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Notes
Sharon and Spectre’s version of Underdetermination says that there can be two (or more) inconsistent theories supported by the same body of evidence. My Underdetermination principle is weaker, but is all they need.
Sharon and Spectre’s main principle is what they call Consistency of Evidence (CS): If e evidentially supports h, e does not evidentially support the negation of h. Notice that Entailment is weaker than CS, but (again) is all that Sharon and Spectre need to make their argument.
See Vogel (forthcoming) and Pryor (2013).
See van Fraassen (1984). The reflection principle says, roughly, that if one’s conditional confidence at a time t in a proposition p, given that one’s confidence in that proposition at a later time t’ will be r, should also be r. Thus, for instance, if I know that I will later be confident that p, then I should already be confident that p.
In my reconstruction I only use two atomic propositions, where they use three. I don’t see the need for the third proposition.
They could, as they intimate in note 31, appeal to the principle that evidence for a disjunction must be evidence for at least one of the disjuncts. It is not clear to me why one would accept this principle about disjunctions but reject Entailment.
Footnote 46 of Sharon and Spectre’s paper is relevant here. They say that “[t]aking p itself [in my case, that there is a red wall in front of me] as one’s new evidence will not essentially affect the argument. Standard conditionalization is unwarranted on p since its probability is less than 1 (…), and using Jeffrey conditionalization will leave things as they stand.” As I go on to say in the main text, so much the worse for both standard and Jeffrey conditionalization.
They also claim, at one point, that CE just is incompatible with Underdetermination alone, but I have argued that this argument fails and that they need something like Entailment.
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Comesaña, J. On Sharon and Spectre’s argument against closure. Philos Stud 174, 1039–1046 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0722-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0722-3