Christopher Michael Cloos » Weight

New Paper – Against the Total Evidence Requirement

Christopher Cloos — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:51:14 +0000

I just posted a new paper in which I argue against the total evidence requirement on knowledge. The abstract reads as follows:

A requirement on rational belief frequently invoked in epistemology and inductive logic is the total evidence requirement (TER). This requirement asks one to consult all evidence when making a determination about what one believes or the degree of confirmation to assign to a hypothesis. Despite the wide-spread use of the requirement there are many problems with it. After explaining the requirement in section 1 of this paper I motivate the requirement in section 2. In section 3, I highlight problems with successive interpretations of the requirement. This applies pressure to abandon TER or revise it. In section 4, I create the proportional evidence requirement (PER). This requirement revises the notion of what constitutes relevant evidence by making the notion proportional to the weight of evidence for a given hypothesis. After formulating two key principles behind PER I realize that one of the principles may not be an improvement over the commitments of TER. So, I revise one of the principles in PER to avoid such problems and create a requirement on evidence that is truly an upgrade over TER. I conclude this paper in section 5 by summarizing and indicating directions for future research.

Update: The paper is now down for revision.

Posted in Confirmation Theory, Epistemology, Evidence, My Papers, Weight

Weighty Moral Reasons

Christopher Cloos — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 01:54:08 +0000

One of my current areas of research is the relationship between the concepts of weight and evidence. I’m interested in weight of evidence issues because various philosophical concepts (reasons, intuitions, judgments, and so on) are used as evidence for certain philosophical claims. The weight attached to these philosophical concepts, either implicitly or explicitly, determines the conclusions reached through their use. So, you could imagine my delight when I came across a blog post that featured the concept of a weighty moral reason in arguing for a specific conclusion.

In the blog post I’m referring to Mike Almeida proposed a two-part argument. Using premises from an argument about saving non-persons a second argument derived the conclusion that non-persons can be terminated. Within the second argument the concept of a weighty moral reason is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. When I pressed Mike about the concept he softened the strength of the concept by trying to claim something non-controversial. As a response, I stipulated a plausible meaning for the concept of a weighty moral reason, and I tried to show that his non-controversial rendering (i.e. a very good reason) is less effective than my rendering when it comes to the kinds of moral situations his argument attempts to handle. The post I’m referring to is found here. For your consideration, my stipulated version of a weighty moral reason runs as follows:

(WMR) The weight W of a morally relevant reason R is directly proportional to the probative force F it exerts on a moral claim M; a particular reason R qualifies as weighty if it exerts enough probative force F on moral claim M to cause M to cross the threshold of genuine belief (i.e. assert M as true).

The Weighing of Evidence

Christopher Cloos — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:12:13 +0000

Hats off to Alex Baia and Alex Grzankowski for running a 5-day workshop that featured instructive sessions where professors presented current work, stimulating conversations with grad students and faculty, and enjoyable social events where the dialogue continued into the night. I also want to give props to the UT Philosophy Department. Many thanks to David Sosa, the faculty who participated in the workshop, and the many grad students who attended the sessions. The department was a gracious host and an encouraging place to think hard.

One of the presentations at the conference was Ernest Sosa on intuitions. I am somewhat of an intuition skeptic, but the way he outlined what an intuition is made it reasonable for me to believe there are such things as intellectual seemings. In a previous post, I mentioned the ambiguity of the term “weight” and how it, like other terms, is used loosely by the analytic community. I’d like to pick up on that thread and discuss the term as it relates to Sosa’s intuition project. Sosa identifies intuitions with seemings. A seeming is an attraction to assent (i.e. an attraction to affirm a proposition). Seemings come in two flavors: prima facie and ultima facie (or resultant). Seemings can conflict. Such is the case when one views a Muller-Lyer display and initially the lines seem incongruent. This prima facie seeming can conflict with the opposite seeming that the lines are in fact congruent.

Seemings can come by way of different sources. These sources might include testimony, empirical data, or intellectual data about what seems to be the case upon reflection. When there is a conflict between seemings, for example, that the Muller-Lyer lines are congruent and that they are incongruent the resultant seeming is determined by weighing the conflicting seemings. These conflicting seemings are weighed based on the sources of evidence that count in their favor. My question, then, is this:

Is the weighing of evidence for a seeming agent-relative?

Put differently, is there no objective way to determine how an agent should resolve the conflict of seemings or take certain evidence to be decisive? Even if a person has measured the lines and been told that the seeming incongruence of the lines is an illusion it is plausible that if all evidence is agent-relative in terms of how it is weighed, then the person could still have a resultant seeming of the incongruence of the lines (because they weighed the perceptual prima facie seeming of incongruence heavily) despite the amount of strong evidence to the contrary. If weighing of seemings is strictly agent-relative (i.e. there is no objective way of ranking evidence or saying more evidence of a certain sort is better), then it looks as if there is no way to say the person has produced the wrong resultant seeming based on a mis-weighing of the evidence. Any ideas on how to objectively determine the weighing of evidence?