Implausible Theories Research Articles

Evidentialism and Epistemic Duties to Inquire

Abstract Are there epistemic duties to inquire? The idea enjoys intuitive support. However, prominent evidentialists argue that our only epistemic duty is to believe well (i.e., to have doxastically justified beliefs), and doing so does not require inquiry. Against this, I argue that evidentialists are plausibly committed to the idea that if we have epistemic duties to believe well, then we have epistemic duties to inquire. This is because on plausible evidentialist views of evidence possession (i.e., views that result in plausible theories of evidentialist justification), inquiry is sometimes a necessary constitutive means of forming doxastically justified beliefs—beliefs that are proportioned to and based on one's evidence. So, either evidentialist views of evidence possession commit them to epistemic duties to inquire or they lead to independently implausible theories of evidentialist justification. My discussion also has important implications for the zetetic turn in epistemology, since I argue that evidentialists who are staunchly opposed to epistemic norms on inquiry have reason to reconsider.

Of tinfoil hats and thinking caps: Reasoning is more strongly related to implausible than plausible conspiracy beliefs

People who strongly endorse conspiracy theories typically exhibit biases in domain-general reasoning. We describe an overfitting hypothesis, according to which (a) such theories overfit conspiracy-related data at the expense of wider generalisability, and (b) reasoning biases reflect, at least in part, the need to reduce the resulting dissonance between the conspiracy theory and wider data. This hypothesis implies that reasoning biases should be more closely associated with belief in implausible conspiracy theories (e.g., the moon landing was faked) than with more plausible ones (e.g., the Russian Federation orchestrated the attack on Sergei Skripal). In two pre-registered studies, we found that endorsement of implausible conspiracy theories, but not plausible ones, was associated with reduced information sampling in an information-foraging task and with less reflective reasoning. Thus, the relationship between belief in conspiracy theories and reasoning is not homogeneous, and reasoning is not linked specifically to the “conspiracy” aspect of conspiracy theories. Instead, it may reflect an adaptive response to the tension between implausible theories and other beliefs and data.

The Hollowing out of Youngstown Sheet: How Congress and the Courts Can Restore Limits on Presidential Power

Justice Jackson's concurring opinion in the Youngstown Sheet steel seizure case is seen as a rejection of unlimited presidential power and a suggestion that presidents should, when possible, act with Congress rather than acting unilaterally. However, his famous tripartite framework can be exploited. After 9/11, both the Bush and Obama administrations claimed statutory authorization when none existed in order to lend legitimacy to what were in fact unilateral actions. In most cases, Congress and the courts declined to challenge implausible theories of statutory interpretation relied on by the executive branch. The result is that national security power has increasingly been concentrated in the hands of the president, cloaked by the fiction that presidents are acting pursuant to statutory authority. Congress and the courts can and should give meaning to Jackson’s tripartite framework by rejecting implausible claims that executive branch action is supported by statutory authority. This would restore meaning to the tripartite framework as an effective tool to define and set limits on executive power.

The Tempting of American Antitrust Law: An Open Letter to President Trump

The greatness of American antitrust law derives from its having been forged since 1890 by federal judges who distilled general principles from individual cases actually litigated on a factual record and scrutinized under the Federal Rules of Evidence — including government cases in which the Antitrust Division or the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) bore the burden of proof. But today the Division and the FTC are commissariats dispensing ukases of “soft law” through guidelines, business review letters, speeches, press releases, and raised eyebrows. They avoid litigating because they lose too often when they need to convince a federal judge of the righteousness of their interpretations of the law. The degeneration of U.S. antitrust enforcement has global ramifications. Citing an “abuse of dominance,” foreign enforcers routinely threaten to punish the most successful American multinational companies that compete with or supply their national champions. These foreign enforcers pursue what are, by American standards, implausible theories of liability that most U.S. district judges would quickly discern to be unsupportable by facts and sound economic analysis. Typically, these foreign enforcers also deny American companies the due process that the U.S. Constitution would guarantee a defendant in any American courtroom. The latest example occurred in December 2016, when the Korean Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) imposed an $865 million fine on Qualcomm, the U.S. pioneer in cellphone technology. In its press release announcing the fine, the KFTC acknowledged the assistance of Korea’s national champion, Samsung. The ease with which antitrust enforcers in countries like Korea and China can flagellate an American multinational can corrode the rule of law within the United States. It is tempting for American antitrust enforcers to encourage their foreign counterparts to prosecute American multinationals under more parsimonious standards of due process and more invasive theories of antitrust liability than American law would ever permit. The practical economic effect of the foreign prosecution can be to produce a result having extraterritorial effect throughout the world — even in the United States, where the conduct is lawful. President Obama’s Antitrust Division, encouraged by several Silicon Valley giants, pivoted from being an enforcer of U.S. antitrust law to being a global industrial planner that favored some business models in the technology sector over others. The Division then concocted and disseminated soft law in the form of speeches and business review letters that favored the economic interests of the Silicon Valley giants. Such edicts circle the globe in a mouse click and abet antitrust enforcers in Korea and China, as well as Europe. By executive order, President Trump should instruct his administration that no official of the U.S. government may aid a foreign antitrust authority (1) that seeks to prosecute an American company doing business in its jurisdiction on a theory of “abuse of dominance” that would be unlikely to withstand a motion to dismiss if instead pleaded under U.S. antitrust law in an American court or (2) that employs investigatory or judicial procedures that lack the fundamental fairness that American justice requires. President Trump should appoint to the Antitrust Division and the FTC only persons who are willing to bear the burden of proving in federal court that the interpretation of antitrust principles that they espouse deserves to be called the law of the United States.

