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Blindspots
Sorensen here offers a unified solution to a large family of philosophical puzzles and paradoxes through a study of "blindspots": consistent propositions that cannot be rationally accepted by certain individuals even though they might by true.
- GenresPhilosophy
468 pages, Hardcover
First published June 30, 1988
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September 12, 2025
From the second read...
While I thought I read carefully my first time around, my understanding has changed this second time; I had missed some key parts of Sorensen's theory. Let me emphasize what I had missed. Sorensen derives his theory of blindspots from two starting points. First, there’s the assumption that we criticize ourselves and each other when we know that we have inconsistent beliefs. This assumption is difficult to deny. The goal of belief is to arrive at truth and to avoid error. The world itself does not include inconsistencies; the property of being inconsistent cannot be had by the world itself but only by representations of the world. So, when we know that somebody has inconsistent beliefs, we know that they’ve gotten something wrong about the world, or some part of the world is critically missing from their awareness, the acknowledgment of which would reveal that some current beliefs are false.
The second key fact that makes up Sorensen’s starting point is the fact that we’re tied up with various beliefs. There appears to be two main ways of being tied up like this. A belief is just true and amounts to knowledge, and so there’s no way of getting rid of it. This can be for more or less contingent or logically necessary reasons. For example, a modest person knows that being modest consists in underestimating one’s worth and not bragging; this is a relatively contingent or empirical affair, but nevertheless it is something she knows, and so she can’t get around it. Alternatively, to say “Christmas is coming sooner than you expect” is a blindspot for everyone because of the conceptual requirements of what it means to expect something. We all know that when we expect something is the case, it is incompatible with knowing that something contrary to that is actually the case; expectation is tied up with knowledge, and so we can’t expect contradictory things.
Alternatively, we can be tied up with a belief in such a way that it produces various blindspots if the belief is something we can’t get around, regardless of whether it turns out to be true or false. This inability to get around it holds by virtue of certain constraints, like principles of psychology, laws of physics, or the laws of logic. For example, the principles of psychology make it the case that we can only believe that we are free when we make decisions (it is plausible when a person claims to believe otherwise, they are in an abnormal state or are wrong about what they actually believe). As another example, physical laws might explain why we can only know, for chancy events, overall probabilities at any present moment, and we can’t know with certainty what the relevant outcomes will in fact be in the future. This in combination with the very meaning of being lucky implies that “I will be lucky” is a blindspot for all of us.
This is quite the variety of cases that can all be counted as blindspots. Sorensen explains this by appealing to the fact that the basic case of a blindspot is a belief- or knowledge-blindspot, and belief and knowledge are at the heart of many propositional mental attitudes, like guessing, expecting, remembering, forgetting, liking, etc. I think that there is another explanation of this diversity, which I’ll raise later.
Moreover, blindspots appear to essentially involve the facts that different things happen to our cognitive mode at a given time when we think about something as an individual occurrence or particular, on the one hand, and when we think about the same thing in light of the relevant particulars manifesting a certain overall kind.
We’re able to almost always shift betwen this cognitive mode of considering kinds, rather than particulars, by virtue of the fact that we can imagine, read, or say out loud pretty much anything that comes to mind, regardless of whether we’re able to believe that what we say is true. It appears that when I can’t believe a proposition I utter, but can nevertheless find it intelligible in some weak sense or conceivable, this intelligibility implies that I’ve made sense of what’s going on in that proposition in terms of kinds, rather than of particulars. When I say out loud to you “It is raining, but I don’t believe it is raining,” I can’t believe this Moorean sentence. But it still has some minimal intelligibility to me. I can imagine what this might be like in a general way, which becomes more incoherent as I try to work out the details and remember what it really means to believe something (cf. Sorensen’s discussion on the structural requirement of belief formation; the mind will resist getting closer to a patent inconsistency, such that we’ll be unwilling to take deductive steps that get us closer to that. Perhaps, to generalize from and move away from Sorensen’s account, the mind will increasing lose “resolution” of what we’re thinking about or imagining, as we make mental transitions that concern a patent inconsistency).
