Speaker Series: Matt Kotzen

Matt Kotzen will give a lecture entitled “Epistemic Fundamentality and Defeat.”

Abstract:

The goal of this paper is to develop a view about credal dynamics that is sensitive to which of an agent’s assignments of credences are “more epistemically fundamental” than her other assignments. In the main case that I discuss, which I call Theft at the Mansion, Bayesian Conditionalization entails that when I learn that one of the disjuncts of a disjunction is false, my credence in the disjunction ought to go down. On the contrary, I argue that, since my assignment of a particular credence to the disjunction is more epistemically fundamental than my assignment of credences to any of its disjuncts, my credence in the disjunction ought to remain the same.