tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631035637795172582.post4724822904446897974..comments2023-01-24T10:06:57.212-08:00Comments on (Blog&~Blog): Generality Problems in Biology and EpistemologyBenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06702722560438833244noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631035637795172582.post-62354513394604494702010-03-23T12:16:09.923-07:002010-03-23T12:16:09.923-07:00Oh, and checking the schedule, it looks like Searl...Oh, and checking the schedule, it looks like Searle is giving two talks on Friday, one before lunch and one in the late afternoon. I'll probably only be able to go to the first one, but it looks like you guys are scheduled to go to both.Benhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06702722560438833244noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631035637795172582.post-19192628484493512872010-03-23T10:53:17.343-07:002010-03-23T10:53:17.343-07:00Right, standard versions of reliabilism are defini...Right, standard versions of reliabilism are definitely trying to formulate necessary and sufficient conditions, get around Gettier, etc. My impression of Kornblith is that--although I don't think he puts it quite like this--what he's doing amounts to a sort of version of reliabilism, or a very reliabilism-like theory, that isn't in the business of doing this. Whether that's a viable idea, and whether that would get around these problems, is of course a separate issue.Benhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06702722560438833244noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631035637795172582.post-25109582807786179912010-03-23T00:19:00.607-07:002010-03-23T00:19:00.607-07:00This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631035637795172582.post-73071747089551361842010-03-22T23:54:47.775-07:002010-03-22T23:54:47.775-07:00There's a Searle talk? Neat. I have no idea wh...There's a Searle talk? Neat. I have no idea what's happening this weekend; no one's shown me a schedule of any kind. I'll probably not see "Hot Tub Time Machine" until I get back home, sadly. Unless that's what Searle's talking about.<br /><br />I think you're right that if reliablism is not trying to do something like define knowledge, then the generality problem might not be a problem for reliabilism. And if reliabilist epistemology starts to get interesting enough results, then maybe things like the generality problem will start to look like a philosopher's silly questions. (I'm not familiar with Kornblith; the little reliabilist literature I've read has explicitly been in the business of getting around Gettier problems by finding better criteria for knowledge; this is why I haven't read more of the reliabilist literature.)Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631035637795172582.post-54013430467913392542010-03-22T22:54:44.810-07:002010-03-22T22:54:44.810-07:00Ah, cool. I'm not sure just how much of the we...Ah, cool. I'm not sure just how much of the weekend I'll be around for, what with community college teaching on both Friday night and Saturday morning, some parties and whatnot I'm going to for the Winter Music Festival, trying to poke at papers that I've been waiting for too long to start sending out, and, of course, the fact that "Hot Tub Time Machine" comes out this weekend. That said, I am signed up for the dinner on Thursday night, so I'll definitely at least see you then, and I'll probably be at the Searle talk as well.<br /><br />Anyway, I think everything you say here is right (and yes, I loved the "Quinean union card" line). I'm not sure what the upshot is for the reliabilism analogy...like I said before, at the moment I'm more interested in raising and kind of poking at the question than pretending to have a well-worked out answer to it.<br /><br />But yes, I think you've identified one extremely plausible source of Fodor's confusion. In terms of how this relates to the generality problem, one way to frame the issue might be in terms of just what the difference is between how biology works and how philosophy works, e.g. is epistemology necessarily in the game of developing hard and sharp "iff" conditions for concepts?<br /><br />Kornblith's line in some of his articles about this seems relevant here--he endorses a broadly reliabilist sort of way of thinking about knowledge, but denies that this should be thought of as conceptual analysis, and trots out his stock analogy that if you want to know about gold investigating our concept of gold isn't going to be very useful.Benhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06702722560438833244noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631035637795172582.post-35121482980418919172010-03-22T20:32:57.173-07:002010-03-22T20:32:57.173-07:00First, a personal note: I'll be at the prospec...First, a personal note: I'll be at the prospective students thing at the University of Miami this weekend. I note this because it is weird to me when people I've talked to online suddenly show up "IRL" so I am giving you advanced warning. Now back to Fodor.<br /><br />"After all, in the biological case, the fact that all of an infinite number of traits, cut up at different levels of generality, produce the right results <i>is the problem</i>. The objection is that Fodor is raising (on this way of understanding Fodot) is that because they would all work the biologist has no good, principled way of deciding which level to pick."<br /><br />I think this is right, as a summary of Fodor. The problem is just <i>the fact that Fodor thinks this raises a problem for "Darwinists"</i>, when really it just shows that Fodor doesn't know how evolutionary biology proceeds as the science it is. I think this comes out in Block & Kitcher's response, which I like quite a bit; hopefully a little elaboration will make things clearer.<br /><br />Block & Kitcher's point about Fodor's "it's just natural history" <a href="http://bostonreview.net/BR35.2/darwin_exchange.php" rel="nofollow">complaint</a> is that Fodor is coming in with an <i>a priori</i> notion of what sciences must be, and then complaining when a science doesn't match his ideal. The "problem" Fodor raises isn't a real problem because that's not how biology works. Biology isn't trying to find The One True Causally Relevant Trait for any given case of fitness, it's trying to answer the "good questions" like "whether it's the black coloration or the nighttime lethargy that makes the moths fitter". Biology <b>can</b> answer those questions. It can't answer the "silly questions", but biologists aren't interested in asking <i>those</i> in the first place.<br /><br />Fodor thinks evolutionary biology must be trying to do something like "discover essences". As Block & Kitcher say: "Some would wince at the idea that Darwin and his successors were in the business of finding some analog of a Platonic theory of beds.... There is no “theory” of natural selection. So what?... nobody needs a “theory” of the type [Fodor and P-P] demand."