Just a quick book note. Not exactly hot off the presses (a 2018 publication date) but still new-ish as philosophers reckon the passage of time. A work on epistemology rom Oxford University Press, FALLIBILISM by Jessica Brown. Here is the description, lifted straight from the publishers' website copy: What strength of evidence is required for knowledge? Ordinarily, we often claim to know something on the basis of evidence which doesn't guarantee its truth. For instance, one might claim to know that one sees a crow on the basis of visual experience even though having that experience does not guarantee that there is a crow (it might be a rook, or one might be dreaming). As a result, those wanting to avoid philosophical scepticism have standardly embraced "fallibilism": one can know a proposition on the basis of evidence that supports it even if the evidence doesn't guarantee its truth. Despite this, there's been a persistent temptation to end...
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In recent discussions of artificial intelligence, the idea of "large language models" has become closely associated with that of AI itself. A "large language model" is an algorithm that is fed, as a training set of data, a huge array of human-generated writing, generally internet available, that includes relevant problems (the questions that users might ask it) as well as their solutions. Anyway, in a new paper computer scientists challenge how intelligent this sort of artificial intelligence is. The paper is called "The Wall confronting large language models" and it is the work of Peter Coveney and Sauro Succi. The idea is that LLMs aren't some wave of the future, about to be scaled up in ways that will put people like me out of work. Rather, LLMs are hitting a wall at their current level of application. (Whew.) LLMs, they say, are built o n stochastic, non-Gaussian architectures that make them prone to error accumulation. The models can be rewor...
I've decided I don't believe in Descartes' presentation. In less kind language: he was a phony. He marketed as someone who went through a skeptical dark night of the soul, took seriously arguments about the malevolent demon and dreams, thought himself out to the other aside of such arguments, (by finding God), and so was able to provide us with a distinctive view of the world. The dark-night-of-the-soul stuff has so come to dominate the collective imagination that it overshadows the distinct view of the world that Descartes eventually offered. What he offered was this: 1. There are three substances: God, mind, and matter. We need God chiefly as the guarantor of our knowledge about matter: "we" are manifestation of mind. 2. How does mind interact with matter? Descartes left that as a mystery -- but he minimized the extent of the mystery a bit by telling us that other animals are mindless: the issue only arises for humans. 2. Matter is in essence the s...
In the period of Near-Eastern history beginning with the conquests of Alexander, there were by the standard accounts that have come down to us four great schools of philosophy: the cynic, the stoic, the epicurean, and the skeptic. Each of the first three of these four may be defined by a clear conception of the ideal life. For the fourth, the ideal life is more of an unspoken implication. For the cynic, the ideal was renunciation. For the stoic, indifference. For the epicurean, a sort of sustainable low-intensity pleasure. For the skeptic, it was the bursting of balloons, a ruthless honesty about the fact that no one (else) knows what they think they know. There was a distinction between the Academic and the Pyrrhonistic variants of skepticism, but in both cases the underlying glee seems to have been the same, the conviction that most people in the world have minds full of balloons, hot and airy ideas easily burst by sharpened logical arguments. What fun!
The Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project. Okay, I'm a sucker for guerrilla/gorilla puns, as embodied in this pen-and-ink thing. At any rate, I recent saw an article on the Wikipedia "guerrillas" who seek to add skeptical notes to articles that might otherwise be taken over by true believers, on subjects such as the supposed dangers of childhood inoculations, paranormal phenomenon, fringe science theories. One astrologer has apparently complained that certain of the astrological articles have been gutted by these guerrillas , due to "the Sun opposed by transiting Pluto" and other planetary matters. That pretty well illustrates the threat against which skeptical voices rightly protect us. So: three cheers, and three yummy bananas.
Last week, in two posts on the "tracking theory of knowledge," we reached the following point: 1) The tracking theory seems to capture many of our intuitions about what it means to know something, 2) It resolves the Gettier problems, 3) But it creates a glitch of its own -- it isn't epistemically closed. It generates circumstances in which I know p, and I know that p implies q, but I can't be said to know that q. Nozick, though, thought of the non-closure as a good thing: a feature, not a bug, because it allowed him to address global skepticism hypotheses. Suppose we concede that I don't know that I am not a brain in a vat, or that I don't know that I am not the victim of a joke by a malicious demon. Should this bother us? Specifically, should we infer from ignorance on this point that we don't know anything at all? Well, we would have to if we thought knowledge was epistemically closed. I know (we want to say) that I am now sitting in a gre...
Continuing the line of thought from yesterday and the day before.... So far in this discussion I've quoted Hume only once, that bit from the Enquiry about how "we are ignorant of those powers and forces" etc. So here are a couple of other quotes used by Strawson in laying out his broad thesis. From the Treatise he quotes, "[I am] ready to allow, that there may be several qualities both in material and immaterial objects, with which we are utterly unacquainted." Note the duality, "material and immaterial." One of Strawson's underlying points is that Hume considered Berkeley's metaphysics a plausible one -- neither certain nor probable, but coherent and on its own terms irrefutable. Berkeley saw the world as consisting of a God, various human minds, and the ideas that God implants into their/our minds. These ideas include the entire sensory world, including the regularities we might describe as examples of causality. Berkeley too, then, b...
Continuing yesterday's train of thought... Strawson (pictured here) observes that there are differences between the young Hume and the mature Hume: the fellow who wrote the TREATISE (1740) and the man who wrote the ENQUIRY (1748). To some extent, at least, the positivistic reading of Hume on causation follows from some dramatic overstatements in the earlier book, overstatements that Hume later regretted. In the latter book he said, "the positive air, which prevails in that book, and which may be imputed to the ardor of youth, so much displeases me, that I have no patience to review it." Strawson also sometimes quotes from DIALOGUES ON NATURAL RELIGION, which was written subsequent to the ENQUIRY by at least another couple of years, and specifically of course the words of Philo, the Humean mouthpiece there. At any rate: Strawson reads Hume, at all stages of his working life, in such a way as to connect the issue of causation/Causation to the issue of the independen...