Upcoming events/talks in September:

1. Workshop New Perspectives on Conditionals and Reasoning, Regensburg, Sep. 5–6, co-organised with Christoph Michel and Hans Rott
2. Talk at ESPP 2018 (Conference of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology): “Three experimental approaches to epistemic closure”, Rijeka, Sep. 10–13 – cancelled due to illness, slides are here.
3. Talk at GAP.10 (10th conference of the German Society for Analytic Philosophy): “Knowledge, belief and the how/why asymmetry”, Cologne, Sep. 17–20
4. Talk at 6. Tagung für Praktische Philosophie: “True belief ignorance and excuses” (in German), Salzburg, Sep. 27–28

Hope to meet some of you at some of these events!

This Friday I’m going to present a poster “Scepticism, Closure and Folk Epistemology” at the first conference of the Experimental Philosophy Group Germany at Bochum. You can find the poster here.

The central thesis of the poster is that closure of knowledge under known entailment is a principle of folk epistemology. Pace other studies, folk ascriptions are sensitive to logical relations. As always comments are most welcome (or have a chat with me at the conference)!

Together with Christian Wirrwitz I will give a talk at GAP.9 next week (Tuesday 14:15): “Optimism and the Value of Truth”. Our starting point is a type of conversation we probably all have taken part in several times in our lives (both in the role of A and in the role of B): A and B are talking about some episode of their past or future lives. A paints it black, B reprimands A for being such a pessimist. A replies that she is not a pessimist, but a realist. Three observations about this type of conversation are important to us:

1. Optimism is assumed to be good, at least by B.
2. Having true beliefs (aka realism) is assumed to be good, at least by A.
3. These two values are assumed to clash with each other, otherwise A’s reply wouldn’t make sense.

Drawing on several ideas (self-fulfilment and feedback loops, semantic indeterminacy, rejection of uniqueness/underdetermination principle) we offer an explanation of how optimists can value truth and need not be epistemically irrational.

For the full show come along on Tuesday (or have a chat with us at GAP.9)!