Logs, Analíticas de aprendizaje (LA) y Minería de datos educativos (EMD)

With the Deference Principle, the idealist assumes that truths about ordinary objects correspond to subjects’ (fully-informed, idealized) judgments about objects. In this sense, the idealist assumes that judgments about objects are similar to judgments aboutgames.

Suppose we were told all of the relevant details about the rules, aims, history, etc. of a practiceX. Suppose that, on the basis of all of this information, we judge thatXis a game. It is implausible that, nonetheless,X could fail to be a game. For example, when told all of the details about the rules, aims, history, etc. of chess, we judge that chess is a game. It is not coherent to suppose that, nonetheless, chess might notreallybe a game after all. So we can motivate the following principle:

Deference Principle for Games: Let Gi be a sentence of the form ‘X is a

game’. Gi is true just in case ordinary speakers would (ideally) judge thatGi

is true when given a full description of the rules, aims, history, etc. of the practiceX in question.

Similarly, the idealist’s Deference Principle asserts that, if subjects were presented with all of the experiences ordinarily considered relevant to assessingSi, and thereby judged that

Siis true, it could not be the case that, nonetheless,Si turns out to be false.

That there is such a correspondence between truth and judgment is the main lesson of the Oracle thought experiment (see 6.4.1). This thought experiment shows that, when mak- ing judgments about ordinary objects, we do not care about whatever mind-independent external reality gives rise to our experiences; instead, we care about the world as it ap- pears tous. For this reason, we should not expect truths about ordinary objects to outstrip judgments about objects made on the basis of all of the counterfactual experiences insi.

Of course, the Deference Principle does not guarantee that all of ouractualjudgments about objects are correct. This is for two reasons.

One reason is that ordinary speakers are not fully-informed of all the relevant evidence. For example, suppose that I have observed a blue bike outside my apartment an hour ago and on that basis judge ‘There is a blue bike outside my apartment’. This judgment may be mistaken; perhaps the bike has been moved since then. To account for such cases, the Deference Principle appeals to subjects who are fully-informed14 of all the evidence ordinarily considered relevant to assessing the truth ofSi. This evidence would include,

e.g., the visual experiences I would have if I were outside my apartment right now: visual experiences that show my judgment about the bike is mistaken.

Even when assuming full information, we can still imagine truths about objects out- stripping our actual judgments about them. For example, subjects may make mistaken judgments due to careless reflection on the evidence. Similarly, the total set of evidence may be too complex for any human to fully process. This is why the Deference Princi- ple appeals to an idealization on the cognitive capacities of subjects making the judgments relevant to the principle, as discussed in note (iv) of section 7.4.15

7.6 Objections

Given the close link between truth and judgment discussed in the last section, one might worry that the Deference Principle makes truths about ordinary objectstoosubjec- tive. In this section, I will consider some objections of this form.

Objection 1: “Why should we suppose that it is the judgments of actual hu- man subjects that determine the truth of ordinary object judgments? Why not

14_{While it is fine for present purposes to leave the notion intuitive, I will clarify how to understand this}

assumption about “full information” in chapter 9.

15_{There are further reasons for challenging the alleged correspondence between truth and judgment de-}

scribed by the Deference Principle. For example, what about truths about objects in environments where experiences are not nomically possible? I consider these types of cases, and other challenges to the Defer- ence Principle, in chapter 9.

subjects of some other possible community?”16

Response: To respond to this objection, it is useful to reconsider the deference principle for games. The parallel objection in this case would be: why is it the case that the game judgments of actual human subjects determine which practices count as games?

The response is that the deference principle for games is a principle about howweuse the term ‘game’, not how some other community uses the term. Similarly, the reason the edenic idealist’s Deference Principle invokes actual human subjects is because it is a thesis about howweuse ordinary object terms, not some other community.17

Objection 2: “It seems that subjects from other cultures or subjects from dif- ferent time periods might consider different types of experiences relevant to assessing the truth of a manifest judgmentSi. The Deference Principle implies

that such subjects do not even share our concepts of objects.”

Response: To begin, I note that the Deference Principle does not imply that anytime two communities disagree on the experiences relevant to assessingSi, those communities pos-

sess different concepts. This is because of the cognitive idealization in the Deference Prin- ciple (see section 7.4): the experiences included insi are those that subjects wouldideally

consider relevant to assessing the truth of Si. For example, speakers in ancient Greece

would not consider flashlights relevant to judgments in dark environments since they would never have encountered flashlights before. But the cognitive idealization allows subjects to possess any concept it is possible to possess. And if ancient Greeks knew about flashlights, they would immediately recognize them as relevant to judgments in dark environments.

