Phenomenal Conservatism & Epistemology w/ Michael Huemer

[@EmersonGreen]

Phenomenal Conservatism (PC): If it seems to S that P, then, in the absence of defeaters, S thereby has at least some justification for believing that P. If we accept phenomenal conservatism, we have a single, simple principle to account for the justification of multiple very different kinds of belief, including perceptual beliefs, moral beliefs, mathematical beliefs, memory beliefs, beliefs about one’s own mind, beliefs about other minds, and so on.

[@TheVeganVicar]

Well, Slave, we all have our own particular BELIEFS, but ultimately, there exists objective truth, which is not subject to our misconceptions and misunderstandings. One who has transcended mundane relative truth is said to be an ENLIGHTENED soul. 😇

[@zeebpc]

S = santa claus P = presents if it seems like santa claus put the presents, in the absence of any counter evidence, then im justified to believe santa exists and gives me presents? is that how PC works?

[@thejimmymeister]

​@@zeebpc In that example, S = you, not Santa Claus, and P = Santa Claus leaves the presents. Otherwise, yes, that is how phenomenal conservatism works.

[@ParkersPensees]

Such a great conversation, man!

[@lvincents]

Thanks for the excellent discussion about PC! Huemer's work is definitely the cutting edge of epistemology---or so it seems to me. Where I think many critics of PC go wrong is in failing to recognize that the hard work lies in assessing whether there are any defeaters for any given belief. If some appearance is false, then there does exist some defeater or defeaters, even if we (or the believer in question) does not have access to it or them at this point in time. Keeping in mind this notion of "ultima facie" justification answers many if not most of the criticisms of PC.

[@cultofscriabin9547]

Very good convo

[@eapooda]

This conversation ‘seemed’ extremely fluid. You guys talked like you were friends, it makes the video much more enjoyable. Also the questions directly correlated with the topic. Good job!

[@TheVeganVicar]

Good and bad are RELATIVE. 😉

[@Contagious93812]

I disagree with the gettier case example. If your justification is based off a broken clock then you don't have a justified true belief. You have an unjustified true belief. Which means that you don't have knowledge.

[@oakschris]

Let’s assume that you have a clock that works and you have reasons to believe it works, that is, you are justified in believing that it works. Then at sometime unknown to you, it breaks. Did the justification status of your belief change? if the answer is no, then, the next time you look at your clock, you might have a gettier case. if the answer is yes, then your concept of justification seems suspicious. Clocks break with some frequency, and you already knew that, so how were you justified in believing that it works before it broke?

[@jordancox8802]

Excellent interview! Do you plan on interviewing David Bentley Hart?

[@EmersonGreen]

I was not planning on it, but I'll have to check out his philosophy of mind book

[@ldsphilosophy6015]

I think I find externalism about justification to be missing the point of justification - to say that S could have reasons P or Q for believing something, which seem to S identical but which in fact differ as to whether they are justificatory seems like an unacceptable consequence. However I’m thoroughly convinced of anti-individualism, or externalism about meaning and mental states. That seems tricky for internalism about justification because if internalism is about access to mental states but those mental states aren’t transparent - they can only be individuated with reference to the environment - then that basically seems like externalism about justification anyway haha

[@EmersonGreen]

I'm not sure we totally disagree, but I have a few thoughts that may be relevant: Justification seems inherently person-based, so separating justification from subjects doesn't make much sense to me. A belief seems justified *to* someone. That's not to say there's nothing interesting about externalist accounts of justification (I talked about this in the segment on proper functionalism), but an externalist thesis just can't be the foundational account of justification. You mentioned "access to mental states" as a condition for an internalist theory, but as Huemer pointed out at 15:53, an internalist theory doesn't necessarily claim that you have introspective access to everything in your mind. So justification could ultimately rely on factors internal to your mind, but all those factors need not be readily accessible to introspection. Also, I buy Huemer's argument that all non-PC theories are ultimately self-defeating, so that'd be another reason to reject externalism to add to the list.

