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What to not know

Posted on August 23, 2011 | 1 comment

I just read ‘A counterexample to the contrastive account of knowledge‘ by Jason Rourke, at the suggestion of John Danaher. I’ll paraphrase what he says before explaining why I’m not convinced. I don’t actually know much more about the topic, so maybe take my interpretation of a single paper with a grain of salt. Which is not to imply that I will tell you every time I don’t know much about a topic.

Traditionally ‘knowing’ has been thought of as a function of two things: the person who does the knowing, and the thing that they know. The ‘Contrastive Account of Knowledge’ (CAK) says that it’s really a function of three things – the knower, the thing they know, and the other possibilities that they have excluded.

For instance I know it is Monday if we take the other alternatives to be ‘that it is Tuesday and my computer is accurate on this subject’, etc. I have excluded all those possibilities just now by looking at my computer. However if alternatives such as that of it being Tuesday and my memory and computer saying it is Monday are under consideration, then I don’t know that it’s Monday. Whether I have the information to say P is true depends on what’s included in not-P.

So it seems to me CAK would be correct if there were no inherent set of alternatives to any given proposition, or if we often mean to claim that only some of these alternatives have been excluded when we say something is known. It would be wrong if knowing X didn’t rely on any consideration of the mutually exclusive alternatives, and unimportant if there were a single set of alternatives determined by the proposition whose truth is known, which is what people always mean to consider.

Rourke seems to be arguing that CAK is not like what we usually mean by knowledge. He seems to be doing this by claiming that knowing things need not involve consideration of the alternatives. He gives this example:

The Claret Case. Imagine that Holmes and Watson are investigating a crime that occurred during a meeting attended by Lestrade, Hopkins, LeVillard, and no others. The question Who drank claret? is under discussion. Watson announces ‘‘Holmes knows that Lestrade drank claret.’’ Given the question under discussion and the facts described, the alternative propositions that partially constitute the knowledge relation are Hopkins drank claret and LeVillard drank claret.

He then argues basically that Holmes can know that Lestrade drank claret without knowing that Hopkins and LeVillard didn’t drink claret, since all their claret drinking was independent. He thinks this contradicts CAK because he claims, using CAK,

 The logical form of Watson’s announcement, then, is Holmes knows that Lestrade drank claret rather than Hopkins drank claret or LeVillard drank claret.

Whereas we want to say that Holmes does know Lestrade drank claret, if for instance he sees Lestrade drinking claret, and he need not necessarily know anything about what Hopkins and LeVillard were up to.

Which prompts the question why Rourke thinks these other guys’ drinking are the alternatives to Lestrade drinking in the knowledge relation. The obvious real alternative to exclude is that Lestrade didn’t drink.

Rourke gets to something like this as a counterargument, and argues against it. He says that if ‘who drank claret?’ is interpreted as ‘work out whether or not each person drank claret’ then it can be divided up in this way into ‘Lestrade drank claret’ vs. ‘Lestrade did not drink claret’ combined with ‘Hopkins drank claret’ vs ‘Hopkins did not drink claret’ etc. However if the question is meant as something like ‘who is a single person who drank claret?’, then ‘knowing’ the answer to this question doesn’t require excluding all the alternative answers to this question, some of which may be true.

As far as I can tell, this seems troublesome because he supposes that the alternatives to the purported knowledge must be the various other possible answers to the question, if what you supposedly know is ‘the answer to the question’. The alternative answers to such a question can only be positive reports of different people drinking, or that nobody drank. The question doesn’t ask for any mentions of who didn’t drink. So what can we contrast ‘Lestrade drank’ with, if not ‘Lestrade didn’t drink’?

But why suppose that the alternatives must be  the other answers to the question? If ‘knowing who drank claret’ just means knowing that a certain answer to that question is true rather than false for instance, there seems no problem. For instance perhaps ‘I know who drank’ means that I know ‘Lestrade did’ is one answer to the question. This can happily be contrasted with ‘Lestrade did’ not being an answer for instance. Why not suppose ‘I know who drank claret’ is shorthand for something like that?

