Logic and Philosophy of Science Research Interest Group Talk (Jeremy Goodman, USC)

The Logic and Philosophy of Science Research Group welcomes Jeremy Goodman, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Southern California (USC). Dr. Goodman’s research focuses on metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic.

Talk Title

Induction and Lotteries

Talk Abstract

What you can know depends on who you are. In one sense this is trivial: different people have different evidence and what you can know depends on your evidence. I will argue for a more radical kind of epistemic asymmetry, one that divides agents with the same relevant evidence. I’ll start by considering a recent puzzle due to Andrew Bacon (2020). He argues that a few plausible principles about inductive knowledge entail an absurd amount of knowledge, and so cannot all be accepted. I show how a variant of his puzzle illustrates a general tension between the possibility of inductive knowledge and the claim that what one is in a position to know depends only on one’s evidence. I will then offer a solution to the puzzle that denies this claim, and argue that it is preferable to Bacon’s. I’ll then apply this style of solution to the lottery paradox to argue that people are better positioned to know that they will lose the lottery than they are position to know that a given person disconnected from them will lose. I’ll conclude by relating this picture to recent work on normality-based theories of knowledge and to some recent experimental work. 

About the Logic and Philosophy of Science Research Group

One of six departmental research interest groups, the Logic and Philosophy of Science Group undertakes research in logic, general philosophy of science, and philosophy of the particular sciences, as well as philosophy of mathematics and formal epistemology.