So, blindspots are fascinating because they involve our awareness that we can’t possibly know or believe that the proposition under consideration is true, but we can imagine the proposition as true, and even “distantly know” in a sense that it is true for certain people, at certain times, and just not for us right now. This offers a promising starting point for thinking through what’s required of knowledge or belief, which explains this divergence between proper knowledge or belief, on the one hand, and this weird sense of at least imagining something but also potentially sort of knowing it in a “distant” way…
Sorensen has gotten me now thinking about how a complete account of this difference between "cognitive modes" needs to go beyond appeal to perceptual experience and perceptual relations to particulars. Many of the subject matters of blindspots do not concern things that we could possibly perceive (e.g., luck, perfect flatness, the world as it stands independently of our experience or thought concerning it). I propose that the additional factor we should appeal to and that would complete this account is emotion regulation. Emotions concern the significance that things have for us. Any predicate that is not perceptual/observable must be said to consist in certain significance. There’s a significance that amounts to being lucky. There’s a significant that amounts to perfect flatness, which has built into it the impossibility of perceiving anything that instantiates that. There are limits to what emotions we can have at a given moment, and the flipside of the same coin is that there are limits to what significances we can sense as part of reality. We can sense the flatness of a surface we perceive, but we can’t sense the perfect flatness of this surface; at best, we can imagine, think about, or make judgments about what it’d mean for this surface to be perfectly flat, and if we tell ourselves that the surface is so, we’ll be unable to sense this as real, and we won’t be able to believe it.
_______________
From the first read... (subtracted some text bc of the review word limit)
This was one of the most alluring and confusing books I’ve read. The confusion isn’t due to the fault of Sorensen at all; he is a remarkably clear writer, and entertaining, too. At this moment, I’m still confused, but hopefully I’ll arrive at some clarity through typing out my thoughts.
The thesis is that there are all sorts of “blindspots” of our cognition (mostly epistemically normative propositional attitudes are treated here), and appreciating these resolves a family of paradoxes. What are blindspots? This is a technical term Sorensen introduces. It builds on the metaphor of the blind spot on our visual field. There is always a little empty hole on our visual field, but subpersonal visual processing normally fills it in for us using surrounding material. Usually, this procedure works just fine; what is there behind our blind spot just is more of the same of what it is nestled between. Only in rare cases we can catch our blind spot.
Similarly, Sorensen argues, our reasoning always unfolds according to certain constraints (I’ll get to examples of these in a moment), and usually this works out fine. But sometimes we get caught up in having to accept paradoxical or absurd propositions, on the burden of rejecting these propositions committing us to self-conscious error. The absurdity of the cognitive situation amounting to a blindspot is this: we must say one of the following things (1) the subject of the belief (for example) isn’t actually having a belief, (2) the subject is straightforwardly endorsing a doxastically unacceptable proposition, or (3) the subject is endorsing a proposition which must turn out to be doxastically unacceptable, once they pursue the implications of their straightforward or obvious commitments just a tad more.
Central examples of blindspots are the sentences which make up Moore’s problem or paradox (call these Moorean sentences). These take on the form: “P, but I don’t believe that P” or “Not P, but I believe that P.” Sorensen offers a definition of Moorean sentences, which reveals that there are more examples that possess their essential absurd feature and are continuous with these classical examples, which are overlooked.
The long story short of what Sorensen makes of Moorean sentences is that they violate certain constraints which the act of believing imposes on us. The longer story is that Sorensen points out that definitions offered of Moorean sentences often rely upon doxastic logics (e.g., Moorean sentences are ones which cannot be believed in due to logical constraints of belief), which are controversial; so he aims to offer an alternative definition free of that dependency.
It’s useful to distinguish between three types of inconsistency. A direct inconsistency happens when one has different beliefs which evidently contradict one another. A patent inconsistency happens when one believes a proposition which is composed of inconsistent conjuncts. An indirect inconsistency happens when one has different beliefs which turn out to contradict one another, but this requires more careful probing; the contradiction here depends upon conditions external to the contents of the propositions believed in, such as structural requirements for having belief at all.
