Event Detail
Thu Dec 9, 2010 Howison Library 4:10–6 PM |
Graduate Research Colloquium Michael Caie (University of California, Berkeley) Belief and Paradox |
An attractive approach to the semantic paradoxes holds that cases of semantic pathology give rise to indeterminacy. What attitude should a rational agent have towards a proposition that it takes to be indeterminate in this sense? Orthodoxy holds that rationality requires that an agent disbelieve such a proposition. I argue that it is a consequence of some very basic principles of epistemic rationality that if a rational agent believes that a proposition is indeterminate then the agent should be such that it is indeterminate whether it believes the proposition in question. For rational agents, indeterminacy in the objects of their attitudes will filter up to the attitudes themselves.