Workshop: The Objects of Credence

This one-day workshop is a follow-up event of the ‘The Objects of Credence Book Symposium’ discussing Anna Mahtani’s book ‘The Objects of Credence’, forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

The symposium takes place on 22 May, 9.20am-5.30pm, at the Institute of Philosophy. Link to the programme and registration. 

On 23 May, LSE Philosophy is hosting a follow-up workshop. The workshop consists of presentations by

• Timothy Williamson (University of Oxford)
• Luc Bovens (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
• Caspar Hare (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Melissa Fusco (Columbia University)
• Christian List (LMU München)

This event is free and open to all. The workshop takes place in-person. Link to the registration form.

Preliminary Programme

10.00am   Welcome

10.15am   Luc Bovens: Demographic Sorting in the US

11.15am   Short Break 

11.30am   Melissa Fusco: Absolution of a Causal Decision Theorist

12.30pm   Lunch 

14.00pm   Caspar Hare: Ought I to Want You to Do What You Ought to Do?

15.00pm   Short Break 

15.15pm   Christian List: The first-personal argument against physicalism

16.15pm   Tea/coffee break 

16.45pm   Timothy Williamson: Hyperintensionality, Heuristics, and Overfitting

17.45pm   Closing the workshop and drinks nearby

Abstracts

Timothy Williamson: Hyperintensionality, Heuristics, and Overfitting

According to currently fashionable hyperintensional metaphysics, logically and necessarily equivalent sentences or predicates can express distinct states of affairs, properties or relations. I will argue that the examples used to motivate hyperintensional metaphysics depend on an imperfectly reliable heuristic, and that such theories look like a case of the phenomenon, well-known to scientists, of overfitting.

Luc Bovens: Demographic Sorting in the US

Consider the following broad generalization: younger voters, women voters, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) voters, more educated voters, and urban voters are thought to be more on the left of the political spectrum, while older voters, male voters, white voters, less educated voters, and rural voters are thought to be more on the right. To what extent does this claim hold true? Does it hold true for all issues that divide liberals from conservatives? Or are some more conservative demographic groups more liberal on some issues and vice versa? Is there elite polarization, that is, are elites more polarized than non-elites? Are there interaction effects between demographic variables? I consider the General Social Survey and the American National Election surveys to address these questions.

Melissa Fusco: Absolution of a Causal Decision Theorist

I respond to a dilemma for Causal Decision Theory (CDT) under determinism, posed in Adam Elga’s paper “Confessions of a Causal Decision Theorist”. The treatment I present highlights (i) the status of laws as predictors, and (ii) the consequences of decision dependence, which arises natively out of Jeffrey Conditioning and CDT’s characteristic equation. My argument leverages decision dependence to work around a key assumption of Elga’s proof: to wit, that in the two problems he presents, the CDTer must employ subjunctive-suppositional (rather than evidential) transformations of a shared prior.

Caspar Hare: Ought I to Want You to Do What You Ought to Do?

Suppose that you are doing something and I am passively watching. Suppose that you and I know all the same things, and have all the same attachments. Suppose that there is something you ought to do. In circumstances like this, is it always the case that I ought to want you to do what you ought to do? This is a tricky question for advocates of deontological moral theories to answer. I recommend that they answer it like this: It is always the case that any  attitude you ought to have, I ought to have, and vice-versa. But sometimes we both ought to be curiously ambivalent. We both ought to want-in-one-way that you do the right thing, and both ought to want-in-another-way that you do the wrong thing. The difference between these two ways-of-wanting is already apparent in another well-understood theory of the practical ought: causal decision theory.

Christian List: The first-personal argument against physicalism

The aim of this talk is to discuss a seemingly straightforward argument against physicalism which, despite being implicit in much of the philosophical debate about consciousness, has not received as much attention as it deserves (compared to other, better-known “epistemic”, “modal”, and “conceivability” arguments). This is the argument from the non-supervenience of the first-personal (and indexical) facts on the third-personal (and non-indexical) ones. This non-supervenience, together with the assumption that the physical facts (at least as conventionally construed) are third-personal, entails that some facts (namely, first-personal, phenomenal ones) do not supervene on the physical facts. Interestingly, unlike other arguments against physicalism, the first-personal argument, if successful, refutes not only physicalism but also other purely third-personal metaphysical pictures.