Placement Practice Job Talk—Evan Taylor

Evan Taylor is a recent graduate from our PhD program and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy. Please join us for his practice job talk, which will begin at 3:00 PM sharp.

Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81351088053?pwd=dFZZY3NqSDBYcGJoc1BPcWdYVUhLdz09

Passcode: mockpwd

Talk Title

Epistemic Obligations to Know

Talk Abstract

While we regularly attribute to ourselves obligations to know things, those obligations often look more like moral or professional obligations, rather an epistemic ones. In general, discussions of epistemic obligations tend to focus on obligations with respect to believing, rather than with respect to knowing.  In this talk, I argue that we can make sense of a category of obligations to know which are distinctively epistemic, and which don’t reduce to mere obligations to believe. These are obligations to avoid certain kinds of knowledge loss, or, equivalently, obligations to retain one’s knowledge. Insofar as the normative pressure to retain knowledge is not simply understandable as normative pressure to retain belief, we sometimes have epistemic obligations to know.