Sorensen points out that we shouldn’t criticize a speaker for holding inconsistent beliefs; this is commonplace. But we can criticize a speaker for committing to direct inconsistencies—a state which a speaker could be led into by their coming to face up to the inconsistency between their beliefs. We shouldn’t hold one another put to the standard of “absolute thoroughness,” or that we examine all of our beliefs and come to face any inconsistencies therein. But we should criticize a person’s indirect inconsistencies if these stop that person from growing their beliefs into certain directions, namely those which would make these inconsistencies more evident to that person. Compare this to the case where, in order for a person to ensure they’re able to continue believing in a self-deceived view of their situation, they have to avoid places that could provide evidence to the contrary, which hinders their life (e.g., to maintain the self-deceived view that one is healthy, one may avoid going to the doctor).
The problem with Moorean sentences is that whoever utters such a sentence is very near to committing to directly inconsistent beliefs. It isn’t just any ordinary case, which is not necessarily criticizable, of our holding inconsistent beliefs. To utter the first conjunct of such a sentence “P” and to believe it yields a belief which soon can be made out to contradict the second conjunct “I don’t believe P.” The utter is “pinned by the prospect of inconsistency.”
With this definition of Moorean sentences in place, Sorensen goes on to showing that the class of these sentences is more far-ranging than one might initially think. There are Moorean sentences which do not take on the grammatical form of “p & not-K(p)”. Consider the following: “Everyone is unconscious” and “No one believes anything” (there are more surprising examples some of which I’ll mention below). If any person believed either of these propositions, they in effect hold contradictory beliefs; it takes just a bit of teasing out the consequences of such propositions to show where the contradiction is at, and it is not unreasonable to expect any person to come to terms with that.
Sorensen proposes that we understand Moorean sentences as blindspots. They are propositions which are internally consistent, but which we can’t ever believe in, due to certain background constraints. These constraints can be temporally and subject sensitive; they do not apply to everybody, and they leave once time has passed. Moreover, which constraints are at play depends upon the kind of mental attitude a person has towards the proposition. So the status of a proposition’s being a blindspot should be understood relativized to a given propositional attitude (e.g., believing, knowing, guessing, remembering, forgetting), a given agent, and a given time. Certain truths can be inaccessible (at a certain time, for a certain person, who is taking up a certain propositional attitude), just like the point of your visual field behind your blind spot, because certain constraints based in these parameters bind you to be unable to acknowledge these truths.
Here’s an example of a subject-relative blindspot (rather than one which any person uttering the sentence must face). “I’m a solipsist, and you’re a solipsist.” This sentence is a blindspot only for individuals who are currently solipsists. Any normal person who watches this exchange can believe without an issue that two people who claims to be solipsists are indeed solipsists, but solipsists can’t believe this. The constraints which determine this sentence to be a blindspot are based in the mental attitude of belief, but also in the concept of solipsism itself; being a solipsist can only be satisfied if one believes that no one else exists than oneself. Another example is the predicate of being modest.
Sorensen argues that there is a determinate, potentially true proposition which makes up any blindspot, even though it is inaccessible. This goes against the grain of semantic anti-realism and its neighboring theses of verificationism and idealism, according to which what exists is just what’s “perceived” (or in the broader sense, what we can utter or think about). Sorensen supports a sort of semantic realism, according to which assertion/acceptance conditions of a sentence come apart from its truth conditions. Everything we can possibly assert need not exhaust everything that’s true.
This view serves as Sorensen’s starting point in addressing the three paradoxes. I skimmed over the chapters on the iterated prisoners’ dilemma and the prediction paradox, so I won’t go into those. But let me talk about the application of blindspots to the sorites’ paradox. In the sorities paradox, there must be some determinate point at which the heap stops being a heap, with the subtraction of one grain at a time, and it’s just that which point that’s at is inaccessible to us. This blindspot rides on constraints imposed by the starting premises of the paradox (e.g., for n-grains of sand which suffices as a heap, n-1 grains of sand still suffices as a heap).
Sorensen thinks that the opposing positions (e.g., there’s no fact of the matter regarding the cut-off point; every proposition along the ‘slippery slope’ should be assigned a degree of truth) are motivated by certain principles which shouldn’t be accepted in this case. One purported principle is that tiny changes can’t yield large effects; the subtraction of one grain of sand shouldn’t alter the status of heap to non-heap. This purported principle has counterexamples (e.g., subtracting one neutron to a chemical molecule will change the chemical type at play).
