Modal Security

Clarke‐Doane, Justin; Baras, Dan

doi:10.1111/phpr.12643

Cited by 14 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 45 publications

(44 reference statements)

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“…As long as we can argue that our beliefs have certain appropriate modal characteristics with respect to truth — in particular, safety and sensitivity — then our beliefs are immune from undermining (see, e.g. Clarke‐Doane and Baras (2019) and Clarke‐Doane (2020)).…”

Section: Modalist Responsesmentioning

confidence: 99%

What's the coincidence in debunking?

Bhogal

2022

Philos Phenomenol Research

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Many moral debunking arguments are driven by the idea that the correlation between our moral beliefs and the moral truths is a big coincidence, given a robustly realist conception of morality.One influential response is that the correlation is not a coincidence because there is a common explainer of our moral beliefs and the moral truths. For example, the reason that I believe that I should feed my child is because feeding my child helps them to survive, and natural selection instills in me beliefs and dispositions that help my children survive since that is conductive to my genes continuing through the generations. Similarly, the reason that it's morally good to feed my child is because it helps them to survive, and survival is morally valuable.But if we look at some cases from scientific practice, and from everyday life, we can see, I argue, why this response fails. A correlation can be coincidental even if there is a common explainer. I give an account of the nature of coincidence that draws upon recent literature on scientific explanation and argue that the correlation between moral belief and moral truth is a coincidence, even given such common explainers. And I use this to defend a certain form of debunking argument. Consider this argument:(1) On robustly realist conceptions of morality the correlation between our actual moral beliefs and the moral truths is a big coincidence.(2) There is reason to reject theories that lead to big coincidences. So,(3) There is reason to reject either the correlation between our moral beliefs and the truth, or the robustly realist conception of morality.

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Section: Modalist Responsesmentioning

confidence: 99%

What's the coincidence in debunking?

Bhogal

2022

Philos Phenomenol Research

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“…Below, we will raise objections to two recent Modalist projects. The first project comes from Justin Clarke-Doane and Dan Baras (Forthcoming), and centers on a principle they call “Modal Security.” The second project is a defense of “Modal Virtue Epistemology,” by Bob Beddor and Carlotta Pavese (Forthcoming). Our criticisms of these two projects point toward the shortcomings of Modalism generally.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since learning that the clock has frozen in this context would undermine Smith's belief without requiring any change in her confidence regarding safety or sensitivity, this is a problem for Modal Security. Notice also that this case makes trouble even for “Modal Security 3 ,” from Clarke-Doane and Baras (Forthcoming: §8), which says: “If evidence, E, undermines our belief that P, then E gives us direct reason to doubt that our belief is sensitive or safe or E undermines the belief that <the belief that P is safe and sensitive>.” For reasons already given, the first disjunct of the consequent of Modal Security 3 is not met. And, plausibly, neither is the second disjunct, for two reasons: First, in the case now under consideration, Smith doesn't even believe that <the belief that it’s 8:22 is safe and sensitive>.…”

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confidence: 99%

Knowledge is Believing Something Because It's True

Bogardus¹,

Perrin²

2020

Episteme

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Modalists think that knowledge requires forming your belief in a “modally stable” way: using a method that wouldn't easily go wrong (i.e. safety), or using a method that wouldn't have given you this belief had it been false (i.e. sensitivity). Recent Modalist projects from Justin Clarke-Doane and Dan Baras defend a principle they call “Modal Security,” roughly: if evidence undermines your belief, then it must give you a reason to doubt the safety or sensitivity of your belief. Another recent Modalist project from Carlotta Pavese and Bob Beddor defends “Modal Virtue Epistemology”: knowledge is a belief that is maximally modally robust across “normal” worlds. We'll offer new objections to these recent Modalist projects. We will then argue for a rival view, Explanationism: knowing something is believing it because it's true. We will show how Explanationism offers a better account of undermining defeaters than Modalism, and a better account of knowledge.

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“…What we are interested in when we inquire what a trait was selected for is which (if any) of its effects boosted our ancestors' reproductive fitness, and thereby caused the genes associated with that trait to proliferate throughout our species. 6 See White (2010), Shafer-Landau (2012), Vavova (2014;forthcoming), Bogardus (2016), Clarke-Doane (2016), Sinclair (2018), and Clarke-Doane and Baras (2021). The most important points of criticism, to my identified for Joyce and Street's accounts, and, by so doing, move the evolutionary debunking project they initiated onto surer footing.…”

mentioning

confidence: 95%

The epistemology of evolutionary debunking

Koon

2021

Synthese

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The Epistemology of Evolutionary Debunking Justis Koon IntroductionMoral realism, as I will understand it here, is the conjunction of four theses: that moral language should be interpreted literally, that moral claims express beliefs, that there are at least some moral truths, and that these truths are mind-and language-independent. 1 Sharon Street (2006; and Richard Joyce (2006; have both advanced evolutionary debunking arguments which purport to show that, if moral realism is true, our moral beliefs are systematically unjustified. 2 These arguments are motivated by recent empirical work on the evolution of morality, work which suggests that the human moral sense was selected chiefly to promote cooperation among small tribes of huntergatherers in our distant evolutionary past. 3 If, however, our moral sense evolved due to the positive contribution that cooperation made to our ancestors' reproductive fitness, it becomes something of a mystery how it could also succeed in tapping into a well of mind-independent moral truths. It seems like it would be an extraordinary coincidence -in Street's words, nothing short of a miracle -if 1 For comparison, Ayer-style emotivists will reject all four theses, error theorists will reject the third, and moral relativists and constructivists will reject the fourth. There are a few meta-ethical views -I am thinking especially of thin forms of reductive naturalism, like those defended by Copp (2008) and Sterelny and Fraser (2017) -where it is unclear whether we should categorize them as realist or anti-realist. I will not be addressing these sorts of views here. 2 See Horn (2017) and Lutz (2018) for more recent presentations of evolutionary debunking arguments, and Korman ( 2019) for a review of the evolutionary debunking literature. 3 See Section 3.5 and the references therein. 2 evolutionary forces indifferent to the moral truth somehow shaped our faculties to be appropriately sensitive to it.Contrast the situation for vision. Any plausible account of the evolution of our visual faculties will make it clear that they were selected to capture information about the color, shape, texture, brightness, and relative distance of objects in our visual field, and to produce beliefs that accurately reflect these features of our surroundings. 4 We should not expect natural selection to have made our vision perfectly reliable, of course, both because selection is not all-powerful and must work within existing physical and biological constraints, and because visual illusions may, in rare circumstances, be adaptive. But, generally speaking, it will be an enormous boon to an organism's fitness for it to have an accurate picture of its environment, rather than being left in the dark about what goes on around it, blind not only to the presence of food, water, and potential mates, but also to the threats posed by predators and other hazards. So evolutionary theory gives us every reason to think that our visual faculties were selected primarily to produce true beliefs about the sources of the lig...

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Modal Security

Cited by 14 publications

References 45 publications

What's the coincidence in debunking?

What's the coincidence in debunking?

Knowledge is Believing Something Because It's True

The epistemology of evolutionary debunking

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