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A talk by Anne Simon, moderated by Eliza Zingesser

Zoopoetics aims to highlight the plurality of stylistic, linguistic and narrative tools used by writers to express the plurality of animal activities, affects and worlds, as well as the intricacies of the interactions between humans and animals. Such an approach helps to understand that all life forms are in a relationship of dependence with an archè (Husserl)—an origin, a reason, a refuge, a dwelling, the Earth— and that animals are more stylistic or rhetorical beings than we usually think of them as being. Evolution and biomorphic logics allow us to intuitively understand other species related to us, to share many of their emotions and expressions, and to be able to account for them through specific human means, such as evocative and figurative language. The lecture will show that perspectivism, metamorphosis and hybridity are universal patterns and experiences that literature embodies in different ways.

Anne Simon is a Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Française and a Member of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), where she leads the Project « Animots » ; an author of Trafics de Proust, 2016 and La rumeur des distances traversées, to be published in 2018. Her research focuses on disturbing relationships between philosophy and literature, and on zoopoetics.

Abstract: Traditional theories of knowledge often focus on the epistemic status of full beliefs. In Probabilistic Knowledge (forthcoming), I argue that like full beliefs, credences and other probabilistic beliefs can constitute knowledge. This talk applies probabilistic knowledge to problems in legal and moral philosophy. I begin by arguing that legal standards of proof require knowledge of probabilistic contents. For instance, proof by a preponderance of the evidence requires the factfinder to have greater than .5 credence that a defendant is liable, and also requires this probabilistic belief to be knowledge. Proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt requires knowledge of a significantly stronger content. The fact that legal proof requires knowledge explains why merely statistical evidence is insufficient to license a legal verdict of liability or guilt. In addition to explaining the limited value of statistical evidence, probabilistic knowledge enables us to articulate epistemic norms that are violated by acts of racial and other profiling. According to these norms, it can be epistemically wrong to infer from statistics that a person of Mexican ancestry is likely undocumented, for instance, even when inferring parallel facts about ordinary objects is perfectly okay.

Reception to follow in 6th floor lounge.

One well-known objection to the principle of maximum entropy is the so-called Judy Benjamin problem, first introduced by van Fraassen (1981). The problem turns on the apparently puzzling fact that, on the basis of information relating an event’s conditional probability, the maximum entropy distribution will almost always assign to the event conditionalized on a probability strictly less than that assigned to it by the uniform distribution. In this paper, I present an analysis of the Judy Benjamin problem that can help to make sense of this seemingly odd feature of maximum entropy inference. My analysis is based on the claim that, in applying the principle of maximum entropy, Judy Benjamin is not acting out of a concern to maximize uncertainty in the face of new evidence, but is rather exercising a certain brand of epistemic charity towards her informant. This charity takes the form of an assumption on the part of Judy Benjamin that her informant’s evidential report leaves out no relevant information. I will explain how this single assumption suffices to rationalize Judy Benjamin’s behavior. I will then explain how such a re-conceptualization of the motives underlying Judy Benjamin’s appeal to the principle of maximum entropy can further our understanding of the relationship between this principle and the principle of insufficient reason. I will conclude with a discussion of the foundational significance for probability theory of ergodic theorems (e.g., de Finetti’s theorem) describing the asymptotic behavior of measure preserving transformation groups. In particular, I will explain how these results, which serve as the basis of maximum entropy inference, can provide a unified conceptual framework in which to justify both a priori and a posteriori probabilistic reasoning.

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We will be having dinner right after the meeting at the faculty house. Please let Robby (jrf2162@columbia.edu) know if you will be joining us so that he can make an appropriate reservation (please be advised that at this point the university only agrees to cover the expenses of the speaker and the rapporteur and that the cost for all others is $30, payable by cash or check).

https://philevents.org/event/show/37746

A subjective probability function is broadminded to the extent that it assigns positive probabilities to conjectures that can be possibly true. Assigning to such a conjecture the value 0 amounts to a priori ruling out the possibility of confirming the conjecture to any extent by the growing evidence. A positive value leaves, in principle, the possibility of learning from the evidence. In general, broadmindedness is not an absolute notion, but a graded one, and there is a price for it: the more broadminded the probability, the more complicated it is, because it has to assign non-zero values to more complicated conjectures. The framework which is suggested in the old Gaifman-Snir paper is suitable for phrasing this claim in a precise way and proving it. The technique by which this claim is established is to assume a definable probability function, and to state within the same language a conjecture that can be possibly true, whose probability is 0.

The complexity of the conjecture depends on the complexity of the probability, i.e., the complexity of the formulas that are used in defining it. In the Gaifman-Snir paper we used the arithmetical hierarchy as a measure of complexity. It is possible however to establish similar results with respect to a more “down to earth” measures, defined in terms of the time that it takes to calculate the probabilities, with given precisions.

A claim of this form, for a rather simple setup, was first proven by Hilary Putnam in his paper ““Degree of Confirmation” and inductive logic”, which was published in the 1963 Schilpp volume dedicated to Carnap. The proof uses in a probabilistic context, a diagonalization technique, of the kind used in set theory and in computer science. In the talk I shall present Putnam’s argument and show how diagonalization can be applied in considerably richer setups.

The second part of the talk is rather speculative. I shall point out the possibility that there might be epistemic limitations to what human science can achieve, which are imposed by certain pragmatic factors ‒ such as the criterion of repeatable experiments. All of which would recommend a skeptic attitude.

What do the worlds of global finance and nationalist populism have in common? How can we understand the rise of today’s ‘new fascisms’ through the prism of financialization? This one-day workshop brings together scholars from across disciplines to debate  these key questions for our understanding of contemporary capitalism. The workshop is part of Public Seminar’s Imaginal Politics initiative and is organised jointly with the Department of Social Science, University College London. The workshop will include three panel discussions and will close with a talk by Judith Butler on ‘Anti-gender ideology and the new fascism’.

Rebecca Comay, Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature, The University of Toronto discusses Hegel and Beckett followed by a response from Paul Kottman of The New School for Social Research.

The Vanishing Point of Existence: Kierkegaard and the Ethics of the Novel.

Presented by: Yi-Ping Ong, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Thought and Literature, Johns Hopkins University.

Presented by Liberal Studies at The New School of Social Research