[@matteopastrello4535]

the problem that i have for the arguments proposed here in favor of PC, is that they all seems circular argument. The argument for what i understood looks like this - "trusting your intuition until there is a valid reason to doubt it" is not an approach that can proove your intuitions - but to proove something you need to rely on an intuition to start with (statistics theorems and assumption example). - so you need to trust your intuitions to define knowledge (without the presence of reasanable doubts). The problems that i have with this approach are: 1) in order to show that there is an objective truth that we need to discover you need a reason to show that there is such thing as an objective knowledge, which is itself a concept derived by common sense and intuitions. So in order to justify the method of intuitions to arrive at the truth, we used intuition to justify the presence of a truth. which seems rather a circular approach to me. In other words: why not be a complete skeptic or, better, a complete relativist instead of a intuitionist? the selection between theese alternatives seems completely arbitrary and not justifiable without going into circular arguments. 2) the definition of valid or reasonable doubts when you decide if your intuitions are wrong of correct. It seems to me that the definition of what is reasonable relies heavily on the perspective of the person having that intuition. guiding the argument in a circle again. In order to understand if an intuition is correct or not you need an intuition of what is reasonable, which is itself an intuition that might or might not be true. I'm sorry for the english (which is not my language) and i'm sorry if my ideas and doubts are blatently moronic, i'm an engineer and only read about philosophy for fun in my spare time.

[@taolex77814]

The idea is that one doesn't need to prove the way things seem to you. Skepticism argues you do, PC argues that you don't.

[@ashleyl6790]

OK, so I skipped to the part about psychedelics... really interesting points made. I came down from LSD once convinced I had apprehended a thorough understanding of Quantum physics (I had not). Also came down off mushrooms another time utterly convinced that my being had merged in some very substantial way with that of Bob Dylan. I have difficulty untangling what was real (as I perceived it then and may still) and what was the product of a chemically bathed brain. The professor had some good points in that regard. Interesting discussion, thanks! I'll try to get to the rest of it.

[@ashleyl6790]

@@thotslayer9914 Sorry, not sure what you mean in this context?

[@kimmyswan]

What about using PC as a justification for the seeming of gratuitous suffering in the world? Are their any “good” defeaters in this case?

[@EmersonGreen]

I think it seems to pretty much everyone involved (including skeptical theists) that some suffering is gratuitous. And no, I’m unaware of any defeater for this. I have a video about skeptical theism where I talk about this more.

[@maxmax9050]

It's cool you got Huemer on the podcast. I'm not sure I agree with PC though, at least not entirely. It takes what is given in consciousness further than it has any right to go. There are certain inferential beliefs for instance we hold that I don't think can be justified solely on the basis of it "seeming" to be the case from a given experience. It becomes very easy to beg the question when we draw conclusions from "seemings" here by going beyond what is given. For beliefs like the existence of other minds and of the external world, for example, there comes a point where we have to make a fundamentally unjustified inferential leap. There doesn't seem to me any non-question begging way to infer the existence of these two things, because experience alone does not directly reveal these things to us. They must be inferred, but then you have the burden of justifying the use of abduction and induction without circularity or some naïve appeal to pragmatism. I'm not saying that is a bad thing (because other minds and a belief in an external world are entirely rational beliefs to hold), but I think we should just admit when we can't justify an inference we really want to believe under PC. We need a coherentist framework to pick up the slack where foundationalist PC fails.

[@thejimmymeister]

You don't think it seems like there are other minds or an external world? Huemer also argues that inferences are valid (or, more specifically, we are justified in believing that they are valid) because they seem valid. I think that if these things aren't justified by seemings (either directly or merely ultimately), then they aren't justified at all.

[@maxmax9050]

@@thejimmymeisterI don't think it actually seems like there are other minds or an external world, in the same sense Hume would have argued that we don't really have any concepts of causation or induction. So in a sense, yes, it "seems" like induction is valid to us in some psychological sense. But that seeming is literally without content and unintelligible,. It's not really anything. That seeming is not there. I think we can justify beliefs in an external world, but it has to be externalist and pragmatic, rather than purely internalist. We simply don't have internal access to the validity of inductive and abductive inference.

