Miriam Schoenfield

This is a first course in deductive symbolic logic. We'll study formal languages for representing sentences
in logically precise ways, we'll study algorithms for evaluating arguments as logically valid or invalid, and
we'll get an introduction to some of the surprising discoveries logicians have made about what tasks no
algorithm can possibly do.

What is knowledge? What are the principal types of knowledge, and what
does a person's knowing a claim or proposition p amount to? Philosophers
have commonly supposed that a person's having justification, or warrant, for
believing that p is a necessary condition of his/her knowing that p.
Accordingly, this course will be concerned with theories of justification as
well as of knowledge, along with the question of whether there can be
knowledge without what is called epistemic justification. Views in ancient,
early modern, and contemporary philosophy—also one Eastern view—will
be surveyed.

HIGHER ORDER EVIDENCE

Prerequisites

Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Advisor or instructor required.

Course Description

Higher order evidence concerns evidence of our own cognitive capabilities.  There has been a lot of recent literature on how to accommodate such evidence and how our higher order beliefs (about the rationality of our beliefs) should interact with the beliefs themselves. 

In the first part of the seminar we will think about how to accommodate higher order evidence generally, and then look into some more specific cases such as irrelevant influences on belief and evolutionary explanations for belief. 

In the second part of the seminar, we will read some papers about how theories of higher order evidence impact theories of rationality more generally.  We will spend some time discussing “bridge principles”: principles that say, roughly, that your credence in p should equal the expected rational credence in p.  We will then discuss connections between accommodating higher order evidence and views according to which what seems rational to the agent plays a large role in determine what is rational for that agent.

Grading

Grade based on term paper. Required: attendance and class presentation.

Texts

We’ll be reading papers by (in no particular order): Christensen, Weatherson, Kelly, Elga, Street, Aarnio, Horowitz and Sliwa, White, a couple things by yours truly (Schoenfield), and others.

This is a first course in deductive symbolic logic. We'll study formal languages for representing sentences
in logically precise ways, we'll study algorithms for evaluating arguments as logically valid or invalid, and
we'll get an introduction to some of the surprising discoveries logicians have made about what tasks no
algorithm can possibly do.

What is knowledge? What are the principal types of knowledge, and what
does a person's knowing a claim or proposition p amount to? Philosophers
have commonly supposed that a person's having justification, or warrant, for
believing that p is a necessary condition of his/her knowing that p.
Accordingly, this course will be concerned with theories of justification as
well as of knowledge, along with the question of whether there can be
knowledge without what is called epistemic justification. Views in ancient,
early modern, and contemporary philosophy—also one Eastern view—will
be surveyed.