Dear all, The HPS Philosophy Workshop provides a friendly and supportive setting for graduate students and postdocs to get feedback on their work-in-progress from their peers. Texts are circulated one week in advance and discussed over tea and biscuits in HPS Seminar Room 1 on alternate Wednesdays, 5-6pm.
We continue next Wednesday with James Poskett (PhD student in HPS) on "Mind your Ps and Qs: a contrastive account of testimonial inference to the best explanation". The abstract is below; please contact me if you'd like a PDF of the paper. Best wishes, Vashka -- Testimonial inference to the best explanation (TIBE) is a promising descriptive account of our testimonial practices. In this paper I argue that TIBE must be supplemented by contrastivism in order to explain both the success and the failure of testimony. In doing so, I incorporate two domains of the philosophy of science which are often treated as distinct: contrastive explanation (Why P rather than Q?) and contrastive knowledge (S knows P rather than Q). This contrastivist development imposes a requirement to manage contrast classes. In light of this, I make the novel argument that TIBE is a two-step process. A primary IBE is performed in order to identify the speaker's contrast class. A secondary IBE is then performed to evaluate the truth of the speaker's testimony. These developments help emphasise the role of context in the management of testimony. _____________________________________________________ Sent by the CamPhilEvents mailing list. To unsubscribe or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents Posts are archived here: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive
