Abstracts

Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij

Title: Why No True Reliabilist Should Endorse Reliabilism

Abstract: Critics have recently argued that reliabilists face trade-off problems, forcing them to con-done intuitively unjustified beliefs when they generate lots of true belief further down-stream. What these critics overlook is that reliabilism entails that there are side-constraints on belief-formation, on account of which there are some things you should not believe, even if doing so would have very good epistemic consequences. However,we argue that by embracing side-constraints the reliabilist faces a dilemma: she can either hold on to reliabilism, and with it aforementioned side-constraints, but then needs to explain why we should allow the pursuit of justification to get in the way of the acquisition of true belief; or she can deny that there are side-constraints–and in effect give up on reliabilism. We’ll suggest that anyone moved by the considerations that likely attract people to reliabilism in the first place–the idea the true belief is good, and as such should be promoted–should go for the second horn, and instead pursue a form of epistemic utilitarianism.

Anna Mahtani

Title: The Awareness Growth Illusion

Abstract: There has been recent interest in the phenomenon of 'awareness growth' - where an agent starts off unaware of a proposition and so assigns it no credence, and then becomes aware of it and assigns it a credence, redistributing credences in other propositions accordingly. This phenomenon creates a problem for Bayesian epistemologists who standardly claim that a rational agent's credences change only by conditionalization. I show that we can handle these cases if we adopt a contextualist account of credences. I describe this contextualist account of credences, and show how cases of apparent awareness growth can be understood in light of this account. I argue that this approach dissolves a number of problems that philosophers working on awareness growth have faced.

Ann C Thresher

Title: The Tangle of Science

Abstract: Science is remarkably reliable. It puts people on the moon, performs laser eye surgery, tells us about ancient civilisations and species, and predicts the future of our climate. What underwrites this reliability? This talk argues that the standard answers—the scientific method, rigour, and objectivity—are insufficient for the job. Here I propose a new model of science which places the products it creates front and centre. This is the ‘Tangle of Science’. In this talk I show how any reliable piece of science is underpinned by a vast, diverse, and thick network of other scientific products. In doing so I bring back into focus areas of science that have been long neglected, emphasising how every product, from the screws that hold the space shuttle together to ways of measuring the consumer price index to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, work together to support results we can trust.

Michael Wilde

Title: Reliability and Abductive Knowledge

Abstract: How do we generate abductive knowledge? Peter Lipton thinks it is sometimes enough to carry out an inference to the best explanation consistent with the evidence. Against this, Alexander Bird thinks that such an inference can generate knowledge if and only if it is an inference to the only explanation consistent with the evidence. Why? Bird provides a case to the effect that an inference to the best explanation is insufficiently reliable to generate scientific knowledge. However, I will argue that this case goes wrong by demanding the impossible, namely, an explanation of knowledge in terms of reliability.