Sarah Moss (University of Michigan), “A Defense of Probabilistic Knowledge”

Sarah Moss will give a presentation as part of our annual Speaker Series.

Sarah’s work is focused on questions connecting language and epistemology: what semantic theories accommodate intuitive norms governing credences in counterfactuals, how updating de se credences resembles communicating de se beliefs, and how we can know non-propositional contents of assertion. She is currently writing a book that defends a unified probabilistic account of the contents of assertion, belief, and knowledge.

Abstract: This talk will hit the highlights of my current book project. The central thesis of the book is that partial beliefs can constitute knowledge in just the same sense as full beliefs can. This thesis is supported by a theory of content according to which your middling credence that it is raining, say, may be something that you assert as well as something that you know. I present a novel argument that such probabilistic knowledge may be directly grounded in perception, and I answer several skeptical challenges targeting probabilistic knowledge. In addition, I argue that probabilistic knowledge plays an important role in theories of rational action and rational belief, as well as in theories from the philosophy of language, feminist philosophy, and other philosophical subfields.