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Signature Redacted Department of Linguistics and Hilosophy S Aust 4, 2015 ARCHIVES MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE ACCESS AND ANTICIPATION OF TECHNOLOGY by OCT 15 2015 Bernhard Salow LIBRARIES MMathPhil, University of Oxford (2009) BPhil, University of Oxford (2011) Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology September 2015 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved. Signature of author: Signature redacted Department of Linguistics and hilosophy S aust 4, 2015 Certified by: Signature redacted- /7 Roger White Associate Professor of Philosophy ( I is Supervisor I Thes Signature redacted Accepted by: I 'V Alex Byrne Professor of Philosophy Philosophy Chair and Chair of the Committee on Graduate Students Access and Anticipation by Bernhard Salow Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy on August 4, 2015 in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy. Abstract Can we always tell, just through reflection, what we should believe? That is the question of access, the central disagreement between epistemic internalists and externalists, and the focus of the dissertation. Chapter 1 gives an argument for access, connecting it with the question of whether we can intentionally bias our own investigations to favour desirable hypotheses. I argue that we can't: since we have to take any known biases into account when evaluating the evidence obtained, attempts to bias our inquiries will be self-undermining. Surprisingly, this explanation fails for agents who anticipate violating access; and such agents can in fact intentionally bias their in- vestigations. Since this possibility remains counterintuitive when we focus on alleged coun- terexamples to access, this is a serious problem for externalism. Chapters 2 and 3 offer a solution to this problem and related, more familiar, ones. Chapter 2 lays some technical foundations, by investigating iterated knowledge in David Lewis's contex- tualist theory of knowledge. I show that his account has the surprising consequence that agents cannot attend to "negative access failures", cases in which someone fails to know something without knowing that they fail to know it. Whilst this prediction is prima facie unattractive, I show how it can be defended. Chapter 3 uses this Lewisian treatment of negative access failures to solve our problems for externalism. For I show that these problems arise not from maintaining that, in some situations, agents are unable to tell what they should believe, but rather from maintaining that rational agents can sometimes suspect that they are currently in such a situation or anticipate that they will be in such a situation in the future. Externalists can reject this stronger thesis. To explain how, I sketch a theory of evidence which integrates the Lewisian treatment of negative access failures to predict that agents always have to think that they can tell what they should believe, even though this isn't always true. By rejecting access, but maintaining that agents can never anticipate violating it, this theory reconciles the most attractive features of externalism and internalism. Thesis Supervisor: Roger White Title: Associate Professor of Philosophy Acknowledgements I enjoy philosophy most when doing it with others. So it is hardly surprising that this dissertation has been shaped by a large number of people other than myself. First, there is my dissertation committee. Roger White offered just the right balance of detailed and 'big-picture', substantive and presentational feedback. Bob Stalnaker usually knew where my ideas were going long before I did. Steve Yablo's unexpected examples and analogies reminded me of why I love philoso- phy in the first place. While not officially on my dissertation committee, Alex Byrne, Declan Smithies, and Jonathan Vogel performed a similar role, reading multiple versions of my papers, and providing extremely helpful and detailed guidance on how to develop and present my thoughts. I also benefited hugely from less formal conversations. Two groups of people deserve special notice here. First, there is MIT's flourishing epistemology team. Conversations with its members, especially Nilanjan Das, Kevin Dorst, Sophie Horowitz, and Ginger Schultheis, have shaped my ideas and their presentation more than I can articulate. Second, there are three of my all-time favourite people to talk philosophy with: Brendan de Kenessey, Jack Spencer, and Josh Thorpe; they deserve special credit for spending so much time with me thinking about topics that were often quite far removed from those that they themselves work on. In addition to those mentioned above, I also had extremely helpful com- ments from and/or discussions with Stew Cohen, Jeff Dunn, J. Dmitri Gallow, Jeremy Goodman, Dan Greco, John Hawthorne, Brian Hedden, Abby