Balter Distinguished Lecture: Harjit Bhogal (Maryland)

Strikingness

Some facts are striking. That is, they seem to call out for explanation in a way that other facts do not. If a coin is tossed 50 times and lands heads every time, that’s striking. The correlation between the moral truths and our moral beliefs is striking (at least according to some people). The fact that the microwave background radiation is uniform in temperature throughout the universe is striking. And strikingness plays an important role in our theory choice — if a theory implies that there is no appropriate explanation of some relevant striking fact, then that’s a pro tanto reason to reject the theory. This applies across a wide range of domains — it doesn’t matter whether your theory is about coins, or about metaethics, or about cosmology. Strikingness has great importance in philosophy of science and epistemology, but it is deeply underexplored. My aim in this talk is to start to explore it.  (Bhogal)