Oxford Epistemology Group (Tuesday - Week 5, TT22)

This talk aims to distinguish between different views of conditional propositions through their epistemological consequences. Put very roughly, monism about conditionals says that rational agents all reason with and assign probability to the same proposition, when they reason using conditional claims; pluralism says that people will reason about and assign probability to different conditional propositions, when they have different evidence. Monism is often rejected in favour of pluralism, given how it interacts with Stalnaker’s Thesis (roughly the claim that one’s probability in a conditional should be the conditional probability of the consequent, given the antecedent). Given Conditionalisation and Stalnaker’s Thesis, monism collapses the rational probability of a conditional and its consequent, an absurd result.

A weekly seminar of visiting speakers, work-in-progress talks, and discussion of recent work in epistemology, for faculty and graduate students. Please email Nick Hughes to be added to the mailing list.