Certain Doubts

Below the fold you will find the epistemology offerings of the upcoming meeting of the APA Central Division (with thanks to Matthew Mullins for collecting this).

Those of you who are going to be in town for the central should consider coming a day early for the one-day epistemology conference at Northwestern. The program has been loosely organized around Jennifer Lackey’s book, Learning From Words, and features papers by Robert Audi, Elizabeth Fricker, Peter Graham, and Jon Kvanvig, with an additional talk (as part of our epistemology brownbag series) by Ted Poston.

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THE UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN
AUGUST 19-20, 2010
We tend to think of liberal democracy as providing the most ethically defensible way to set up a modern society. A separate yet highly relevant issue is whether liberal democracies also are preferable from an epistemological perspective, i.e., from the point of view of promoting true over false belief, knowledge over ignorance, and so on. The purpose of this conference-and of the research project that it is part of-is to investigate the norms, practices, and institutions that determine how belief and knowledge is acquired and transmitted in liberal democracies. Questions to be addressed include but are not limited to the following:

- Under what conditions is free speech a truth-conducive social arrangement?
- When can we trust each others’ testimony?
- What is the proper response to disagreement, including disagreements among experts?
- What is the proper role of scientific expertise in democratic decision making?
- How is the need for expertise to be balanced against the desire for adequate representation?
- What are the epistemological properties of social deliberation?

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS
Speakers include David Christensen (Brown), Jerry Gaus (Arizona), Stephan Hartmann (Tilburg), Rainer Hegselmann (Bayreuth), Vincent Hendricks (Copenhagen), Michael Lynch (UConn), Erik J. Olsson (Lund), and Duncan Pritchard (Edinburgh).

CALL FOR PAPERS
We cordially invite you to submit a 500 word abstract on any topic relevant to the conference theme. Please prepare your abstract for anonymous review. Abstracts should be submitted (as a plain text, MS Word, or PDF file) to cph.epistemology@gmail.com no later than April 1, 2010. Decisions regarding acceptance will be made within two weeks.

REGISTRATION
To register, please e-mail kappel@hum.ku.dk with your name and affiliation. There will be a registration fee of 200 DKK ($40, or €25) for faculty, and 100 DKK ($20, or €12) for students. There will also be an option to attend the conference dinner on the evening of August 19 at a cost of 400 DKK ($80, or €50). Please indicate in your registration if you wish to attend. All fees are due in full on the first day of the conference.

ORGANIZERS
The conference is organized by the Social Epistemology Research Group (SERG) at the University of Copenhagen as part of the research project, the Epistemology of Liberal Democracy: Truth, Free Speech and Disagreement, conducted with generous support from the Velux Foundation.

See also:

http://epistemology.ku.dk/

Everyone knows that there are epistemic conditions on moral responsibility, but discussions of the connection are not extensive.  George Sher’s book is a full-length treatment of this issue, and has implications for much of the recent work that epistemologists have been doing, including work on norms of assertion as well as the prospects for intellectualism.

Neal Tognazzini has a nice review of the book at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

When I teach my writing class for first-year graduate students, one of the non-philosophical tasks has as a goal to see how much of our use of adjectives and adverbs is pointless prolixity (instanced in that very phrase by the word ‘pointless’ and in this parenthetical remark by ‘very’). I look for examples of such wasted words, and saw a delightful example caught by our spam filter:

Easily, the article is actually the sweetest on this worthy topic. I concur with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to your upcoming updates. Saying thanks will not just be enough, for the wonderful lucidity in your writing. I will instantly grab your rss feed to stay privy of any updates.

Hard to believe someone about lucidity in writing when they write like this! Invites advice to the author, such as: hopefully, you will easily learn to fruitfully explore expressively communicative language through more economically efficient, straightforward simplicity of linguistic and verbal expression.

Or, if part of a paper submitted for a grade, a remark I’ve heard attributed to a philosopher I won’t name: “I like this paper, too bad someone wrote on it…”

Keith DeRose and I have corresponded some about appropriate advice to those applying to graduate schools looking for strong programs in epistemology.  He and I both agree that the additions of Gillies, Fitelson, Schellenberg, and Schaffer now make Rutgers clearly the best graduate program for epistemology in the world.  Keith has updated The Epistemology Page to include this new assessment.  It is under section 2 on the page in question, and since it could easily be missed by potential grad students, I thought it worth posting here as well.

SIPTA Workshop on Uncertainty

The Society for Imprecise Probabilities: Theories and Applications will hold a Workshop on Uncertainty at Columbia University on April 17^th of 2010, following the Synthese Conference on epistemology and economics that will take place at Columbia University on April 15^th and 16^th.  We expect the workshop to feature a mixture of invited and contributed talks on the use of imprecise probabilities in models of inference and decision making under uncertainty.

Those who are interested in contributing a talk to the workshop should send a short abstract (no more than 300 words) to

synthese.conference.2010@gmail.com

with “SIPTA Workshop Contribution” in the subject of the message.   (more…)

A revised and expanded “Virtue Epistemology” entry is up on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The Journal of Philosophy has implemented a major change in how it handles submissions. From its website:

All manuscripts should be thoroughly prepared for double-blind refereeing, with any and all revealing references to the author removed, including personal acknowledgments. Any submission which does not adequately take steps to conceal the identity of its author will not be read.

I’d say this is a welcome development.

(H/T: Anon commenter on Leiter’s blog.)