Speakers Include
Berit Brogaard, ANU
Andy Egan, Michigan
Adam Elga, Princeton
Hilary Greaves, Rutgers/Oxford
Thomas Hofweber, UNC-Chapel Hill
Jenann Ismael, Arizona/Sydney
Robin Jeshion, UC-Riverside
John MacFarlane, UC-Berkeley
Daniel Nolan, Nottingham
Jill North, Yale
Josh Parsons, Otago
Joe Salerno, ANU/Saint Louis
Brian Weatherson, Rutgers
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First Formal Epistemology Festival
Conditionals and Ranking Functions
at Konstanz University, July 28-30, 2008
Call for Papers here.
Special Issue of Erkenntnis
Conditionals and Ranking Functions
Guest editors: Franz Huber, Eric Swanson, and Jonathan Weisberg.
Call for submissions here.
Formal Epistemology Postdoc Positions
Project: Belief and Its Revision
1/2008 to 12/2012
Day 3 of the conference began with an animated talk by Alan Hájek on whether formal methods are a boon or bane for philosophy. He also discussed whether we should be doing traditional epistemology or Baysian epistemology. He argued both sides of both issues, and then painted Lewis' intellectual history as a synthesis of the two sides of these two disputes. It was quite a treat.
Great talks were also given by Ulrich Meyer, Vladan Djordjevic, and Rohit Parikh.
Photos to come, but a small sample appear over at Lemmings.
The talks today were on the semantics for conditionals. John Cantwell proposed a branching-time framework that aimed to unify our understanding of indicative and subjunctive conditionals. The variation in truth-value of corresponding indicative and subjunctive "Oswald sentences" is, on John's view, to be explained without positing a plurality of conditionals. The job can be done by tense and our understanding of open futures.
Hannes Leitgeb offered a probabilistic semantics for subjunctive conditionals. His very precise proposal (which I won't go into here) is a version of the thought that subjunctives are true just in case the consequent is sufficiently likely (in some objective sense) given the antecedent. By default Hannes rejects the strong and weak centering assumptions---respectively,
(A & B) --> (A []--> B), and
(A []--> B) --> (A --> B)
(T []--> (A & B)) --> (A []--> B), and
(A []--> B) --> (T []--> (A --> B))
Today began the 1st Synthese Annual Conference, Between Intuition and Logic: David Lewis and the Future of Formal Philosophy, which was hosted at the Honorary Niels Bohr Mansion in Copenhagen and organized by Johan van Benthem, Vincent Hendricks and John Symons.
John Collins started things off with his paper "Formal and Informal Models of Belief", in which he embraced a Lewisian theory of knowledge:
if S knows that X, then there is no uneliminated possibility that is very close to actuality and in which X is false.
He argued, among other things, that the threat of skepticism is not as ubiquitous as Vogel and Hawthorne suggest. The statistical information that n number of otherwise healthy people die of a heart attack is not enough to make the world in which i die of a heart attack very close to the actual world. That's because people don't just die of heart attacks if absolutely nothing is medically wrong with them. Since the actual world is not one where unbenownst to me there is something wrong with me, there is no very close world where I am one of the unlucky few to die in this way. So, my original ordinary knowledge claim about where I'll be tomorrow still stands. Of course, if it turns out that unbenownst to me and my doctors there is something medical wrong with my heart, then my ordinary knowledge claim falters.
Allesandro Torza gave the most formal of the talks thus far, titled "How to Lewis a Kripke-Hintikka". He argued that BL (i.e., [quantifier] independence friendly modal logic) is more expressive than QML (quantified modal logic); there are modal notions (e.g., the notion of rigidity for general terms) that can be expressed by BL but not by QML. However, this portion of BL cannot be translated into counterpart theory, and so, there is reason to doubt that counterpart theory is adequate to model our modal intuitions.