The Parade of the Bankers’ New Clothes Continues: 44 Flawed Claims Debunked

The debate on banking regulation has been dominated by flawed and misleading claims. The title of our book The Bankers New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press, 2013, see bankersnewclothes.com) refers to flawed claims about banking and banking regulation, and the book discusses and debunks many of them.Flawed claims are still made in the policy debate, particularly in the context of proposals that banks be funded with more equity and less debt than current or new regulations would allow. Those who make the flawed claims do so without addressing our arguments, even when commenting on the book or on our other writings. Because the financial system continues to be dangerous and distorted, however, flawed claims must not win the policy debate.This document provides a brief account of claims that we have come across since the book was published in February, 2013. We provide brief responses, with references to more detailed discussions in the book and elsewhere.2 Many claims are asserted without any justification. Some of these claims are simply false or based on fallacious reasoning. Other claims are misleading or irrelevant, for example confusing costs and benefits to banks or bankers with costs and benefits to society, which must be the focus of policy. Still other claims are based on implausible theories that ignore important parts of reality.We first provide a list of the flawed claims that the rest of this document takes on. References to chapter numbers refer to our book. Nothing that we heard or read changes our conclusions or our strong policy recommendations.

Bayesians sometimes cannot ignore even very implausible theories (even ones that have not yet been thought of)

In applying Bayes’s theorem to the history of science, Bayesians sometimes assume – often without argument – that they can safely ignore very implausible theories. This assumption is false, both in that it can seriously distort the history of science as well as the mathematics and the applicability of Bayes’s theorem. There are intuitively very plausible counter-examples. In fact, one can ignore very implausible or unknown theories only if at least one of two conditions is satisfied: (i) one is certain that there are no unknown theories which explain the phenomenon in question, or (ii) the likelihood of at least one of the known theories used in the calculation of the posterior is reasonably large. Often in the history of science, a very surprising phenomenon is observed, and neither of these criteria is satisfied.

Thinking Without Global Generalisations: A Cognitive Defence of Moral Particularism1

In their article entitled “Ethical Particularism and Patterns”, Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit, and Michael Smith (JPS henceforth) argue that moral particularism is a cognitively implausible theory since it appears to entail the view that one might have a skill that is not grounded in an ability to recognise and represent natural patterns in the world. This charge echoes the complaints of computational theorists of cognition against their embodied cognition counterparts, namely that, theories of cognition that eschew talk of mental representation are implausible qua theories of cognition. In both debates, the cognitive role of generalisation is central to the discussion; however, contrary to the received wisdom, I want to suggest that the dispute is not between generalisation or mental representation on the one hand and no generalisation or mental representation on the other, but rather between what I will call global and local generalisation. Using the dialogue between JPS and Dancy (our paradigm particularist) to frame this discussion, I show that by replacing Dancy's connectionist model for particularist reasoning with a case‐based one, we not only vindicate his response to JPS, but we also gain insight into how it is the global/local distinction rather than the generalisation/no generalisation distinction that divides the two views.

Chinese settlement pattern analysis using SIR-A data: A comment

Abstract Lo's paper in Remote Sensing Letters uses an interesting data source to study settlement patterns in North China. His use of point pattern analysis, however, tells us little about these patterns. The analysis, which contains some technical errors, allows him to support or reject only extremely implausible theories about the settlement process.

Death and renovation at the end of the Mesozoic

The first dinosaur remains, a mososaurian jaw more than a meter long, was unearthed near Maastricht, Holland, in 1770. As recounted by Desmond [1976], it created a scientific sensation. With the discovery of a wealth of additional fossils during the 19th and 20th centuries, it became clear that the dinosaurs had evolved into a fantastic array of forms and sizes and were reigning supreme during the Mesozoic. It also became clear that they disappeared very abruptly near the peak of their success. What killed them remained a mystery that fascinated scientists for more than a century and generated a host of more or less implausible theories.