Another purported principle is that ignorance is compositional. That is, if when the ‘slippery slope’ is considered as a whole, the fact that it is not knowable where the cut off point is located should imply that at any individual step, it is also in principle not knowable; this invites the thought that there is no fact of the matter of the cut off point. But matters need not be compositional like that; properties of the whole need not be preserved in each of the parts.
Another purported principle is that if there’s no possible way to get evidence to settle an apparent tie, between competing positions, there’s no fact of the matter regarding which is correct.
An upshot of Sorensen’s account of blindspots is that there can be certain disagreements which are in principle irresolvable.
There’s my summary. I’m confused. One point of confusion is based in Sorensen’s claims that such a diversity of examples of blindspots are all blindspots in the same way...
I guess a reason for why this feels so odd is that the sort of constraints of the bad mood case are different in character than those of classic Moorean sentences. The constraints of the latter are eternal; they are based in necessary conditions of being a human and having rationality. In contrast, the constraints of the bad mood case are fleeting; as long as one’s heart is pounding and one is wallowing in their feeling victimized will one be unable to sincerely believe propositions which contradict that they’re a victim. It’s relatively easy to shake oneself out from these constraints; one needs only remember good times.
Moreover, in the bad mood case, it’s unclear which propositions exactly would count as those which the angry person can’t believe. To speak of “contradictions” between the truth of a proposition and the way the world is colored by virtue of a certain mood is only metaphorical.
To think for a moment about the relationship between Sorensen’s account and other thinkers I’ve read on the topic of self-knowledge and Moorean sentences: Sorensen is less concerned with first-person authority and self-knowledge, and rather he’s concerned with the nature of the absurdity of Moorean sentences and upshots this has for understanding a certain sense of a truth’s being epistemically inaccessible to one. Maybe his view would be compatible with other thinkers’ which are incompatible to one another, like Moran, Bryne, and Peacocke? On Moran’s view, we partially constitute our first-order belief by coming to know about it or forming a second-order belief. Sorensen’s account could be understood as specifying that there are constraints upon this process.
While I thought I read carefully my first time around, my understanding has changed this second time; I had missed some key parts of Sorensen's theory. Let me emphasize what I had missed. Sorensen derives his theory of blindspots from two starting points. First, there’s the assumption that we criticize ourselves and each other when we know that we have inconsistent beliefs. This assumption is difficult to deny. The goal of belief is to arrive at truth and to avoid error. The world itself does not include inconsistencies; the property of being inconsistent cannot be had by the world itself but only by representations of the world. So, when we know that somebody has inconsistent beliefs, we know that they’ve gotten something wrong about the world, or some part of the world is critically missing from their awareness, the acknowledgment of which would reveal that some current beliefs are false.
The second key fact that makes up Sorensen’s starting point is the fact that we’re tied up with various beliefs. There appears to be two main ways of being tied up like this. A belief is just true and amounts to knowledge, and so there’s no way of getting rid of it. This can be for more or less contingent or logically necessary reasons. For example, a modest person knows that being modest consists in underestimating one’s worth and not bragging; this is a relatively contingent or empirical affair, but nevertheless it is something she knows, and so she can’t get around it. Alternatively, to say “Christmas is coming sooner than you expect” is a blindspot for everyone because of the conceptual requirements of what it means to expect something. We all know that when we expect something is the case, it is incompatible with knowing that something contrary to that is actually the case; expectation is tied up with knowledge, and so we can’t expect contradictory things.
Alternatively, we can be tied up with a belief in such a way that it produces various blindspots if the belief is something we can’t get around, regardless of whether it turns out to be true or false. This inability to get around it holds by virtue of certain constraints, like principles of psychology, laws of physics, or the laws of logic. For example, the principles of psychology make it the case that we can only believe that we are free when we make decisions (it is plausible when a person claims to believe otherwise, they are in an abnormal state or are wrong about what they actually believe). As another example, physical laws might explain why we can only know, for chancy events, overall probabilities at any present moment, and we can’t know with certainty what the relevant outcomes will in fact be in the future. This in combination with the very meaning of being lucky implies that “I will be lucky” is a blindspot for all of us.