<br /><br />To hypothesize a bit: I think Fodor doesn't like that the "theory of natural selection" doesn't look like how he thinks theories of science should look, and that he thinks this because he thinks of all sciences as being physics (at different levels of generality). A very old, very wrong, philosophical muddle. (I suspect it goes back to the early modern rejections of "final causality" in general, when really all they should've done is maintained that their new physics didn't need any such thing. And then it continues on through Kant's denial that there could ever "be a Newton for the study of life" or a scientific explanation of the growth of a blade of grass, on to the neglect of biology in 20th-century philosophy of science that Ernest Mayr complains about in the first pages of his "Toward A New Philosophy of Biology".)<br /><br />Fodor raises a complaint that could hold water against an imaginary science that's trying to play the game he's thinking of, but not against actually existing evolutionary biology. Thus Leiter's nice quip that Fodor has to turn in his "Quinean union card": Fodor is here failing to recognize what a science is doing before he tries to raise problems for the scientists doing it. It's bad naturalism.<br /><br />For what it's worth: I can see some analogy between the problem for reliabilism and the "problem" Fodor raises; I think I may have been coming across as too negative in my past comment. I did like this post and it's been fun to think about just what makes Fodor wrong while the anti-reliabilist is right.Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631035637795172582.post-76368591275316911482010-03-22T13:30:26.017-07:002010-03-22T13:30:26.017-07:00This might be right, but I'm not as confident ...This might be right, but I'm not as confident as you are.<br /><br />It's certainly true that, while (if one glosses reliability in statistical frequency terms) different answers about which process caused the belief will result in different degrees of reliability, whereas different answers about which trait caused increased reproductive success don't lead to importantly different results. As such, there seems to be a sense in which you can 'pick whichever you want' in the latter case but not in the former.<br /><br />I'm not sure, however, about just how important a disanalogy this. After all, in the biological case, the fact that all of an infinite number of traits, cut up at different levels of generality, produce the right results <i>is the problem</i>. The objection is that Fodor is raising (on this way of understanding Fodot) is that <i>because they would all work</i> the biologist has no good, principled way of deciding which level to pick. This lack of a principled way of picking levels is (for very different reasons) supposed to be the reliabilist's problem as well.<br /><br />Again, I'm not at all sure how much to make of the analogy. At least some of the question surely revolves around precisely *why* one takes the biological version to be a non-starter. I certainly agree that it is--when I read that passage, I had a hard time believing that someone like Fodor would press such a silly objection in the first place--but I'm less satisfied by Block & Kitcher's diagnosis of exactly what the problem is. After all, the (alleged) problem is that the biologist can't do better than just shrugging their shoulders and picking arbitrarily, so saying that they *can* do this isn't obviously a satisfying response.Benhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06702722560438833244noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2631035637795172582.post-1308838148695531812010-03-22T02:19:51.030-07:002010-03-22T02:19:51.030-07:00I agree that this "generality problem" f...I agree that this "generality problem" for biology is a non-problem, but think that the analogy is not particularly strong.<br /><br />The issue with the generality problem for reliabilism is that, depending on what process we look at as being <i>the</i> relevant one when you look at your phone and learn the time, we might get different answers regarding reliability (and so regarding the status of your true belief as knowledge). Suppose you look at the time to the nearest second, and that only cellphone clocks and atomic clocks are reliable there (since other clocks are set by hand, and most people don't bother lining up the second hand precisely), and that the majority of clocks are neither cellphone nor atomic. Then your belief that <i>it is now 4:23:05 PM</i> would be reliably formed if you formed it by looking at a cellphone clock, but not if you formed it by looking at a clock <i>simpliciter</i>. Which means it's reliably formed or not reliably formed, depending on what we say about the level of generality we're looking at. So you know or don't know the time to the nearest second; we can't tell which. For the reliabilist account of knowledge to be workable, we have to have some sort of principled way of saying whether you were looking at a cellphone clock in particular or just a clock in general when you formed your belief, on pains of it being unclear whether or not you can know what the time is (to the second) by looking at the clock on your cellphone.<br /><br />(And of course you <i>were</i> doing both things, and the looking-at-a-cellphone-clock was identical with the looking-at-a-clock-<i>simpliciter</i> (since there's just the one clock you looked at), so trying to say that it's one of these and not the other that lead to the belief being formed looks mighty hard to work out.)<br /><br />But there's nothing analogous to this consequence in biology. The reason the "generality problem" is a non-issue for biology is pretty nicely laid out in Block & Kitcher's review: "How then could there be a sense in which one of the properties—being-a-melanic-moth—rather than the other—being-a-melanic-moth-and-smaller-than-Manhattan—caused the increased reproductive success?<br /><br />We suggest that the question deserves a shrug. Serious evolutionary biology is concerned with comparative causal claims among interestingly different alternatives. Is it the black coloration rather than the larval resilience or the nighttime lethargy? Good question. Is it the coloration rather than coloration-and-being-smaller-than-Manhattan? Silly question."<br /><br />That is, the question posed by the "generality problem" in biology is "silly" because it doesn't matter what we say about it. Being-melanic and being-melanic-and-smaller-than-Manhattan are both good ways for the moth to hide on tree trunks, which is what biology cares about. Biologists can just shrug their shoulders at some questions (as Block and Kitcher suggest) and still have a lot of interesting things to say about their subject. Reliabilists, on the other hand, cannot shrug off the generality problem, as it affects pretty much any case of supposed knowledge you might want to look at. If the reliabilist shrugs off the generality problem, there's nothing left to reliabilism.Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.com