When: September 13-15, 2024
Where : Hosted in Boulder, Colorado by the University of Colorado Boulder philosophy department.
The Friday talks will be in the UMC Building, room 245; Saturday and Sunday's talks will be in UMC 247. (click for map link).
Fri, Sept 13 (UMC 245)
5-6:15: Baron Reed Epistemic Potential
Sat, Sept 14 (UMC 247)
10am-11:15: Jeff Kasser Facts, Frequencies, and Peircean Probabilities
Peirce's theory of inquiry, as generally understood, involves a rejection of "pedigree epistemology," understood as a concern with grounding an agent's current beliefs. Somewhat surprisingly, Peirce pairs his approach to inquiry with a firm rejection of subjective probabilities. A recent paper, however, claims that "Peirce’s criticisms of subjectivism, to the extent that they grant that such a conception of probability is viable at all, revert back to pedigree epistemology" (Stewart and Sterkenburg 2022). Both Peirce's conception of inquiry and his demands for grounding judgments of probability will be reinterpreted and (partially) defended.
11:45-1: Renee Jorgensen Encroachment and Epistemic Negligence
2:30-3:45: Luis Oliveira Doxastic Agency and Epistemic Reasons
Appeals to “reason responsiveness” have been recently popular in debates about doxastic agency. This talk argues that these arguments suffer from a kind of transmission failure: they rely on a premise whose justification depends on our independent justification for the conclusion.
4:15-5:30: Deborah Heikes Epistemic Trust, Responsibility, and Echo Chambers
Epistemic trust is presumably a responsible trust, but, responsible or not, it is also ineliminable. We cannot help but trust—but this trust is always wrapped up in communal norms. One way of potentially distinguishing demarcating epistemic communities with good and bad norms of trust is to appeal to epistemic ends, especially truth. Truth is itself, however, wrapped up in communal standards. The circularity of epistemic trust and communal standard is such individual knowers may well be responsible epistemic agents, even when putting their faith in those who are untrustworthy.
Sun, Sept 15 (UMC 247)
10am-11:15: William Roche Inference to the Best Explanation, Bayesianism, and the Screening-Off Challenge -- A Critical Review
In their 2013 paper, William Roche and Elliott Sober used Bayesian confirmation theory and the probabilistic concept of screening-off to pose problems for the epistemological theory of Inference to the Best Explanation. Several philosophers replied to those criticisms and Roche and Sober refined and extended their critique in subsequent papers. This talk assesses where the debate now stands.
11:45 - 1: Charity Anderson Learning about Possibilities: Theodicies and Evidence
Please contact Brian Talbot to register (btalbot@colorado.edu). Registration is free.