Hello everyone,
Serious Metaphysics continues this Thursday 28 April - Alexander Greenberg will be presenting 'Sacrifices for the greater epistemic good?' (abstract below). 1.00-2.30pm as usual, at the philosophy faculty board room. Feel free to bring your lunch. The rest of the termcard can be found at: http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/SMG Best wishes, Li Li Abstract: It is often claimed that true belief is the fundamental goal of epistemic justification, i.e. that the fundamental point of having a justified belief is to have a true one. Call this claim 'veritism'. Particular examples are alleged to create problems for this claim: examples in which having a belief that looks prima facie unjustified is a means to the end of having a large number of other true beliefs. To illustrate, say a scientist is seeking to get a grant from a religious organisation that only gives grants to true believers. If this scientist gets this grant, he'll have many more true beliefs, since he'll be able to continue his research. However, since this scientist is a terrible actor, the only way he'll succeed in getting the grant is if he believes that God exists. Such cases create a difficulty for veritism because if the scientist were to believes that God because it will lead to many true beliefs in the future, a) that belief would seem to be unjustified, but b) because of the true beliefs he'll have in the future, he's doing well with regards to the aim of true belief. Some have argued that these examples should lead us to reject veritism. This conclusion, I'll argue, is unwarranted. A plausible version of veritism can deal with these examples. But these examples do reveal a fundamental difference between theoretical and practical normativity. -- Li Li Tan PhD (Probationary) in Philosophy St Catharine's College _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
