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Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta epistemic modals

Luck, Risk and Competence

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I was invited to talk about my book on luck this week in Sevilla as part of this wonderful workshop. It was a great experience and I am very thankful for the organizers. After hearing and discussing topics related to luck and risk, specially from an epistemological perspective, here are some of my main conclusions: Rejecting a philosophical theory because of a thought experiment that seems to provide counter-examples is not good practice.
 In general, thought experiments ought to be complemented by – turned into, I would say – rigorous theorising, modelling and argumentation. Epistemic risk is not a genuine phenomenon (at least not different from probability or other already well established epistemic notions).
 However, the theoretical tools developed for the study of epistemic risk are still epistemically valuable for other purposes. Except, perhaps, for truth (and very closely related notions), all central epistemic notions are modal. The relevant uncertainty in norma...

Relativism and Moral Luck revisited

Contextualist and relativists regarding epistemic modals quarrel on how to account for phenomena like the following: Sally’s mother comes into Sally’s bedroom to find her looking under the bed. “What is going on?” asks Sally’s mother, “why are you looking under the bed?” (1) “My glasses, they might be there,” replies Sally. After taking a long look under he bed, Sally finds no glasses under it. So she moves on to look in other places, but not before saying, (2) “Oops, I was wrong.” What is going on here? According to me, this is just a case of moral luck, but in the context of assertion. According to Andrew Latus (2001): The problem of moral luck traps us between an intuition and a fact: . 1)  the intuition that luck must not make moral differences (e.g., that luck must not affect a person’s moral worth, that luck must not affect what a person is morally responsible for).  . 2)  the fact [Berg-Cross 1975, Cushman et.al. 2009, Cushman 2008, etc.] tha...