Formal Philosophy Seminar

The paper presents an overarching argument to the effect that, given a certain attractive picture according to which—in certain situations, for certain obviously true propositions—(being in a position to have) knowledge iterates, single-premise closure principles are bound to fail in certain situations. The situations in question involve inexact knowledge, originating with one’s less than perfect powers of discrimination.

See: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/list/PDF-files/JudgmentTransformation.pdf

How can the propositional attitudes of several individuals be aggregated into overall collective propositional attitudes? Although there are large bodies of work on the aggregation of various special kinds of propositional attitudes, such as preferences, judgments, probabilities and utilities, the aggregation of propositional attitudes is seldom studied in full generality. In this paper, we seek to contribute to filling this gap in the literature. We sketch the ingredients of a general theory of propositional attitude aggregation and prove two new theorems.

Bayesianism and Inference to the Best Explanation both offer models of inductive inference. Prima facie, these two models appear to conflict; nonetheless, recently many philosophers have attempted to reconcile the two. Such Bayesian Explanationists either try to show that these models, while indeed distinct, do not conflict with one another, or they try to show that one of the models reduces logically to the other. In this paper, I survey and critique some of the most prominent strategies that philosophers have adopted to this conciliatory end.