The Logic of Confusion*
John MacFarlane · Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · 2007
Because I am color blind, I routinely wear mismatched socks and clashing colors (or so I am told). Those who know about my visual deficiencies do not hold me responsible for these fashion mistakes. They may tell me where I've gone wrong, but they do not censure me for sloppiness or lack of a fashion sense, as they might if I had normal color vision. It is tempting to tell a similar story about the charity due those who have taken two things to be one and confused them in their thought and talk. When their confusion leads them to make inferential mistakes that would ordinarily be grounds for harsh criticism (like equivocation or misjudging the weight of the evidence), we go easy on them. We acknowledge that the arguments they have given are bad, but we excuse them for having given them. If Joe Camp is right, however, this analogy is profoundly misleading: taking someone to have confused two things is not at all like taking someone to be color-blind. To say that Fred has confused Ant A and Ant B is not to describe Fred's mental state, but to take a normative position on how Fred's reasoning ought to be appraised. And the position is not that Fred should be excused for making certain inferential mistakes (for example, equivocating), but rather that he should be understood paternalistically as unable to make these mistakes in the first place. What this requires, according to Camp, is that we refrain from assigning truth values to Fred's confused claims and evaluate his inferences for validity using a fourvalued epistemic semantics.1 The details are fascinating, and we will get to them shortly. But first, a little reflection on how the game begins.