[SydPhil] Abstract for today's Toby Solomon talk

[David Braddon-Mitchell]

3.30 PM at Main Quad N494 (departmental seminar room)

Title: Epistemic Freedom and Self-Fulfilling Beliefs (jointly with Simon Graf LMU)

Abstract: A (fully) self-fulfilling belief is a belief which is true if you hold it. It is a common intuition that one may form such beliefs even if one does not start out with evidence of their truth. Such intuitions are then used to motivate various theses about epistemic freedom: that we sometimes have the ability to choose beliefs directly, that beliefs can be justified by non-evidential considerations, and that our evidence can leave open multiple rational beliefs. In this paper we argue that the relevant intuitions can be captured without endorsing any of these epistemic freedoms. We do so by developing a Bayesian model of the process of belief formation in self-fulfilling cases that shows how an agent can transform practical reasons into evidence by way of reflecting on their own deliberative process.