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. Sometimes, the truth is bleak. When this happens, we might prefer not to know; we might even prefer to have false beliefs. For the same reason, however, when Ideas from this paper have been presented at the 2012 ARCHE/CSMN graduate conference, the MIT Dissertation Workshop, the 2014 MITing of the Minds, the 2014 Formal Epistemology Workshop, and the 2014 Joint Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. Thanks to the audiences and my commentators Stew Cohen, Declan Smithies, and Jeff Dunn, on these occasions. In addition, the paper has improved greatly as a result of comments from

The Value of Biased Information

“…5 We will call an inquiry rationally biased if, in that inquiry, the agent updates her credences using a biased plan that is 4 For a similar conception of updating plans, see Greaves and Wallace [2006], Schoenfield [2017], and Das [2019]. 5 This notion of bias is different from Salow's [2018] notion. On Salow's view, bias isn't a property of updating plans, but rather of inquiries themselves: for him, an inquiry is biased in favour of a proposition just in case the expected current evidential support for that proposition is lower than the expected posterior evidential support for that proposition.…”

Fragmentation and Higher-Order Evidence

“…They tend to turn on facts about our limited perceptual discriminatory capacities. Here's an example from Salow (2017b), who is adapting a case from Williamson (2011 that can point in any one of 60 slightly different directions. Your ability to discriminate where it is pointing is good, but not unlimited.…”

“…If people actually like me, the hand will be set to 53, 22 See Salmon (1981). 23 See, e.g., Titelbaum (2010), Salow (2017b). and so my evidence will only tell me that it is somewhere between 52 and 54, which I knew already.…”

Higher-Order Uncertainty

“…This conclusion is not original to me(Christensen 2010b;Sliwa and Horowitz 2015;Rasmussen et al 2016;Salow 2017).…”