Fortgeschrittenenseminar Selected Topics in Formal Epistemology

This course will cover selected topics in contemporary formal epistemology, all involving probabilistic methods. The first segment will engage with a current debate over the -accuracy-first” program which aims to supply a nonpragmatic justification of probabilism. Both the promise and the limitations of accuracy-first epistemology are rooted in de Finettis operationalist approach to his theory of subjective probability, so the discussion of contemporary contributions to this debate will be framed by an overview of de Finetti’s theory. The second segment will consider the theory of imprecise probabilities (IP), which is the name of a broad variety of interval-valued approaches to modeling reasoning and decision making under uncertainty. We will develop (IP) here as a relaxation of de Finetti’s program to allow for one-sided bets, and we will turn to a variety of surprising consequences this move generates, including dilation, independence concepts, sequential decision-making, and scoring rules. In the last section, we turn to an application of formal methods to a classical problem in traditional epistemology: the program in Bayesian epistemology to explicate coherentist justification. Time permitting, we will review attempts to formulate probabilistic measures of epistemic coherence, including impossibility results threatening the entire program. We close this segment with recent work that attempts to revive the program by shifting away from purely probabilistic methods to probabilistic causal models. W3-Professur für Wissenschaftstheorie (Univ. Prof. Stephan Hartmann) The course assumes familiarity with probabilistic methods. Assignments will include weekly analytical exercise sets or short essays. There will also be a final paper. Hinweis für Bachelor-Philosophie-Studierende und Master-Philosophiestudierende (allgemeiner Masterstudiengang): Die angegebene Prüfungsform weicht (etwas) von den Optionen ab, die bei dem entsprechenden Veranstaltungsformat in der jeweiligen BA- und geplanten (allgemeinen) Master-PStO vorgesehen sind. Sehen Sie den Kurs in dieser Hinsicht bitte als inhaltliche Zusatzoption zu den verschiedenen Fortgeschrittenenseminaren, in denen der übliche Leistungsnachweis abverlangt wird. LMU München WiSe 1415 Dr. Wheeler Gregory