I have drafts available online now of two projects I've been working on recently. One is my paper, "Justification is Potential Knowledge," which defends a knowledge-first account of doxastic justification. The other is a draft of an "Analysis of Knowledge" SEP entry. (The current entry, by Matthias Steup, is in need of revisions, and Matthias has taken me on a co-author for that purpose.) Comments on either are very welcome!
I'm off to Scotland tomorrow, for an extended visit to the NIP.
Friday, May 18, 2012
Monday, May 07, 2012
Correction in "Knowledge Norms and Acting Well"
I was very pleased to have my short discussion on evaluating the knowledge norm of practical reasoning appear in the inaugural issue of Thought. Unfortunately, I've just noticed that there are two errors near the end of the published version of the paper. One, which is entirely my fault, is that I misspelled Mikkel Gerken's name. I'm very sorry, Mikkel!
The second error, which seems to have been introduced in copyediting, is more likely to interfere with comprehension. So I thought I should at least set the record straight here. The penultimate paragraph of my paper was meant to run thus:
The penultimate sentence of this paragraph unfortunately became rather mangled. (I regret that I whiffed my chance of catching it in proof corrections.) This is what was printed:
The point I was trying to make was that everyone should agree that sometimes, pairs of subjects who have distinct reasons available to them ought nevertheless to perform the same actions—different reasons may point in the same direction. And given the knowledge norm, this is pretty plausible in the case of Gettier subjects and their knowledgable counterparts. Henry in fake barn country and twin-Henry in real barn country do not share all the same reasons: twin-Henry has the proposition that there is a barn in front of him, and Henry does not. Nevertheless, if they're both allergic to barns, they are each reasonable in stepping away from the structure before him. Twin-Henry's action is made reasonable by the reason that there is a barn before him (combined with his allergy and interests); Henry's action is made reasonable by the reason that there is a building that looks just like a barn before him (combined with his allergy and interests).
The second error, which seems to have been introduced in copyediting, is more likely to interfere with comprehension. So I thought I should at least set the record straight here. The penultimate paragraph of my paper was meant to run thus:
The point cuts in both directions: pairs of intuitions like the ones featured above cannot be used to refute the knowledge norm of practical reasoning; neither can cases of that include both knowledge and appropriate action, or both ignorance and apt criticism of action, be used to speak directly in favor of the knowledge norm. The same point applies to attempts to evaluate knowledge norms from the other side: just as one can’t get very far from arguments of the form ‘S knows that p, but oughtn’t to Φ, neither can one get very far from arguments of the form ‘S doesn’t know that p, but it would be correct to Φ.’ Relatedly, pairs of cases that differ with respect to knowledge, but are alike with respect to appropriate action—as is plausible, for instance, with knowers and their Gettierized counterparts—do not bear at all directly on knowledge norms (contra Gerkin (2011), pp. 535-36; Smithies (2011), p. 5). The knowledge norm identifies knowledge with reasons, but the facts about what reasons one has do not supervene on the facts about what actions are appropriate. (Perhaps there is supervenience in the other direction.)
The penultimate sentence of this paragraph unfortunately became rather mangled. (I regret that I whiffed my chance of catching it in proof corrections.) This is what was printed:
...Relatedly, pairs of cases that differ with respect to knowledge, but are alike with respect to appropriate action—as is plausible, for instance, with knowers and their Gettierized counterparts—do not bear at all directly on knowledge norms (contra Gerkin 2011, pp. 535–536; Smithies 2011, p. 5). The knowledge norm identifies knowledge with reasons, but the facts about what reasons one has to do does not supervene on the facts about what actions are appropriate. (Perhaps, there is supervenience in the other direction.)
The point I was trying to make was that everyone should agree that sometimes, pairs of subjects who have distinct reasons available to them ought nevertheless to perform the same actions—different reasons may point in the same direction. And given the knowledge norm, this is pretty plausible in the case of Gettier subjects and their knowledgable counterparts. Henry in fake barn country and twin-Henry in real barn country do not share all the same reasons: twin-Henry has the proposition that there is a barn in front of him, and Henry does not. Nevertheless, if they're both allergic to barns, they are each reasonable in stepping away from the structure before him. Twin-Henry's action is made reasonable by the reason that there is a barn before him (combined with his allergy and interests); Henry's action is made reasonable by the reason that there is a building that looks just like a barn before him (combined with his allergy and interests).
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