[@thejimmymeister]

@maxmax9050 Your pre-theoretic view was solipsism? When you were a child, you didn't take an external world or other minds for granted? I find that amazing. Even if it's true, how do you explain others' pre-theoretic beliefs in the external world and other minds? Why do you think that most people react as if it seems crazy that there is no external world when they first hear about that idea? Why do you think they hold to naive realism? Hume thought that it _does_ seem that there's an external world. He takes that to be the commonsense view, the view of the average person, and the view which he himself "cannot help" but assume when he goes about daily life. He also argued that there _is_ a concept of causation but that it is not necessary connection. In fact, he grounds it entirely in seemings: "I shall venture to affirm, as a general proposition, which admits of no exception, that the knowledge of this relation [i.e. cause and effect] is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori; but arises entirely from experience [i.e. seemings], when we find, that any particular object are constantly conjoined with each other." Here is another quote in which he asserts that causality is a seeming: "I say, then, that, even after we have _experience_ of the operation of cause and effect..." (emphasis added). I don't see how a seeming could be without content. A seeming is an experience. How can you have an experience without content, an experience of nothing? If the seeming is not there, why do we (me, Huemer, Hume, most people) think it is? I also don't see how any belief in an external world cannot ultimately depend on seemings or how we can have any access to the validity of inductive and abductive inference which does not involve seemings. I don't actually see how we could have any access to anything without involving seemings. How do you access something without it appearing to you? I agree with Hume that we don't have access to the validity of induction, but this isn't in tension with phenomenal conservatism. Phenomenal conservatism doesn't hold that we have access to the validity of induction (i.e. that we are acquainted with it) but that we have access to its _appearing_ valid (which Hume accepts) and that this is, in the absence of defeaters, justification for a belief in its validity.

[@maxmax9050]

@@thejimmymeister Hey thanks for the reply. Firstly, I don't deny that people *claim* to hold a belief in something like an external world. It certainly "seems" the case to pretty much everyone that there is an external world, and that this is based in general experience. I'm just saying that this seeming is purely a cognitive error. There is no such seeming of what they are claiming to experience. Yes, Hume reduced causation to mere constant conjunction, but that was the point of his error theory and supports what I'm saying. People *think* causation is a necessary connection between contiguous objects and events and is something they directly experience or can derive from experience when they see things happen. But Hume's thesis, as you understand, is that this is an error; all there are are constant conjunctions of experiences. That is what is given, but we mistakenly think the base experience tells us something more. People think, whether implicitly or explicitely, that objects have necessary connections to eachother as cause and effect. That is not something you experience (so he argues), but people mistakenly think they do for purely psychological reasons. That is what I am saying. Causation seems like necessary connection, but that doesn't really exist in our experience. There is only constant conjunction, which we mistake as seeming like this idea of necessary connection. But we have no idea or experience of necessary connection, though we think we do. That is Hume's error theory thesis. So to your incredulity: *I don't see how a seeming could be without content. A seeming is an experience. How can you have an experience without content, an experience of nothing?* I mean exactly what Hume meant to show. Many people have seemings that don't actually make sense and don't exist in the way they think they do. As I understand PC, the seeming must actually possess genuine propositional content derivable from an attendent experience. There are seemings that don't possess propsitional content, though they have the illusion of possessing propositional content. Therefore, rote seemings aren't justifiers. That is the argument. Think of it this way: Can can it really "seem" to someone that they see a square circle? No. There is no such seeming. And yet, you will find plently of people for whom they claim square circles seem conceivable to them. These people, I would argue, just are confused. There is nothing there, no content to reference.

