Dear all, In a special start-of-term bonanza, there will be two CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) seminars this week. All welcome!
FIRST SEMINAR: Wednesday 15th October 1-2:30pm in the Dept of History and Philosophy of Science, Seminar Room 2. Richard Pettigrew (Bristol) will give a talk entitled "Accuracy First Epistemology". (The abstract is below.) SECOND SEMINAR (Note unusual Time/Date/Venue) Thursday 16th October 12:30-2pm in the Dept of History and Philosophy of Science, Seminar Room 1. Anjun Chakravartty (Notre Dame) will give a talk entitled "The Realist Stance". (Abstract to Follow) Best wishes, Christopher Abstract: An agent’s degrees of belief should satisfy the axioms of probability. She should update her degrees of belief in the light of new evidence in line with the Bayesian rule of conditionalization. If she learns the objective chances, her degrees of belief ought to match them. In the absence of any evidence, she ought to distribute her degrees of belief equally over all possibilities. These are norms that govern epistemic agents when we represent them as having degrees of belief in the propositions they entertain. What establishes these norms? Pragmatic arguments have been given for some; evidentialist arguments for others. In this talk, I want to describe an alternative sort of argument. It begins with the claim that the sole fundamental virtue of degrees of belief is their accuracy, or proximity to the truth, and it provides a way of measuring this accuracy. Finally, it derives the consequences of this assumption. Amongst those consequences are the four norms just listed. _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
