Kvanvig Presentation Info

With any luck, I'll have a handout to post in a day or so (which, translated, reads: I hope to get issues below organized in some useful way), but here I'll describe what I want to talk about. At least, it will give a bit of an idea of the literature I intend to engage.

I'm interested in the effects of humble and holistic epistemology on formal approaches. I'll begin by rehearsing some well-known things about the need for a subjective turn in the theory of rationality, the Lockean approach to the relationship between belief and confidence, the alternative formal pictures of each (with Bayesians the heroes in one picture and Pollock the hero in the other), the Christensen/Kaplan debate on closure and Christensen's depragmatized dutch book argument. So the idea is to tell a story that leads toward a fairly common love and appreciation of all things Bayesian, culminating in the depragmatized DBA, a story depending primarily on expressions of humility involved in versions of the preface paradox.

Then I'll turn to criticism. The path traveled in the first part is cleared by the Lockean thesis and a metaphysics that makes confidence levels basic. I'll try to argue that facts about intellectual humility and a suitably holistic epistemology make trouble all along the way. I'll hint a little at the discomfort of abandoning closure and show how Christensen's worries about "downstream consequences" of a too-weak expression of humility depend on the wrong kind of closure principle, and I'll argue that the de-pragmatized dutch book argument isn't sufficiently attentive to holistic requirements on rationality.

I'll wrap things up by suggesting that once the subjective turn is done in a way that is properly humble and holistic, the formal programs in question are in trouble. Here I will trace some the implications of recent discussions of deference principles and anti-luminosity arguments (found in, e.g., Williamson, Weatherson, Elga, Hall, and Joyce, among others).