tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post8546662186136471701..comments2024-03-22T22:09:09.407+00:00Comments on Imperfect Cognitions: Epistemic Innocence (part 4)Kengo Miyazonohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01643685718519136099noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-48007184033469431572014-01-22T15:48:30.164+00:002014-01-22T15:48:30.164+00:00Hi Matthew
Thank you for your comment.
One way ...Hi Matthew<br /><br />Thank you for your comment. <br /><br />One way of understanding the notion of epistemic innocence is to say that it applies to those cognitions that are imperfect (false, irrational, factually inaccurate, groundless) but that have some significant epistemic benefit that could not be easily obtained otherwise. This is quite broad. Then, we need to unpack the reasons why that benefit may be unique to the cognition. It may be that a cognition that is less imperfect is not accessible to the agent at the time (the other cognition is unavailable) or that there is an available cognition that is less imperfect but it does not carry the same epistemic benefit as the imperfect cognition.<br /><br />That is why I prefer to call the second condition for epistemic innocence "no relevant alternatives". It leaves it open whether alternatives are strictly speaking unavailable or whether they just fail to have the relevant epistemic benefit.<br /><br />Hope it makes sense! Still very "work-in-progress".Lisa Bortolotti https://www.blogger.com/profile/00976016764033246051noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-50244660393025322822014-01-20T19:27:20.613+00:002014-01-20T19:27:20.613+00:00Hi Matthew,
Thanks for this, glad you enjoyed th...Hi Matthew, <br /><br />Thanks for this, glad you enjoyed the series!<br /><br />So you ask: if a particular hypothesis is less probable, does that make it unavailable? Or is it unavailable because the cognitive mechanisms responsible for updating one’s belief is unconscious – i.e., the hypothesis is not available to consciousness?’ This is a really useful way of putting the question, because it roughly matches with what I have called 'explanatory unavailability' and 'strong unavailability' (I sketched a bit of this in Epistemic Innocence (part two)). I’m inclined to think that, if we’re thinking in terms of the Bayesian framework, that non-delusional hypotheses are explanatorily unavailable, which is to say that they strike the subject with a delusion as poor (or at least, less good) explanations of their experiences than the delusional hypothesis. (Though there might be stronger unavailability going on—something like the hypothesis not being available to consciousness, and that might be why 76% of Freeman and colleagues’ participants did not come up with an alternative hypothesis *at all*.) <br /><br />So you worry that one hypothesis better explaining the data than a rival doesn’t make that rival ‘unavailable’, so maybe that’s an unfortunate way of putting it (because I agree, ‘unavailable’ here seems a bit strong!). But what I mean by explanatory unavailability is cashed out in terms of the implausibility or poor explanatory power of alternative explanations (by the subject’s lights). A subject may come to have a cognition which explains some experience she has. If alternative cognitions which might also be candidate explanations for her experiences are such that they strike her as seriously implausible or explanatorily inadequate, I want to say that these alternative cognitions are explanatorily unavailable. <br /><br />Take a non-pathological case: suppose there are bite marks in my cheese, I hear scratching at night, and my cat is agitated. I come to the conclusion that I have mice in my house. An alternative explanation might be that cheese-eating, cat-hating, noisy fairies are infiltrating my home at night. This explanation is unavailable to me in the sense I have in mind here due to the incredulity I would feel towards it. It is either not considered by me, or it is such that I rule it out on grounds of implausibility or poor explanatory power, relative to the preferred and adopted cognition. <br /><br />So it is in that sense that I think rival non-delusional hypothesis might be ‘unavailable’ to the subject, though I agree, that might be a slightly misleading way of characterising what’s going on. <br /><br />Thanks again for this, it's really useful for us to think about what we mean by unavailability of alternatives!<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4430111450575356526.post-70859846895187513092014-01-20T18:04:01.592+00:002014-01-20T18:04:01.592+00:00Dear Ema,
I've very much enjoyed this series ...Dear Ema,<br /><br />I've very much enjoyed this series of posts on Epistemic Innocence. <br /><br />I was hoping you could help clarify the notion of 'availability' you are using. Consider the Bayesian framework, if a particular hypothesis is less probable, does that make it 'unavailable'? Or is it 'unavailable' because the cognitive mechanism responsible for updating one's beliefs is unconscious - i.e., the hypothesis is not available to consciousness? Or is there some other notion of what makes an alternative hypothesis available?<br /><br />I think there is one way of understanding what is happening in the Bayesian framework as modeling how a rational agent compares rival empirical hypotheses. The one that better explains the data, should be adopted over the less probable rival, but it doesn't seem like that makes the less probable option 'unavailable'. M. Parrotthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03176134835931810361noreply@blogger.com