Public Lecture in Celebration of World Logic Day (Branden Fitelson, Northeastern)

Join us for a public lecture with Branden Fitelson, a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University known for his expertise in formal epistemology and philosophy of science. Before teaching at Northeastern, he held teaching positions at Rutgers, UC-Berkeley, San José State, and Stanford, as well as visiting positions at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at LMU-Munich, and the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. Before entering philosophy, Fitelson studied math and physics, and he worked as a research scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a NASA contractor.

This is an in-person event, but you may also join the livestream via Zoom.

Zoom link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/81915534821

Passcode: 12345

Talk Title

Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities — Revisited

Talk Abstract

Lewis’s (1976) triviality argument against the Equation (also known as Adams’s thesis) rests on an implausible assumption about the nature of (epistemic) rational requirements. Interestingly, Lewis (1980) later rejected this assumption. In his discussion of the Principal Principle, Lewis makes a weaker and more reasonable assumption about the nature of rational requirements. In this paper, I explain how to apply the insights of Lewis (1980) to repair Lewis (1976). This leads to a more reasonable rendition of the equation — one that is (a) immune to triviality and (b) a better candidate for a (bona fide) rational requirement.