Epistemic Utility Theory:

Foundations and Applications

 
 

As of January 2013, I having been leading a research project entitled ‘Epistemic Utility Theory: Foundations and Applications’.  This project is funded by the European Research Council.


Project team


Principal Investigator: Richard Pettigrew

Postdoctoral researchers: Jason Konek and Ben Levinstein

Doctoral students: Chris Burr and Pavel Janda

Visiting doctoral students: Amanda Montgomery


Project description


For a more detailed overview of the project, its aims and activities, please see here.


This project aims to apply the powerful tools of decision theory to provide novel arguments for the epistemic norms that we take to govern what it is rational to believe; and to discover new epistemic norms. We treat the possible epistemic states of an agent as if they were epistemic actions between which that agent must choose. And we consider how we should measure the purely epistemic utility of being in such a state. We then apply the general apparatus of decision theory to determine which epistemic states are rational in a given situation from a purely epistemic point of view; and how our epistemic states should evolve over time. This allows us, often for the first time, to give formal justifications of epistemic norms without appealing to pragmatic considerations that seem intuitively irrelevant to the norms in question. These formal arguments have the great advantage that their assumptions are made mathematically precise and their conclusions are deduced from their assumptions by means of a mathematical theorem. We call their study epistemic utility theory.


Visitors


Jim Joyce (Michigan) - 27-29 November 2012

Rachael Briggs (ANU) - Summer 2013

Branden Fitelson (Rutgers) - Summer 2013


Overviews of the topic


  1. •‘Epistemic utility arguments for Probabilism’ in Zalta, E. (ed.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Website)

  2. •‘Epistemic utility and norms for credence’ commissioned by Philosophy Compass (Draft)

  3. •‘An Improper Introduction to Epistemic Utility Theory’ in Regt, Henk de, Stephan Hartmann, and Samir Okasha (eds.) EPSA Philosophy of Science: Amsterdam 2009 (Springer) (Preprint)

  4. •Slides from a tutorial I gave at LMU Munich on decision theory in epistemology (Slides)