This is quite the variety of cases that can all be counted as blindspots. Sorensen explains this by appealing to the fact that the basic case of a blindspot is a belief- or knowledge-blindspot, and belief and knowledge are at the heart of many propositional mental attitudes, like guessing, expecting, remembering, forgetting, liking, etc. I think that there is another explanation of this diversity, which I’ll raise later.
Moreover, blindspots appear to essentially involve the facts that different things happen to our cognitive mode at a given time when we think about something as an individual occurrence or particular, on the one hand, and when we think about the same thing in light of the relevant particulars manifesting a certain overall kind.
We’re able to almost always shift betwen this cognitive mode of considering kinds, rather than particulars, by virtue of the fact that we can imagine, read, or say out loud pretty much anything that comes to mind, regardless of whether we’re able to believe that what we say is true. It appears that when I can’t believe a proposition I utter, but can nevertheless find it intelligible in some weak sense or conceivable, this intelligibility implies that I’ve made sense of what’s going on in that proposition in terms of kinds, rather than of particulars. When I say out loud to you “It is raining, but I don’t believe it is raining,” I can’t believe this Moorean sentence. But it still has some minimal intelligibility to me. I can imagine what this might be like in a general way, which becomes more incoherent as I try to work out the details and remember what it really means to believe something (cf. Sorensen’s discussion on the structural requirement of belief formation; the mind will resist getting closer to a patent inconsistency, such that we’ll be unwilling to take deductive steps that get us closer to that. Perhaps, to generalize from and move away from Sorensen’s account, the mind will increasing lose “resolution” of what we’re thinking about or imagining, as we make mental transitions that concern a patent inconsistency).
So, blindspots are fascinating because they involve our awareness that we can’t possibly know or believe that the proposition under consideration is true, but we can imagine the proposition as true, and even “distantly know” in a sense that it is true for certain people, at certain times, and just not for us right now. This offers a promising starting point for thinking through what’s required of knowledge or belief, which explains this divergence between proper knowledge or belief, on the one hand, and this weird sense of at least imagining something but also potentially sort of knowing it in a “distant” way…
Sorensen has gotten me now thinking about how a complete account of this difference between "cognitive modes" needs to go beyond appeal to perceptual experience and perceptual relations to particulars. Many of the subject matters of blindspots do not concern things that we could possibly perceive (e.g., luck, perfect flatness, the world as it stands independently of our experience or thought concerning it). I propose that the additional factor we should appeal to and that would complete this account is emotion regulation. Emotions concern the significance that things have for us. Any predicate that is not perceptual/observable must be said to consist in certain significance. There’s a significance that amounts to being lucky. There’s a significant that amounts to perfect flatness, which has built into it the impossibility of perceiving anything that instantiates that. There are limits to what emotions we can have at a given moment, and the flipside of the same coin is that there are limits to what significances we can sense as part of reality. We can sense the flatness of a surface we perceive, but we can’t sense the perfect flatness of this surface; at best, we can imagine, think about, or make judgments about what it’d mean for this surface to be perfectly flat, and if we tell ourselves that the surface is so, we’ll be unable to sense this as real, and we won’t be able to believe it.
_______________
From the first read... (subtracted some text bc of the review word limit)
This was one of the most alluring and confusing books I’ve read. The confusion isn’t due to the fault of Sorensen at all; he is a remarkably clear writer, and entertaining, too. At this moment, I’m still confused, but hopefully I’ll arrive at some clarity through typing out my thoughts.
The thesis is that there are all sorts of “blindspots” of our cognition (mostly epistemically normative propositional attitudes are treated here), and appreciating these resolves a family of paradoxes. What are blindspots? This is a technical term Sorensen introduces. It builds on the metaphor of the blind spot on our visual field. There is always a little empty hole on our visual field, but subpersonal visual processing normally fills it in for us using surrounding material. Usually, this procedure works just fine; what is there behind our blind spot just is more of the same of what it is nestled between. Only in rare cases we can catch our blind spot.
Similarly, Sorensen argues, our reasoning always unfolds according to certain constraints (I’ll get to examples of these in a moment), and usually this works out fine. But sometimes we get caught up in having to accept paradoxical or absurd propositions, on the burden of rejecting these propositions committing us to self-conscious error. The absurdity of the cognitive situation amounting to a blindspot is this: we must say one of the following things (1) the subject of the belief (for example) isn’t actually having a belief, (2) the subject is straightforwardly endorsing a doxastically unacceptable proposition, or (3) the subject is endorsing a proposition which must turn out to be doxastically unacceptable, once they pursue the implications of their straightforward or obvious commitments just a tad more.
