison for nonviolent offenses, including many victimless crimes. Convicts often serve draconian sentences in crowded prisons rife with abuse. Almost all defendants are convicted without trial because prosecutors threaten defendants with drastically higher sentences if they request a trial. Most Americans are terrified of encountering any kind of legal trouble, knowing that both civil and criminal courts are extremely slow, unreliable, and expensive to use. This book explores the largest injustices in the legal system and what can be done about them. Besides proposing institutional reforms, the author argues that prosecutors, judges, lawyers, and jury members ought to place justice before the law – for example, by refusing to enforce unjust laws or impose unjust sentences. Issues addressed include: · The philosophical basis for judgments about rights and justice · The problems of overcriminalization and mass incarceration · Abuse of power by police and prosecutors · The injustice of plea bargaining · The appropriateness of jury nullification · The authority of the law, or the lack thereof Justice Before the Law is essential reading for everyone interested in legal ethics, the rule of law, and criminal justice. It is also ideal for students of legal philosophy.

I address Walter Block’s recent criticisms of my book, Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism. Methodologically, Block relies too much on appeals to contentious and extreme assumptions. Substantively, most of his objections are irrelevant to the central issue of the book. Those that are relevant turn on false assumptions or lead to absurd consequences. In the end, Block’s claim to oppose suffering cannot be reconciled with his indifference to a practice that probably causes, every few years, more suffering than all the suffering in human history.

In the practice of “jury nullification,” a jury votes to acquit a defendant despite sufficient evidence of lawbreaking, on the grounds that a conviction would be unjust, usually because the law itself is unjust or because the expected punishment would be unduly harsh. This practice is widely condemned by judges. Nevertheless, in the case of an unjust law or unduly harsh punishment, there are no good arguments against jury nullification, and there is one powerful argument in its favor: it is prima facie wrong to knowingly cause unjust harm to others. Thus, jurors are often morally obligated to disregard the law.

Infinitism claims that a belief is justified only if it stands at one end of an infinite series of available reasons. I argue that this condition cannot be satisfied by any human mind. In general, as one expands the list of propositions that a subject is said to believe, one must either add new basic evidence, add increasingly complex propositions, or include propositions that are ever more similar to each other. But I argue that (a) for a proposition to be available to one as a reason, one must either believe it or be disposed to acquire the belief without the need of acquiring new evidence, (b) there is a limit to the complexity of the propositions that a human mind can grasp, and (c) there is a limit to the capacity of a human mind to distinguish propositions. Thus, no human being can have infinitely many propositions available as reasons.

In earlier work, I argued that observed changes in moral values over human history are best explained as cognitive progress: societies tend over the long term to move closer to the objective moral truth. It is also true that, in recent decades, liberal democracies have moved strongly in the direction of greater government regulation and wealth redistribution. Does this mean that extensive regulation and redistribution are objectively good? I argue that the answer is no; these recent trends are importantly different from earlier examples of moral progress in ways that enable them to be satisfyingly explained without adverting to objective moral correctness.