It seems that at least for any specific state of the world, it’s possible to think of knowing it in terms of excluding the alternatives. It also seems answering more difficutly worded questions such as the one above must still be based on knowledge about straightforward states of the world. So how could knowledge of at least one person who drank for instance not be understandable in terms of excluding alternatives?

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One-on-one charity

Posted on August 22, 2011 | 8 comments

People care less about large groups of people than individuals, per capita and often in total. People also care more when they are one of very few people who could act, not part of a large group. In many large scale problems, both of these effects combine. For instance climate change is being caused by a vast number of people and will affect a vast number of people. Many poor people could do with help from any of many rich people. Each rich person sees themselves as one of a huge number who could help that mass ‘the poor’.

One strategy a charity could use when both of these problems are present at once is to pair its potential donors and donees one-to-one. They could for instance promise the family of 109 Seventeenth St. that a particular destitute girl is their own personal poor person, and they will not be bothered again (by that organisation) about any other poor people, and that this person will not receive help from anyone else (via that organisation). This would remove both of the aforementioned problems.

If they did this, I think potential donors would feel more concerned about their poor person than they previously felt about the whole bunch of them. I also think they would feel emotionally blackmailed and angry. I expect the latter effects would dominate their reactions. If you agree with my expectations, an interesting question is why it would be considered unfriendly behaviour on the part of the charity. If you don’t, an interesting question is why charities don’t do something like this.

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What ‘believing’ usually is

Posted on August 21, 2011 | 2 comments

Experimental Philosophy discusses the following experiment. Participants were told a story of Tim, whose wife is cheating on him. He gets a lot of evidence of this, but tells himself it isn’t so.

Participants given this case were then randomly assigned to receive one of the two following questions:

  • Does Tim know that Diane is cheating on him?
  • Does Tim believe that Diane is cheating on him?

Amazingly enough, participants were substantially more inclined to say yes to the question about knowledge than to the question about belief.

This idea that knowledge absolutely requires belief is sometimes held up as one of the last bulwarks of the idea that concepts can be understood in terms of necessary conditions, but now we seem to be getting at least some tentative evidence against it. I’d love to hear what people think.

I’m not surprised – often people say explicitly things like ‘I know X, but I really can’t believe it yet’. This seems uninteresting from the perspective of epistemology. ‘Believe’ in common usage just doesn’t mean the same as what it means in philosophy. Minds are big and complicated, and ‘believing’ is about what you sincerely endorse as the truth, not what seems likely given the information you have. Your ‘beliefs’ are probably related to your information, but also to your emotions and wishes and simplifying assumptions among other things. ‘Knowing’ on the other hand seems to be commonly understood as about your information state. Though not always – for instance ‘I should have known’ usually means ‘in my extreme uncertainty, I should have suspected enough to be wary’. At any rate, in common use knowing and believing are not directly related.

This is further evidence you should be wary of what people ‘believe’.

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Leaving out the dead

Posted on August 16, 2011 | 1 comment

She asked how uncle Freddie was doing. The past few days have been quite bad for him, I said. He was killed by a bus just over a month ago. The first few weeks nothing good happened that he would have missed, but he really would have liked it when the cousins visited. We are thinking about cancelling the wedding. He really would have wanted to be there and the deprivations are getting to be a bit much.

This is a quote from Ben Bradley via Clayton Littlejohn‘s blog. Commenters there agree that postponing the wedding will not help Freddie, but their suggestions about why seem quite implausible to me.

This is really no different to if Freddy was alive but couldn’t come to the wedding because he was busy. Would it be better for him if we cancel it entirely so he wouldn’t be able to come in any case? I hope it is clear enough here that the answer is no. His loss from failing to attend is the comparison between a world where he could attend and the real world. Changing to a different real world where he still can’t attend makes no difference to him in terms of deprivation. This doesn’t involve the controversial questions about how to treat non-existent people. But I think in all relevant ways it is just the same as dead Freddy’s problem.

