Abstract
This is a response to Paul Boghossian’s paper: What is inference? (doi:10.1007/s11098-012-9903-x). The paper and the abstract originate from a symposium at the Pacific Division Meeting of the APA in San Diego in April 2011. John Broome was a co-commentator.
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Notes
Boghossian, this volume.
Boghossian writes, "By “inference” I mean reasoning with beliefs. Specifically, I mean the sort of “reasoned change in view” that Harman (1986) discusses, in which you start off with some beliefs and then, after a process of reasoning, end up either adding some new beliefs, or giving up some old beliefs, or both."—Boghossian, this volume.
I mean that it is not disposed of by the concerns about suppositional and premise-discharging inference. I do it mean that I think it is correct.
So much is explicit when reasoning by conditional proof is formulated in the notation of sequent calculus. Analogously for reductio.
Boghossian doesn't discuss the question of sufficiency, and nor will I here. But here is a question: suppose I accept certain propositions and then take it on testimony that they support a certain conclusion and proceed to accept it on that basis. Is the latter acceptance inferential?—I haven't, after all, actually carried out the inference myself.
As Boghossian is aware; see his n. 3.
This matter is discussed further in Part 1 of my Replies to Commentators in Coliva (2012).
Boghossian has often called this "blind inference", and treated it as a special case of a more general phenomenon of blind rule-following. But I dislike this terminology, for the reasons given earlier: rule-following has better be subject to the Taking Condition, and 'blind' following can therefore connote only the following of a rule that is merely sub-personally registered. Whereas what I am now calling basic inference is not that.
Reference
Coliva, A. (Ed.). (2012). Meaning, knowledge and mind Essays in honour of Crispin Wright. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Wright, C. Comment on Paul Boghossian, “What is inference”. Philos Stud 169, 27–37 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9892-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9892-9