Central examples of blindspots are the sentences which make up Moore’s problem or paradox (call these Moorean sentences). These take on the form: “P, but I don’t believe that P” or “Not P, but I believe that P.” Sorensen offers a definition of Moorean sentences, which reveals that there are more examples that possess their essential absurd feature and are continuous with these classical examples, which are overlooked.
The long story short of what Sorensen makes of Moorean sentences is that they violate certain constraints which the act of believing imposes on us. The longer story is that Sorensen points out that definitions offered of Moorean sentences often rely upon doxastic logics (e.g., Moorean sentences are ones which cannot be believed in due to logical constraints of belief), which are controversial; so he aims to offer an alternative definition free of that dependency.
It’s useful to distinguish between three types of inconsistency. A direct inconsistency happens when one has different beliefs which evidently contradict one another. A patent inconsistency happens when one believes a proposition which is composed of inconsistent conjuncts. An indirect inconsistency happens when one has different beliefs which turn out to contradict one another, but this requires more careful probing; the contradiction here depends upon conditions external to the contents of the propositions believed in, such as structural requirements for having belief at all.
Sorensen points out that we shouldn’t criticize a speaker for holding inconsistent beliefs; this is commonplace. But we can criticize a speaker for committing to direct inconsistencies—a state which a speaker could be led into by their coming to face up to the inconsistency between their beliefs. We shouldn’t hold one another put to the standard of “absolute thoroughness,” or that we examine all of our beliefs and come to face any inconsistencies therein. But we should criticize a person’s indirect inconsistencies if these stop that person from growing their beliefs into certain directions, namely those which would make these inconsistencies more evident to that person. Compare this to the case where, in order for a person to ensure they’re able to continue believing in a self-deceived view of their situation, they have to avoid places that could provide evidence to the contrary, which hinders their life (e.g., to maintain the self-deceived view that one is healthy, one may avoid going to the doctor).
The problem with Moorean sentences is that whoever utters such a sentence is very near to committing to directly inconsistent beliefs. It isn’t just any ordinary case, which is not necessarily criticizable, of our holding inconsistent beliefs. To utter the first conjunct of such a sentence “P” and to believe it yields a belief which soon can be made out to contradict the second conjunct “I don’t believe P.” The utter is “pinned by the prospect of inconsistency.”
With this definition of Moorean sentences in place, Sorensen goes on to showing that the class of these sentences is more far-ranging than one might initially think. There are Moorean sentences which do not take on the grammatical form of “p & not-K(p)”. Consider the following: “Everyone is unconscious” and “No one believes anything” (there are more surprising examples some of which I’ll mention below). If any person believed either of these propositions, they in effect hold contradictory beliefs; it takes just a bit of teasing out the consequences of such propositions to show where the contradiction is at, and it is not unreasonable to expect any person to come to terms with that.
Sorensen proposes that we understand Moorean sentences as blindspots. They are propositions which are internally consistent, but which we can’t ever believe in, due to certain background constraints. These constraints can be temporally and subject sensitive; they do not apply to everybody, and they leave once time has passed. Moreover, which constraints are at play depends upon the kind of mental attitude a person has towards the proposition. So the status of a proposition’s being a blindspot should be understood relativized to a given propositional attitude (e.g., believing, knowing, guessing, remembering, forgetting), a given agent, and a given time. Certain truths can be inaccessible (at a certain time, for a certain person, who is taking up a certain propositional attitude), just like the point of your visual field behind your blind spot, because certain constraints based in these parameters bind you to be unable to acknowledge these truths.
Here’s an example of a subject-relative blindspot (rather than one which any person uttering the sentence must face). “I’m a solipsist, and you’re a solipsist.” This sentence is a blindspot only for individuals who are currently solipsists. Any normal person who watches this exchange can believe without an issue that two people who claims to be solipsists are indeed solipsists, but solipsists can’t believe this. The constraints which determine this sentence to be a blindspot are based in the mental attitude of belief, but also in the concept of solipsism itself; being a solipsist can only be satisfied if one believes that no one else exists than oneself. Another example is the predicate of being modest.
