March 28, 2019
Colloquium: Ray Briggs, Stanford University
Biography:
R.A. Briggs is a professor of philosophy at Stanford University. They earned their PhD from MIT in 2009, and they currently work on formal epistemology, the metaphysics of probability, measurement theory, and voting theory.
DEFINING DEPENDENCE (OR: WHEN TO SEEK A SECOND OPINION)
All other things being equal, consensus lends more support to a view than a lone peer or expert opinion. But when there is dependency among sources (e.g., when all your friends share opinions because they read the same newspaper), two opinions are not worth much more than one. What does such dependence amount to? Existing characterizations are probabilistic or virtue-theoretic; I supplement them with a causal account that turns on relations of indirect causal dependence.