Dear Cambridge philosophers of Science, Tomorrow (Wednesday, today as most of you read this) is the fourth meeting for CamPoS, which happens as usual at 1 p.m. in the HPS department in seminar room 2 in the basement. Melissa Fusco (Columbia University) will talk about 'Causal Decision Theory and Tragic Evidence: Death in Damascus Revisited'.
Her abstract is below. Sincerely, J. Brian Pitts Abstract: Recent literature on causal decision theory (CDT) has featured much discussion of what Hare & Hedden call "decision dependence"---the fact that, for a causalist, the expected utility of an act a can sometimes depend on how confident one is that one will perform a. In this talk, I will focus on decision dependent cases in which CDTers believe that they are subject to tragic evidential correlations (henceforth TECs). According to the standard theory, the more confident a CDTer grows that she will perform a given act a in a TEC case, the more confident she becomes that she will regret doing a. Yet as Joyce (2012) puts it, in such cases the CDTer "[does] not...fully trust the accuracy of the future beliefs on which [her] regrets about [her act] will be based." This talk will be devoted to sketching the accuracy argument both in TEC cases and in their causal analogues. -- J. Brian Pitts Senior Research Associate Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge jb...@cam.ac.uk Ph.D., Philosophy/History & Philosophy of Science, University of Notre Dame Ph.D., Physics, University of Texas at Austin _____________________________________________________ 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.
