When
Our guest: Julia Staffel (Colorado). Julia specializes in formal and traditional epistemology, and she will be chatting with us about:
Title: Unfinished Business. Transitional Attitudes and Rational Akrasia
Abstract: This talk has two main objectives. The first is to introduce the core ideas of my new book, Unfinished Business: Rational Attitudes in Reasoning. The book investigates the nature of the attitudes we form during ongoing deliberations, which I call transitional attitudes, and the norms that apply to them. I defend two novel claims: First, transitional attitudes play interestingly different roles in our reasoning and decision making than attitudes that serve as conclusions of our reasoning. Secondly, the fact that these attitudes play different roles supports the idea that they should be evaluated according to their own standard of rationality, which I call pro tem rationality. With those new resources in hand, we can answer a variety of philosophical questions in novel ways, such as “How should we model logical learning?”, “How should we respond to higher-order evidence?”, and “Should we believe our own philosophical views?” The second objective is to use the view to answer a question that has gotten a lot of interest in recent epistemology: Can it ever be rational to have epistemically akratic attitudes? I argue that there is a type of epistemic akrasia, which I call transient akrasia, which is not just harmless, it is actually a natural and useful state to be in while deliberating.
As usual, we'll meet in the Maloney Seminar Room, Social Science Building 224, 3-5p. Those unable to attend in person can spectate virtually via this Zoom link.