[@thejimmymeister]

@@maxmax9050 So do you deny that people actually hold that belief? If so, why do you think they claim to hold it? I don't understand what you mean by the seeming being a cognitive error. Do you mean that it does not correspond to a metaphysical truth? Phenomenal conservatism doesn't demand that it does. Do you mean that the seeming is not an acquaintance with the external world? Phenomenal conservatism holds that it isn't an acquaintance, so there's no problem there. Do you really mean, as you subsequently say, that "there is no such seeming"? If so, that's incoherent; if it certainly seems the case, it cannot be that there is no such seeming. Hume's argument does not support what you're saying. You're saying that there is no real seeming of causation. Hume says that there is. People *think* causation is a necessary connection because it *seems* that way to them. (Hume agrees that people think this, and it is consistent with phenomenal conservatism.) Hume's thesis is that 1) there exist defeaters (namely, that A->B is not contained within the concepts of A or B and that we do not observe necessary connection itself but merely constant conjunction) for that belief and so it is unjustified and 2) it seems that causation is constant conjuction, there are no defeaters for this view, and so it is justified. Both of these are consistent with phenomenal conservatism; in fact, they presuppose phenomenal conservatism or something very much like it (so very much like it that it is practically identical). I mentioned defeaters above. One of them is that we do not observe necessary connection itself. This does not mean that it doesn't seem like there is necessary connection; it means only that we are not acquainted with necessary connection. The seemings of phenomenal conservatism are explicitly not acquaintances, so this is completely compatible with phenomenal conservatism. That we are not acquainted with x does not mean that it doesn't seem that x. That necessary connection doesn't exist (in our experience or independently of it) doesn't mean that it doesn't seem like it does. We cannot mistake something as seeming like x. If there is anything at all we cannot be mistaken about, it is our seemings. This is the bedrock of empiricism. Hume accepts it. What would it mean to be mistaken about a seeming? How could I possibly be wrong that something seems to me to be the case? How could I get the mistaken belief that x seems to be the case? We do not mistake constant conjunction as seeming to be necessary connection; it _really does_ seem that way. Hume doesn't deny this. He just states that this seeming cannot correspond to metaphysical truth, and he argues this by providing defeaters. Hume did not mean to show that we have seemings without content. Seemings are impressions, and he did not suggest that there can be an empty impression. He did not mean to show that _seemings_ don't exist, either, but that the things which we take them to correspond to don't exist. He showed this by providing defeaters for these seemings. This is all perfectly consistent with phenomenal conservatism. What seemings don't have propositional content? _It seems like there is causation_ and _It seems like causation is necessary connection_ clearly have propositional content. Hume argues that those propositions are false, but they couldn't be false if they weren't propositions to begin with. How could something have the illusion of propositional content? I don't understand what you mean. I don't think that it can seem to someone that he or she is seeing a square circle. I have never met anyone who made such a claim. I have met people who claimed that a square circle is conceivable. I do not believe that a square circle is conceivable, but I believe that it seems to them that it is. This is not an empty seeming; the propositional content is _a square circle is conceivable_ . I believe that proposition is false, but I don't believe it's not a proposition.

[@dummyaccount.k]

so what i think ppl mean by "All is one" is that they experienced the brainstate of "To Hen" or smth (if i may speak neoplatonist in this context). same thing they mean when they say they met god while theye were tripping on substances.

[@lanceindependent]

Suppose that it seems to one person that P, and it seems to another person that not-P. Each has justification for their beliefs in the absence of defeaters. Suppose neither considers the objections of the other sufficient to override their confidence in their belief that P or not-P. Are there any steps that can be taken to resolve these disagreements? I am thinking specifically of moral realism. I simply do not share the intuitions moral realists report having. What's more, it seems to me that it is *not* the case that there are or even could be moral facts. I have yet to hear anything convincing from moral realists that would lead me to think moral realism is correct.

[@JudeLind]

I find it unbelievable that it doesn’t, to you, *seem* immoral regardless of the attitudes of observers to, e.g, kill and rape a million babies regardless of attitudes of observers

[@10mimu]

The only thing left is to stare at each other, maybe throw one or two insults. (Almost) every philosophical dispute ends in stalemate, doesn't mean one side isn't in fact right or that there aren't reasons to back up each side.

[@pedjazoo]

‘Fools for Christ’ ;)

[@nosteinnogate7305]

Good/moral and ought do not have to be necessarily connected. If you subscribe to divine command theory and the god is evil, you ought to do the bad thing. If you subscribe to moral naturalism it is just the case that something is good or bad, but it does not follow that you ought to do that thing.