29424 - Seminars (1) (LM) (G. A)

Learning outcomes

The philosophy Seminars propose general objectives, which are those specific teaching seminar: (1) to train the students to philosophical discussion urging participation in conferences and presentations of Italian and foreign scholars; (2) deepen the topics of the courses through participation in philosophical lectures by specialists also of other universities; (3) broaden their thematic and methodological horizons to complete offered teaching.

Course contents

If the probability that the lottery ticket we hold is the winning one is extremely low, we should believe that it will lose, and we may even be tempted to say that we know that it will lose. If we believe A and we believe B, we should also believe their conjunction “A and B.” Surprisingly, these two principles lead to unacceptable conclusions. Since the probability of each ticket winning is the same, we should believe that no ticket will win, even though we know that this is not the case. This is the so-called “lottery paradox.”

A very similar paradox, but one that does not explicitly refer to probability, is this: the author of a long, fact-filled volume (it could be a book on Roman history, or on ornithology, summarizing our current knowledge) writes in the preface, as is customary, “certainly, although I have done my best to check each statement I make in the book, there remain errors in what I have written.” In fact, even if the author seems to be saying something reasonable and showing the necessary modesty, her beliefs are logically contradictory. Since each statement in the book is believed, their conjunction should also be believed, and therefore he should believe that the volume contains no errors at all. If we extend this reasoning from the example of the book to the totality of our opinions, plausibly, we will obtain the same result. Even if we limit ourselves to the things we believe we know, or that we believe with certainty, it is enormously probable that among them there are some errors; in fact this is itself something that we can believe to be certain, and believe we know to be true. But then each of us has logically contradictory beliefs.

To use Christensen's vivid phrase, these paradoxes seem to confirm Murphy's law: if something can go wrong (we are aware of our fallibility) then something will go wrong (we will be inconsistent – in addition to probably making other mistakes).

The lottery and preface paradoxes are a crucial juncture between epistemology (in the broad sense of the theory of knowledge), logic, and the study of probability. In the seminar we will try to better clarify the structure of the paradoxes, starting from David Christensen’s volume “Putting Logic in Its Place” (in particular chapters 1-4) which introduces the problems with a certain degree of depth and defends its own solution, but without presupposing knowledge of logic or probability calculus. Students will also be required to study at least two of the other texts listed below, or other ones that may be proposed during the seminar.

Readings/Bibliography

Main text

David Christensen, 2004, Putting Logic in its Place, Oxford University Press

Other readings

David Christensen, 2007, “Does Murphy’s Law Apply in Epistemology?” in Oxford Studies in Epistemology, vol.2, pp. 3-31.

Simon Evnine, 1999, “Believing Conjunctions” Synthese 118, pp. 201-227.

Richard Foley, 1992, “Being Knowingly Incoherent” Nous 26, pp. 181-203.

John Hawthorne, 2004, Knowledge and Lotteries, Oxford University Press (in particolare cap. 1)

Elizabeth Jackson, 2020, “The relationship between Belief and Credence”, Philosophy Compass 15, pp. 1-13.

Henry Kyburg, 1997 “The Rule of Adjunction and Reasonable Inference” The Journal of Philosophy 94, pp. 109-125.

Dana K. Nelkin, 2000, “The Lottery Paradox, Knowledge and Rationality”, The Philosophical Review 109, pp. 373-409.

Michael G. Titelbaum, 2022, Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology 1, Oxford University Press, capp. 1-2

Alex Worsnip, 2016, "Belief, Credence and the Preface Paradox", Australian Journal of Philosophy 94, pp. 549-562.

Teaching methods

The course consists of presentations made by the teacher on the topics covered in the seminar, group discussions and interventions by Italian and foreign scholars. Students will also be provided with articles and passages of works to present and discuss (individually or in groups).

Assessment methods

The requirement for attendance is to participate in at least 2/3 of the lectures (10 out of 15). In order to obtain the credit points each student will have to give at least one in-class presentation on one of the readings planned for the course (details will be given in due course).

Teaching tools

Slides, handouts and follow-up materials may be used during the lessons. The material used will be made available to students through the platform virtuale.unibo.it [https://virtuale.unibo.it/

Office hours

See the website of Daniele Sgaravatti