La seconde conférence a été organisée dans le cadre du cycle de conférences de l'association PhilEAs des étudiants de philosophie de Genève.

Voici les résumés:

Ought to believe (à paraître dans The Journal of Philosophy)

We sometimes say things of the form ‘S ought to believe that p’. For instance, you ought to believe that you are reading right now and students of geography ought to believe that London is the capital of the UK. These are doxastic oughts. Doxastic involuntarists call the cogency of doxastic oughts into question because of the (apparent) fact that we do not exercise direct voluntary control over our beliefs (Alston 1988, Plantiga 1993). By contrast, epistemic deontologists typically try to support the cogency of doxastic oughts by arguing either that we do have a sort of doxastic control or freedom over our beliefs (Steup 2000, Ryan 2003) or that ‘ought’ does not in general imply ‘can’ and so doxastic oughts are compatible with lack of control (Kornblith 2001, Feldman 2003). In this paper, I argue that neither deontologist way of defending the cogency of doxastic oughts has been completely successful against the involuntarist’s challenge. However, I think doxastic oughts clearly are cogent. So, I propose a new way to understand them. The key distinction is between what Sellars (1969) called ‘rules of action’ and ‘rules of criticism’, or ought-to-dos and ought-to-bes. In Sellars’ view and in mine, the former presuppose that the subject to which they apply has the conceptual capacity and control of action necessary to follow the rules, while the latter do not presuppose this. Indeed, the subject of an ought-to-be can be an inanimate object as in ‘The clock ought to be disposed to strike on the quarter-hour’, which clearly doesn’t presuppose that its subject has direct voluntary control over how it is disposed to strike. My core thesis in this paper is that we should treat doxastic oughts as a species of ought-to-bes, where, although the subject is usually an agent, agency over the belief is not presupposed in making the ought-statement.

Knowledge as True Belief One Ought To Have

In this paper, I sketch and defend a new account of the sort of propositional knowledge possessed by mature humans. The defense of this account comes mostly in pointing out its ability to (i) explain the normativity of knowledge, (ii) comport with three intuitions about knowledge (what I call: the anti-luck, value, and anti-skeptical intuitions), and (iii) make unified progress on the Gettier, Meno, and Cartesian problems. In short form, the proposed account is that knowledge is true belief that one ought to have. However, several refinements come in spelling out the precise sense in which one ought to have such beliefs. One of the keys to these refinements is deploying what I call the “end-relational” theory of ‘ought’. This lets me articulate and defend the final version of the account, which is that knowledge is true belief that one ought to have in order to have rationally defensible belief that could not have easily been false.

(Je regrette d'avoir manqué - de justesse - j'étais à Copenhague.)