Modest epistemology

Thinking properly is hard. Sometimes I mess it up. I definitely messed it up yesterday. I'll likely mess it up tomorrow. Maybe I'm messing it up right now. I'm guessing you're like me. If so, then we're both modest: we're unsure whether we're thinking rationally. And, it seems, we should be: given our knowledge of our own limitations, it's rational for us to be unsure whether we're thinking rationally. How, then, should we think? How does uncertainty about what it's rational to think affect what it's rational to think? And how do our judgments of people's (ir)rationality change once we realize that it can be rational to be modest? This dissertation makes a start on answering those questions. Chapter 1 introduces a general framework for modeling situations in which you are rational to be unsure what the rational opinions are. I first show how this framework allows us to precisely formulate the questions from the "higher-order evidence" literature.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Dorst, Kevin(Kevin Matthew)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Roger White.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/124126

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/124126