Knowability

An incredible resource for published and unpublished online philosophy papers was just made public by Dave Chalmers at the Centre for Consciousness. Having had the opportunity to test drive PhilPapers before the launch, I can say without hesitation that it is by far the best resource we have in our field for tracking the most recent and not so recent papers in any area of philosophy. More info on Dave's blog.

My Stanford Encyclopedia entry on the Church-Fitch paradox of knowability (coauthored with Berit) was recently updated and is now online.

Vincent Hendricks and Duncan Pritchard just published a really fun book of interviews with leading epistemologists. It's called Epistemology: 5 Questions. Here are the 5 questions:

• Why were you initially drawn to epistemology (and what keeps you interested)?
  
• What do you see as being your main contributions to epistemology?
  
• What do you think is the proper role of epistemology in relation to other areas of philosophy and other academic disciplines?
  
• What do you consider to be the most neglected topics and/or contributions in contemporary epistemology?
  
• What do you think the future of epistemology will (or should) hold?
  

Just posted this on my human rights and atrocities montage. Found it relevant and a good excuse to exhibit the beautiful yet disturbing Grace Jones, who hasn't shared any recordings since 1989.

Yesterday Trenton Merricks gave a great talk on Truth and Freedom. He argued that a class of fatalist arguments of the form below are question begging and that their first premise is false.

1. It was true a thousand years ago that Jones sits at time t (where t is a few moments from now), and Jones has no choice about that fact.

2. Necessarily, if it was true a thousand years ago that Jones sits at t, then Jones sits at t.

Therefore,

3. Jones has no choice about his sitting at t.

He demonstrated his point by replacing all occurrences of 'was true a thousand years ago' with 'will be true a thousand years from now'.

My own reaction is that both arguments are invalid. They fallaciously rest on the principle that failing to have a choice (regarding the truth of a proposition) is closed under necessary implication. Let NC be the factive operator 'has no choice that', so that 'sNC(p)' says 'it is true that p, but person s has no choice about it'. Then the above argument has the following form:

1*. sNC(p)

2*. Necessarily, p implies q.

Therefore,

3*. sNC(q)

We see that this is an instance of the closure principle. But counterexamples to the principle are not hard to find. Let p be the true proposition that person A at time t has tortured some detainees at Gitmo. B clearly has no choice about p (because B doesn't know about A's activities). But our proposition (that p) necessarily implies that somebody at some time tortured some detainees at Gitmo. It would follow by the above argument that B had no choice about whether somebody at some time was tortured at Gitmo. However, B himself tortured some detainees there, and so did in fact have a choice about whether some detainees were tortured.

A defense of the Merricks analysis over the one favored here might include the following objection. Even though B had a choice about torturing detainees he did in fact torture, he didn't have a choice about whether some detainees were tortured. After all, he had no choice about what others would do without his knowledge, and those others happened to torture some people. The problem with this objection is that it entails that neither A nor B had a choice about whether some detainees were tortured (even though, we may suppose, A and B were the only ones willfully torturing). More generally, nobody ever has a choice about any existential proposition that more than one person makes true! In sum, if we supposed NO-Choice is closed under necessary implication, we've already conceded too much to the fatalist.