Dear all,
Rachel Fraser (Peterhouse) will be giving a paper entitled “The
Metaphysics of Epistemic Norms" (abstract below) this Wednesday at the
Serious Metaphysics Group.
The seminar will run in our usual time from 4:30 to 6:00pm, in the Board
Room of the Philosophy Faculty.
Hope to see you there,
Carlo
Abstract
Recent epistemology has seen a dispute between those who think all
fundamental epistemic norms are synchronic ("time slice epistemologists)
and those who think there exist fundamental epistemic norms with a
diachronic character ("traditionalism"). One powerful argument in favour
of time slice epistemology is due to Hedden (2015). Hedden argues that
traditionalism relies on the intuition that there is something
rationally amiss in "tragic sequences": sequences in which each time
slice of an agent acts just as they (pragmatically) should, but the
outcome would have been (pragmatically) better had at least one of the
time-slices failed to act in this way. Hedden argues that, contrary to
appearances, there need be nothing amiss in such tragic sequences;
accordingly, we cannot argue that diachronic epistemic norms are
required to prevent tragic sequences.
I show that we can construct *epistemic* tragic sequences — sequences
such that every time slice of an agent appears to maximise the epistemic
good from their perspective, but from every time slice's perspective, it
is such that a different sequence of actions would have done a better
job of maximising the epistemic good. The idea that such sequences are
irrational is less vulnerable to objection than the claim that tragic
sequences are pragmatically irrational. I conclude that the case against
traditionalism is less strong than things initially appear.
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