There’s been light posting as I’m just coming off two very busy days, though busy in the ways that make scholarly life so very satisfying. On Thursday, I spoke to the Philosophy Department at Texas A&M University about “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: The Case of Freud,” and I’m grateful to the graduate students and faculty–especially (and with apologies for omissions) to Colin Allen, Max Cresswell, Ted George, John McDermott, Roger Sansom, and Robin Smith–for making it so intellectually rewarding; what a congenial intellectual community they appear to have in College Station! My paper–excerpted from a longer piece that discusses Marx and Nietzsche as well (and which will appear in The Future for Philosophy volume out from OUP in the fall, with other essays by Annas, Pettit, Railton, Williamson, Chalmers, Kim, Goldman, Hurka, Cartwright, Kitcher, Garrett, and Langton covering almost all aspects of our discipline)–addressed three main topics: it argued against a whole family of what I call “moralizing” readings of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, in favor of naturalistic readings; it gave an account of the connection between explaining the causal genesis of a belief and having grounds for suspicion about the belief (the essence, on my reading, of a “hermeneutics of suspicion”); and it also argued against one important, recent moralizing reading of Freud–David Velleman’s–which marries a quasi-Freudian account of moral motivation to a quasi-Kantian view of morality. (Velleman’s ingenious work on these topics manifests a condition that deserves a formal, clinical name, which I hereby propose: “David Lewis Syndrome.” Philosophers manifest David Lewis Syndrome when they bring extraordinary dialectical ingenuity to bear on behalf of completely implausible philosophical theses.)

I rushed back from College Station yesterday morning for a fabulous 3-hour workshop here in Austin with Larry Laudan, and faculty and students in the Law & Philosophy Program, on Laudan’s paper on “Benefit of the Doubt.” Laudan’s work on the epistemology of proof is ground-breaking and will, I hope, get a wide audience among law professors (his paper on “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” is appearing in Legal Theory shortly). Laudan notes, plainly correctly, that legal scholars simply take for granted that showing that a rule of evidence or procedure will reduce the number of false convictions suffices as an argument for changing the rule. Against this “error-distributionist” concern–a concern for how mistaken verdicts are distributed as between false convictions and false acquittals (with an overwhelming preference for minimizing the former)–is the error-minimizing objective of designing rules of evidence and procedure that maximize the number of true verdicts and minimize the number of mistaken ones, however they are distributed across convictions and acquittals. Laudan’s proposal is to build all the error-distributionist concerns in to the standard of proof, leaving error-minimization as the only error-related consideration in crafting other rules of evidence and procedure. (There are, of course, a range of rights- and policy-based considerations that inform the rules of evidence, that are unrelated to either error minimization or error distribution; Laudan takes up the issue of how to navigate through these considerations, in conjunction with epistemic ones, in his forthcomng book on these topics.)

One nice pedagogical anecdote courtesy of Professor McDermott from Texas A&M. He often asks his students to write down on a piece of paper which of their central beliefs they “chose” and which they simply “inherited.” As he put it, some of the students are (figuratively) “reduced to tears” by the exercise. Interesting!