Jacques, Justin Khoo, Maria Lasonen-Aarnio, Harvey Lederman, Jack Marley-Payne, Agustin Rayo, Damien Rochford, Kieran Setiya, Alex Silk, Ian Wells, and four anonymous referees. I am also grateful to audiences at the 2012 ARCHE/ CSMN graduate conference, the 2014 Formal Epistemology Workshop, and the 2014 Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. Finally, I am extremely lucky to have been a part of the wonderful MIT philosophy commu- nity over the last few years - the feedback I received at numerous workshops at which I presented these ideas was extremely helpful; but it hardly scratches the surface of the influence that this entire community has had on my philosophical development. My last, and greatest, debt is to Ellen Salow. If it wasn't for her, I would be less patient, less experimental, and more argumentative; in short, I would be a 5 significantly worse philosopher. If it wasn't for her willingness to accompany me here, despite the unfamiliar and distant country and the unclear career prospects, I would not have come to MIT; the result would, again, have been a very different philosopher. For these reasons, and many others less directly relevant to the dissertation, I am extremely glad to have her in my life. 6 Chapter 1 The Externalist's Guide to Fishing for Compliments Abstract Suppose you'd like to believe that p (e.g. that you are popular), whether or not it's true. What can you do to help? A natural initial thought is that you could engage in Intentionally Biased Inquiry: you could look into whether p, but do so in a way that you expect to predominantly yield evidence in favour of p. The paper hopes to do two things. The first is to argue that this initial thought is mistaken: intentionally biased inquiry is impossible. The second is to show that reflections on intentionally biased inquiry strongly support a controversial 'access' principle which states that, for all p, if p is (not) part of our evidence, then that p is (not) part of our evidence is itself part of our evidence. Some truths are bleak. Faced with the prospect of discovering such truths, we might prefer not to know; we might even prefer to have false beliefs. For the same reason, however, if the bleak claim turns out to be false, finding that out would be extremely reassuring. So, when faced with a question which may have a bleak answer, we often feel ambivalent about inquiring. Whether we want to know the answer depends on what the answer is. Take an example. If my colleagues like me, I'd love to know. But if they don't, I still want to believe that they do. The negative effects which knowing they don't like me, or even just becoming less confident that they do, would have on my self-esteem and my ability to sustain reasonably productive relationships simply far outweigh any possible advantages such knowledge or doubts might generate. Given such preferences, what am I to do? 7 A somewhat plausible initial thought is that I could inquire into whether my colleagues like me, but do so in a way that is more likely to yield evidence in one direction rather than the other. I could, for example, talk primarily to people who I expect to have a high opinion of me if anyone does; and I could avoid reading the blogs and facebook comments which I expect to be particularly harsh. Moreover, doing this does not seem to require that I deceive myself or exploit any straightforward kind of irrationality, e.g. some predictable failure to correctly assess my evidence. In this paper, I hope to do two things. The first is to argue that this initial thought is mistaken: intentionally biased inquiry is impossible. The second is to show that reflections on intentionally biased inquiry strongly support a controversial 'access' principle, which is a natural component of epistemological internalism:' For all p, if p is (not) part of one's evidence, one's evidence entails that p is (not) part of one's evidence. 2 I will begin, in 1, with a preliminary precisification and defence of the claim that intentionally biased inquiry is impossible. I will then, in 2, turn to consider influential alleged counterexamplies to the access principle, showing that, if they were genuine, they would support strategies for biasing one's inquiries that obviously wouldn't work. Finally, in 3, I will explain the more abstract connec- tion between the two topics, by formalizing both questions in a probabilistic 'Titelbaum (2010) presents related, but somewhat less general, considerations. I should note that, in presenting the argument in this way, I am being a little disingenuous. I actually suspect that we might be able to do justice to our observations about intentionally biased inquiry even if we reject the access principle, provided we maintain that rational agents always have to think that it is true of them in the present and future.
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