Ralph Wedgwood: An Inferentialist Conception of the A Priori
This paper offers an inferentialist account of the a priori. First, an account is given of
what it is for an inference to be justified a priori; then it is explained how a priori
justified inferences can generate a priori justified beliefs. The account is based on a
conception of inference that combines (a) the “natural deduction” approach to inference
with (b) a generalization of the notion of degrees of conditional belief. For an inference to
be justified, the disposition that the thinker manifests in making the inference must be
rational; and when the rationality of the disposition is explained purely by the thinker’s
possession of certain basic cognitive capacities (such as the thinker’s possession of
certain concepts or the like), the inference is justified a priori. This conception of the a
priori has several advantages – notably, that it makes no appeal to any mysterious faculty
of “intuition” or “rational insight”.
Susanna Siegel: 'perceptual inference'.
Paul Boghossian: "Inference and Rules."
The talk will concern the role of rules in inference, among other things whether we can
think of inference as a rule-governed process and if so how. I will be examining some
recent accounts along these lines, including John Broome's treatment in his new book
"Rationality Through Reasoning."
Jim Pryor: "The merits of incoherence."
Abstract: The most interesting kinds of Closure Principles for justification fail because
they don't acknowledge the potential role of undermining or higher-order defeaters
(which I understand in terms similar to Christensen and Schechter). I explore the
possibility of people reasonably having attitudes they know to be inconsistent or
incoherent (including cases of "epistemic akrasia"), and the possibility of epistemic
"tragedies" (cases where no doxastic response on your part may be fully reasonable, not
even withholding belief).
Olav Gjelsvik: Inferential capacity.
This paper will present a Fregean/Neo-Aristotelian type view of inference that aims to
treat practical and theoretical inference together. I will claim that treating the two kinds
of inference together helps for seeing several issues more clearly, including the
relationship with the rule-following issues. The main focus of the paper is on accounting
for how inference can extend knowledge. In order to answer that, I will make use of
resources from virtue epistemology.
Krista Lawlor
Working title: What is known and the limits of deductive inference
Abstract: We don’t know everything that follows from what we know. We know (by
seeing) that there are cookies in the jar, but we don’t know (by seeing) that there is a
world of physical objects external to our minds; we lack this knowledge even though the
existence of cookies implies that there are physical objects external to our minds, and we
might readily infer as much. The problem is to say why we know some of the things that
follow from what we know, but not everything that follows. Failure to explain why there
are principled limits on what we know motivates a range of skeptical arguments. Steve
Yablo and Jonathan Schaffer both try to limit the reach of deductive inference by appeal
to the idea that what is known is not just a proposition, but a subject matter. The turn to
subject matters is of broad importance to epistemology, and suggestive of a real advance
on the problem, but both Yablo’s and Schaffer’s attempts fail in significant ways. I
introduce an Austinian account of what is known, and show that it has some advantages.
Anna-Sara Malmgren: Availability, Goodness, and Argument Structure
On a widely shared conception of inferential justification, an agent is inferentially
justified in believing that p only if she has an antecedently justified belief in each of the
non-redundant premises of a good argument for p. Here I focus on two underexplored
questions that, I think, seriously complicate the application of this conception to cases.
First, what is a good argument? (Which argument forms are fit to constitute inferential
justifications, and why?) Second, what counts as a relevantly complete representation of a
given argument form?
John Horty: Defeasible Inference
Abstract: Although much of the philosophical reflection on the nature of inference
concentrates on deductive inference, most of the inferences that human beings actually
draw in their day-to-day lives are not deductive, but defeasible – these inferences can be
defeated, and their conclusions withdrawn, in light of further information. In this talk, I
will present a high-level overview of several accounts of defeasible inference: first, my
own, based on previous work by the computer scientist Ray Reiter, but also two earlier
theories due to John Pollock.