The apparent trickiness or interestingness of the original problem seems to stem from thinking of Freddy’s loss as being some kind of suffering at some point in time in the real world, rather than a comparison between the real world and some counterfactual one. This prompts confusion because it seems strange to think he is suffering when he doesn’t exist, yet also strange to think that he doesn’t bear some cost from missing out on these things or from being dead.

But really there is no problem here because he is not suffering in the affective sense, the harm to him is just of missing out. It would indeed be strange if he suffered ill feelings, but failing to enjoy a good experience seems well within the capacity of a dead person. And as John Broome has elaborated before – while suffering happens at particular times, harms are comparisons between worlds, perhaps of whole lives, so don’t need to be associated with specific times. My failure to have experienced a first time bungie jumping can’t usefully be said to have occurred at any particular moment, yet it is quite clear that I have failed to experience it. You could say it happens at all moments, but one can really only expect a single first bungie jump, so I can’t claim to suffer from the aggregate loss of failing to experience it at every moment.

You might think of the failure as happening at different moments in different comparisons with worlds where I do bungie jump at different times. This is accurate in some sense, but there is just no need to bother differentiating all those worlds in order to work out if I have suffered that cost. And without trying to specify a time for the failure, you avoid any problems when asked if a person who dies before they would have bungie jumped missed out on bungie jumping. And it becomes easy to say that Freddy suffered a cost from missing the wedding, one that cannot be averted by everyone else missing it too.

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P.S. If you wonder where I have been lately, the answer is mostly moving to Pittsburgh, via England. I’m at CMU now, and trying to focus more on philosophy topics (my course of study here). If you know of good philosophy blogs, please point them out to me. I am especially interested in ones about ideas, rather than conference dates and other news.

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Taking chances with dinner

Posted on July 22, 2011 | 21 comments

Splitting up restaurant bills is annoying.

Good friends often avoid this cost by one of them paying for both one time and the other doing it next time, or better yet, by not keeping track of whose turn it is and it evening out in the long term.

Coins before Euro - European Coins In Circulation

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It’s harder to do this with lesser friends and non-friends who one doesn’t anticipate many meals with because one expects to be exploited by a continual stream of free-riders who never offer to pay, or to have to always pay to show everyone that you are not one of those free-riders, or some other annoying equilibrium.

There is an easy way around this. Flip a coin. Whoever loses pays the whole bill.

Why don’t people do this?

Here are some possible reasons, partly inspired by conversations with friends:

 They don’t think of it

Coins have been around a long time.

It’s hard to have a coin that both people agree is random

One person flips and the other calls it?

They are risk averse

Meals are a relatively small cost that people pay extremely often. They should expect a pretty fair distribution in the long run. If the concern is having to pay for fifty people at once when your income is not huge, either restrict the practice to smaller groups or keep the option of opting out open.

Using a randomising method such as a coin displays distrust, which is rude, but not using one would be costly because you don’t actually trust people

A coin could also display your own intention to be fair. And it doesn’t seem like such a big signal of distrust – I would not be offended if someone offered this deal.

Buying meals for others is a friendly and meaningful gesture – being forced to do it upon losing a bet sullies that ideal somehow

Maybe – I don’t know how this would work

Asking makes you look weird

This is an all purpose reason for not doing anything differently. But sometimes people do change social norms – what was special about those times?

Sharing in the bill feels like contributing to something alongside others, which is a better feeling than paying all of it against your will, or than not contributing at all.

Maybe – I feel pretty indifferent about the whole emotional experience personally.

There are many inconvenient small payments that seem like they could be improved by paying a larger amount occasionally with some small probability. Yet I haven’t seen such a method put to use anywhere.

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