Calendar

Conference Schedule

10AM       Teddy Seidenfeld – Conditional Probability, Conditionalization, and Total Evidence

11AM       Eleonora Cresto – Beyond Indeterminate Utilities. The Case of Neurotic Cake-Cutting

11:20AM  Ignacio Ojea Quintana – Unawareness and Levi’s Consensus as Common Ground

11:40AM  Rush Stewart – Uncertainty, Equality, Fraternity

1PM         Nils-Eric Sahlin – Levi’s Decision Theory: Lessons Learned

1:45PM    Wilfried Sieg – Scientific Theories as Set-Theoretic Predicates?

2:45PM    Panel Discussion – Learning from Levi

Abstracts available in attached documents under “Supporting material.”

Memorial

A memorial service will be held at 5PM at St. Paul’s Chapel on the Columbia campus. Reception to follow on the 7th floor of Philosophy Hall.

https://philevents.org/event/show/75850

• Abstracts
• Conference Schedule

Ian Hacking wrote that probability is a Janus-faced concept with one face looking toward the world and the other toward the mind. The face looking toward the world is central to laws and explanations in physics (especially quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics) and the special sciences. The face looking toward the mind is central to epistemology and decision theory. This conference concerns both aspects and especially their relation to each other. What is probability that it possesses both aspects? This three-day conference will focus on answering this and related questions.

There is no registration fee and attendance is open to all; however, RSVP is required. Please RSVP here before Oct 15, if you plan to attend. All are welcome!

General information is available here.

Conference Organizers

Barry Loewer (Rutgers)
Denise Dykstra (Rutgers)

Invited Participants

David Albert (Columbia)
Valia Allori (NIU)
Katie Elliott (UCLA)
Ned Hall (Harvard)
Carl Hoefer (Barcelona)
Jenann Ismael (Columbia)
Christopher Meacham (Amherst)
Wayne Myrvold (Western)
Richard Pettigrew (Bristol)
Jack Spencer (MIT)

Schedule Overview

(A detailed schedule is available here.)

Thursday, October 24

• 3:00 – 6:00: Metaphysics of Objective Probability: Ned Hall (Harvard); Jenann Ismael (Columbia).

Friday, October 25

• 9:00 – 9:50: Breakfast in the philosophy department
• 9:50 – 10:00: Welcome & Introductory Remarks (Barry Loewer)
• 10:00 – 1:00: Chance: Katie Elliott (UCLA); Christopher Meacham (Amherst).
• 1:00 – 2:30: Lunch
• 2:30 – 5:30: Probabilities in the Special Sciences: Carl Hoefer (Barcelona); Wayne Myrvold (Western Ontario).

Saturday, October 26

• 9:00 – 10:00: Breakfast in the philosophy department
• 10:00 – 1:00: Chance-Credence Principles: Richard Pettigrew (Bristol); Jack Spencer (MIT).
• 1:00 – 2:30: Lunch
• 2:30 – 5:30: Typicality and the Statistical Postulate: David Albert (Columbia); Valia Allori (NIU).

Please contact the conference organizers (LawsAndChanceProject@gmail.com) if you have any questions.

Conference Poster

Individuals support forms of domination with varying levels of understanding that they are doing so. In many cases, those very structures of domination distort our conceptions of them through mechanisms such as motivated reasoning, implicit bias, affected ignorance, false consciousness, and belief polarization. These various epistemic distortions, in turn, cause social conflict, notably by promoting political polarization. Those worried by social conflict have spent a great deal of energy decrying the increasingly polarized contexts in which we live. However, epistemic distortions in our sociopolitical beliefs also misrepresent, maintain systems of domination and prevent human needs from being met.

This workshop aims to go beyond pronouncements such as ‘we are polarized’ or that ‘partisanship is on the rise,’ and begin to think through epistemic distortions at the individual and intersubjective levels, the role of criticism and critique in facilitating belief and social change, and the idea of reconciliation, by asking questions such as:

• In what ways are individual beliefs about domination/social structures epistemically distorted?
• What explains why social beliefs are epistemically distorted?
• What are the normative upshots of epistemic distortion for social relationships like allyship, comradeship, and friendship?
• Ought polarization be remedied? Which epistemic resources and theoretical frameworks avail themselves of emancipatory potential?

Convenors

Ege Yumuşak is a philosopher, specializing in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and social & political philosophy. She received a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University in 2022. Her research examines political disagreement—its material foundations, psychological and social manifestations, and epistemic properties. She is currently writing a series of articles on the nature and significance of clashes of perspective in social life.

Nicolas Côté is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto. His research is mainly in normative ethics and social choice theory, but they also dabble in applied ethics and issues of practical rationality. Côté’s doctoral dissertation work focuses on the measurement of freedom, especially on axiomatic approaches to the measurement question, and on how deontic concerns for protecting individual rights interact with welfarist concerns for improving the general welfare. Côté’s current research focuses on the ethics of decision-making under radical uncertainty.

Invited speakers:

Sabina Vaccarino Bremner; Daniela Dover; Cain Shelley

Invited commentators
TBA