Time/Date/Location: 3:30 PM, July 3rd, Kresge 3438

Title: Against Epistemic Partiality: Character, Values, and Evidence

Abstract: Do practical commitments require that we believe against the evidence? Recently, several philosophers have argued that our practical commitments – such as friendship and promise-making – make a direct difference for what we should believe. I argue that this is misguided. Practical commitments can make a difference indirectly (by giving you different evidence or directing your attention), but they cannot make a difference directly. I give two arguments for this, one from the nature of rationalizing explanation, another from the relationship between value and action. First, it is a general feature of rationalizing explanations that they must stem from an intelligible interpretation of persons and actions. If practical commitments made a direct difference in belief, then we would not be able to engage in rationalizing explanations of ourselves and our intimates. So practical commitments cannot make a direct difference for belief. Second, in order to make actions and persons intelligible, we must interpret them in light of what people value. Knowledge of what someone values is evidence for what they will do and who they are. So viewing someone intelligibly involves taking into account what they value, and this gives us evidence of what they will do and who they are. And this evidence is independent of our practical commitments. As a result, I think it unlikely that a better argument for epistemic partiality will arise.

Date:  May 29th, 2019

Time/Location: 12:00-1:30; Kresge 3438

Title: The Epistemology of Self-Deception and Queer Identity

Abstract: Self-deception is an epistemic phenomenon where one believes a false belief, ~p, despite having evidence and even cognizing that p is true, because one is motivated to not believe p. Relatedly, repression, as originally theorized by Freud, is a psychological phenomenon where an unpleasant idea fails to reach one’s conscious awareness in order to avoid the discomfort that its surfacing would cause. Now, say that there are examples of repression that constitute self-deception. Say, too, that there are cases in which people in the West/Global North fail to believe that they are queer via this type of self-deception. Under these assumptions, this paper aims to show how the concept of Freudian repression is useful to an analysis of self-deception, using queer cases as illustrative. My first claim is that the theoretical framework of repression solves a central problem in the epistemology of self-deception, as shown by examples of queer repression. My second claim is that queer cases of repression expose the fact that self-deception can be socially significant, both in terms of its behavioral manifestations and underlying causes. This paper, it should be noted, will not be interested in the psychological facets of Freud’s theory, which has largely been refuted in more recent scientific research. Instead, my argument will evaluate how notions of the unconscious, consciousness, and repression are useful for examining the epistemological and social significance of self-deception.

Date: February 26th

Time/Location: 12:30-2:00 in Kresge 3438

Title: Moral Knowledge by Deduction

Abstract: How is moral knowledge possible? This paper defends the anti-Humean thesis that we can acquire moral knowledge by deduction from wholly non-moral premises. Hume’s Law says that we can never deduce an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, since it is “altogether inconceivable how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it” (1740: 3.1.1). This paper explores the prospects for theory of moral knowledge that rejects Hume’s Law.

Date: February 18th

Time/Location: 4:00-5:30 in Kresge 3438

Title: Can Trust be Voluntary?

Abstract: In this paper, I defend an answer to the question whether trust can be voluntary and, if so, how. First, I make the question more precise by qualifying it in various ways and specifying which kind of trust I am talking about. Next, I consider to what extent trust is voluntary if trust, as some philosophers have argued, is a particular kind of belief. This is a minority view among philosophers working on trust, but even if it is correct, it only works if so-called doxastic compatibilism is true—a particular view on what control over our beliefs amounts to. I argue that if that view is correct as well, we would save responsibility for trust or lack of trust, but not the idea that we choose or decide whether or not to trust. After that, I explain what counts in favor of the thesis that trust is voluntary. I show that there are at least two and possibly three different ways in which trust can be under our control: the constitutive element of reliance is often under our control, the constitutive element of resilience to evidence is often under our control, and there are situations in which we know that trusting actually sufficiently raises a person’s trustworthiness so that we can choose to trust.

Date: February 12th, 2019

Time/Location: 12:30-2:00 in Kresge 3438

Title: The Skeptical Closure Argument

Abstract: Suppose that P is a piece of pedestrian knowledge (such as “I have hands”) and that SK is a skeptical hypothesis (such as “I’m a handless brain in a vat”). A much-discussed argument for skepticism—the skeptical closure argument, or SCA—runs as follows:

(1) You don’t know ~SK.

(2) If you don’t know ~SK then you don’t know P.

(3) So you don’t know P.

The skeptic appeals to (a common rendition of) knowledge closure in support of (2): if S knows P, and knows that P implies Q, then S knows Q. But I’ll show that (3) only follows from a much less plausible version of closure and that, if a more plausible version is substituted, the resulting argument threatens very few if any of our ordinary knowledge claims. I’ll then revise the SCA in such a way that it does mobilize a plausible closure principle while still threatening most ordinary knowledge. It turns out, however, that the needed support for the premises of the revised SCA either renders the argument dialectically superfluous or undermines closure itself. The overall result is that there is no plausible argument for skepticism that mobilizes closure. I’ll also indicate why a related skeptical argument—one that appeals to what I call “front-loading”—fares no better.

Date: Tuesday, November 13th, 2018

Time: 12:30-2:00 PM

Location: Kresge 3438

Date: Tuesday, October 9th, 2018

Time: 12:30-2:00 PM

Location: Kresge 3438

Title: Epistemology of disagreement, bias, and political deliberation: the problems for a conciliatory view

Abstract:

In this paper, I will discuss the relevance of epistemology of disagreement to political disagreement. The two major positions in the epistemology of disagreement literature are the steadfast and the conciliationist approaches: while the conciliationist says that disagreement with one’s epistemic equals should compel one to epistemically “split the difference” with those peers, the steadfast approach claims that one can maintain one’s antecedent position even in the face of such peer disagreement. Martin Ebeling (Ebeling 2017) applies a conciliationist approach to democratic deliberations, arguing that deliberative participants ought to pursue full epistemic concliation when disagreeing with their peers on political questions. I argue that this epistemic “splitting the difference” could make participants vulnerable to certain cognitive biases. We might avoid these biases by paying more attention to the deliberative environment in which disagreement takes place.