The Workshop

Venue and Date
Beckmanns Hof (room: Shanghai) of the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany; July 20-21, 2017.

Purpose of the Workshop
It is a longstanding philosophical idea that we obtain our evidence (observational data, perceptual beliefs) on the basis of experiences, and that accepting this evidence is often justified/rational in light of the respective experience. This procedure corresponds to the first step of rational, or justified, belief acquisition. In a second step, we use this evidence to justify other, non-perceptual beliefs and to update our belief system.

Concerning the second step, formal epistemology and philosophy of science have already made considerable progress in explaining how we should proceed rationally from evidence to hypotheses about the world, even if many further questions and problems remain. However, very little progress has been made concerning the first step.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together formal epistemologists, philosophers of science and philosophers of mind working at the intersection of both topics and to answer questions regarding experience and its relation to rational updating. We are especially interested in debates concerning:

  • conditionalization in general
  • conditionalization and holism
  • experience and defeaters
  • formal accounts of defeat
  • experience and vagueness of (perceptual) concepts
  • models of the content of experience
  • theory-ladenness of experience
  • models for how experience might get theory-laden

Invited Speakers
Catrin Campbell-Moore (Bristol University)
J. Dmitri Gallow (University of Pittsburgh)
Anna Mahtani (London School of Economics)
Luca Moretti (University of Aberdeen)
Jim Pryor (New York University)
Wolfgang Schwarz (University of Edinburgh)

Contributed Speakers
Seamus Bradley (University of Tilburg)
Lisa Cassell (University of Maryland)
Julien Dutant (Kings College London)
Konstantin Genin (Carnegie Mellon University)
Jeremy Goodman (University of Southern California)
Daniel Kokotajlo (UNC Chapel Hill)

Organizers
The workshop is hosted by the research group From Perception To Belief and Back Again, and organized by Peter Brössel (RUB Bochum), Finnur Dellsén (University College Dublin), Anna-Maria A. Eder (Northeastern University), and Thomas Raleigh (University of Vienna).

Poster