Might it be possible for there to be a community who assess evidence in radically different ways than we do? It is difficult to imagine a human community of this sort. But perhaps there could be an alien community of this sort; for example, an alien com- munity whose phenomenology is very different than our own might employ very different

16_{Cf.Carroll’s (1994, 53) objection to Lewis’ (1973, 73) account of laws of nature.}

17_{Of course, this objection would be a much greater concern if the Deference Principle was an attempt at}

epistemic practices than we do. On the assumption that these aliens make different fully- informed object judgments than we do, the Deference Principle will claim that the two communities are using terms in different ways. But this is exactly what we should say about such a case. If two communities have completely different standards for assessing the truth of a sentenceSi, then it is not plausible to interpret a dispute overSias substantive.

It is much more plausible to say that the aliens are simply employing different terms. Objection 3: “On the assumption of realism, we have an explanation of why we follow certain epistemic practices when making judgments about ordinary objects: we have these practices because they help us form true beliefs about a mind-independent external world. In contrast, the edenic idealist cannot ex- plain why we have the epistemic practices we have.”

Response: There are various types of explanations we might give for why we have the epis- temic practices that we actually have. We might give an evolutionary explanation: these practices have helped contribute to evolutionary fitness. Or we might give a historical ex- planation, tracing the origins of these practices. Or we might give a pragmatic explanation: these practices help us form various types of useful beliefs. All of these types of explana- tions are just as available to the edenic idealist as they are to the realist.

7.6.1 Is the deference principle dispensable?

In this chapter, I have offered the Deference Principle as a way of precisifying the relation between WE and WM. But one might wonder whether the edenic idealist really

needsthe Deference Principle in order to specify this relation. To respond, I will consider whether there are any “easier” ways to selectWM. In particular, I will consider whether it

is possible to directly read offWM from a description ofWE.

For an example of how this “direct strategy” would work, suppose the external world was like the Newtonian worldWN.18 The psychophysical laws on this epistemic possibility

18_{See 6.3 for a precise description ofW} N.

dictate that, roughly speaking, we experience an object in region J just in case particles densely populate the corresponding region in WN. So, roughly speaking, an object in

regionJ will exist inWM just in case particles densely populate the corresponding region

in WN. But then, given this direct link between WN and WM, why should the edenic

idealist bother with the Deference Principle and its attendant complexities?

I am willing to grant that, in certain cases, it may be possible to “read off”WM directly

fromWE. But there are two reasons why this “direct method” cannot and should not replace

the Deference Principle.

First: it will not always be possible to directly read offWM fromWE. For one kind

of case, we can consider examples where we are not able to positively conceive whatWE

is like “in itself” at all. In such cases, we could not read off WM from WE because we

could not even positively describe WE. For a second kind of case, we can consider ex-

amples where there is no clear link between WE and WM. For example, suppose WE

involves a wave function in an infinite-dimensional configuration space.19 _{Even given the}

psychophysical laws, it seems doubtful that we could read offWM fromWE. More likely,

the only way to identifyWM would be to consider the various counterfactual experiences

thatWE supports, which is just what the Deference Principle recommends.

This last example suggests that, instead of viewing them as rivals, it is better to think of the direct strategy as a shortcut form of the Deference Principle that is available in certain simple cases. If the link betweenWM fromWE is simple and uniform, we can use

this uniformity to read off whatWM is like. But in more complex cases, there is no other

recourse than to consider the experiences thatWE supports themselves.20 (Of course, this

19_{For discussion, see Ney (2012).}

20_{Here is an example to illustrate this point. Suppose thatW}

Eis a world where objects have edenic colors,

but these colors change drastically as the objects are moved through space. For example, an edenically red object in regionr1becomes edenically blue inr2, edenically green inr3, and so on. Now further suppose that the psychophysical laws compensate for these changes in the following way: edenic redness causes red experiences inr1, edenic blueness causes red experiences inr2, and so on, so that if an object were moved fromr1tor2tor3, it would seem to us to be red the entire time. On this scenario, the edenic idealist will say that an objectX’s color remains edenically red as it is moved through these spatial regions.

talk of “shortcuts” is metaphorical; it isn’t as if the edenic idealist is actually makingthe judgments relevant to world selection. The question concerning us is only whether there might be a simpler way for the edenic idealist to describe the relation between WM and

WE.)

Second: the Deference Principle provides the most “conceptually basic” way of think- ing about world selection. The guiding idea behind edenic idealism is to link the seman- tics of ordinary object discourse to the actual epistemology of that discourse. The edenic idealist accomplishes this by directly building ordinary epistemology into the Deference Principle. For this reason, any legitimate proposal to read offWM fromWE must endorse

the results of this principle. If a proposal conflicts wih the Deference Principle, it should be rejected as conflicting with our ordinary epistemology.21