Sorensen argues that there is a determinate, potentially true proposition which makes up any blindspot, even though it is inaccessible. This goes against the grain of semantic anti-realism and its neighboring theses of verificationism and idealism, according to which what exists is just what’s “perceived” (or in the broader sense, what we can utter or think about). Sorensen supports a sort of semantic realism, according to which assertion/acceptance conditions of a sentence come apart from its truth conditions. Everything we can possibly assert need not exhaust everything that’s true.
This view serves as Sorensen’s starting point in addressing the three paradoxes. I skimmed over the chapters on the iterated prisoners’ dilemma and the prediction paradox, so I won’t go into those. But let me talk about the application of blindspots to the sorites’ paradox. In the sorities paradox, there must be some determinate point at which the heap stops being a heap, with the subtraction of one grain at a time, and it’s just that which point that’s at is inaccessible to us. This blindspot rides on constraints imposed by the starting premises of the paradox (e.g., for n-grains of sand which suffices as a heap, n-1 grains of sand still suffices as a heap).
Sorensen thinks that the opposing positions (e.g., there’s no fact of the matter regarding the cut-off point; every proposition along the ‘slippery slope’ should be assigned a degree of truth) are motivated by certain principles which shouldn’t be accepted in this case. One purported principle is that tiny changes can’t yield large effects; the subtraction of one grain of sand shouldn’t alter the status of heap to non-heap. This purported principle has counterexamples (e.g., subtracting one neutron to a chemical molecule will change the chemical type at play).
Another purported principle is that ignorance is compositional. That is, if when the ‘slippery slope’ is considered as a whole, the fact that it is not knowable where the cut off point is located should imply that at any individual step, it is also in principle not knowable; this invites the thought that there is no fact of the matter of the cut off point. But matters need not be compositional like that; properties of the whole need not be preserved in each of the parts.
Another purported principle is that if there’s no possible way to get evidence to settle an apparent tie, between competing positions, there’s no fact of the matter regarding which is correct.
An upshot of Sorensen’s account of blindspots is that there can be certain disagreements which are in principle irresolvable.
There’s my summary. I’m confused. One point of confusion is based in Sorensen’s claims that such a diversity of examples of blindspots are all blindspots in the same way...
I guess a reason for why this feels so odd is that the sort of constraints of the bad mood case are different in character than those of classic Moorean sentences. The constraints of the latter are eternal; they are based in necessary conditions of being a human and having rationality. In contrast, the constraints of the bad mood case are fleeting; as long as one’s heart is pounding and one is wallowing in their feeling victimized will one be unable to sincerely believe propositions which contradict that they’re a victim. It’s relatively easy to shake oneself out from these constraints; one needs only remember good times.
Moreover, in the bad mood case, it’s unclear which propositions exactly would count as those which the angry person can’t believe. To speak of “contradictions” between the truth of a proposition and the way the world is colored by virtue of a certain mood is only metaphorical.
To think for a moment about the relationship between Sorensen’s account and other thinkers I’ve read on the topic of self-knowledge and Moorean sentences: Sorensen is less concerned with first-person authority and self-knowledge, and rather he’s concerned with the nature of the absurdity of Moorean sentences and upshots this has for understanding a certain sense of a truth’s being epistemically inaccessible to one. Maybe his view would be compatible with other thinkers’ which are incompatible to one another, like Moran, Bryne, and Peacocke? On Moran’s view, we partially constitute our first-order belief by coming to know about it or forming a second-order belief. Sorensen’s account could be understood as specifying that there are constraints upon this process.
January 5, 2026
A really interesting idea: can certain true propositions be locked from our understanding because issuing them would be self-contradictory? Since I spend 75% of my time reading about propositions that fulfil this, it was a nice way to tie them all together: BUT I am not sure if unbelievability in this sense can do the work Sorensen wants it to. People do say formally unbelievable things like "I believe P but I am not sure that P" all the time: they don't seem to be locked from us in the same way? Why not just point at evolutionary debunking or something. I have to say I did not read this book super properly though, so perhaps I did not understand.
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