Co-Chairs:
Haim Gaifman (Columbia)
Rohit Parikh (CUNY)
Rapporteur:
Yang Liu (Columbia)
October, 2014
The Rise and Fall of Accuracy-first Epistemology
Gregory Wheeler (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
4:10 pm, October 31, 2014
Faculty House, Columbia University
Abstract. Accuracy-first epistemology aims to supply non-pragmatic justifications for a variety of epistemic norms. The contemporary basis for accuracy-first epistemology is Jim Joyce’s program to reinterpret de Finetti’s scoring-rule arguments in terms of a “purely epistemic” notion of “gradational accuracy.” On Joyce’s account, scoring rules are taken to measure the accuracy of an agent’s belief state with respect to the true state of the world, where accuracy is conceived to be a pure epistemic good. Joyce’s non-pragmatic vindication of probabilism, then, is an argument to the effect that a measure of gradational accuracy satisfies conditions that are close enough to those necessary to run a de Finetti style coherence argument. A number of philosophers, including Hannes Leitgeb and Richard Pettigrew, have embraced Joyce’s program whole hog. Leitgeb and Pettigrew, for instance, have argued that Joyce’s program is too lax, and they have proposed conditions that narrow down the class of admissible gradational accuracy functions, while Pettigrew and his collaborators have sought to extend the list of epistemic norms receiving an accuracy-first treatment, a program that he calls Epistemic Decision Theory.
In this talk I report on joint work with Conor Mayo-Wilson that challenges the core doctrine of Epistemic Decision Theory, namely the proposal to supply a purely non-pragmatic justification for anything resembling the Von Neumann and Morgenstern axioms for a numerical epistemic utility function. Indeed, we argue that none of the axioms necessary for Epistemic Decision Theory have a satisfactory non-pragmatic justification, and we point to reasons why to suspect that not all the axioms could be given a satisfactory non-pragmatic justification. Our argument, if sound, has consequences for recent discussions of “pragmatic encroachment”, too. For if pragmatic encroachment is a debate to do with whether there is a pragmatic component to the justification condition of knowledge, our arguments may be viewed to address the true belief condition of (fallibilist) accounts of knowledge.
November, 2014
Conversation about Human Judgment and Decision-making
Daniel Kahneman (Princeton University)
4:10 pm, November 7, 2014
Faculty House, Columbia University
December, 2014
Two lessons to remember from the Sleeping Beauty problem
Teddy Seidenfeld (Carnegie Mellon University)
4:10 pm, December 5, 2014
Faculty House, Columbia University
February, 2015
Learning Conditionals and the Problem of Old Evidence
Stephan Hartmann (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
4:10 pm, February 13, 2014
Faculty House, Columbia University
Abstract. The following are abstracts of two papers on which this talk is based.
The Problem of Old Evidence has troubled Bayesians ever since Clark Glymour first presented it in 1980. Several solutions have been proposed, but all of them have drawbacks and none of them is considered to be the definite solution. In this article, I propose a new solution which combines several old ideas with a new one. It circumvents the crucial omniscience problem in an elegant way and leads to a considerable confirmation of the hypothesis in question.
Modeling how to learn an indicative conditional has been a major challenge for formal epistemologists. One proposal to meet this challenge is to construct the posterior probability distribution by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the posterior probability distribution and the prior probability distribution, taking the learned information as a constraint (expressed as a conditional probability statement) into account. This proposal has been criticized in the literature based on several clever examples. In this article, we revisit four of these examples and show that one obtains intuitively correct results for the posterior probability distribution if the underlying probabilistic models reflect the causal structure of the scenarios in question.
May, 2015
Gödel on Russell: Truth, Perception, and an Infinitary Version of the Multiple Relation Theory of Judgment
Juliet Floyd (Boston University)
4:10 pm, May 8, 2014
Faculty House, Columbia University
Formal Philosophy 