Dear all, REMINDER: Tomorrow at the SMG we will have Nick Treanor (Edinburgh University) presenting a talk entitled ‘The (Serious) Metaphysics of Epistemic Normativity’ (abstract below). As usual it will be from 4.30 to 6pm in the Philosophy Faculty Board Room. The talk should last about 45 minutes followed by questions and discussion. All graduate students are welcome.
A full list of speakers for Lent and Easter term is available here: https://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/SMG Abstract: Consider the omniscient being and the blank slate. One has perfect, complete, immaculate knowledge, the other none at all. We are all somewhere in between. Perhaps we once were blank slates; no matter, none of us has been for a long time. Our knowledge increases or diminishes, both overall and with regard to specific subject matters. Interpersonal comparisons are possible too; each of you now knows more than I knew as a child, and there are subjects about which you know more than me and others about which I know more than you. We also differ from the omniscient being and the blank slate in that there is, in all of us, some admixture of error. It’s not just that how much we know can increase or diminish, and in principle be compared to how much some other person knows. It is that we can go wrong to a greater or lesser extent. All this points to the idea that there is a quantitative dimension to knowledge and error, one that (I will argue) is poorly understood. In this talk, I will outline the problem, which ties together epistemology and metaphysics, with a particular eye to showing (i) how the standard way this quantitative dimension is understood is mistaken, (ii) how an appeal to similarity suggests a better route, and how (iii) this approach threatens a perspectival or interest-dependent sense of the quantitative dimension of knowledge and error. The aim will be to collapse an issue in epistemology to an issue within metaphysics. I hope to see you there! Nathan Hawkins PhD student in Philosophy Cambridge University _____________________________________________________ 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.
