Author: Malvin

One of the central debates in epistemology in recent decades concerns epistemic closure principles, such as the closure of knowledge under known implication (the K axiom). In this talk, I will introduce epistemic-logical models of three influential theories of knowledge according to which various epistemic closure principles do not hold: the relevant alternatives (RA) theory, the tracking theory, and the safety theory of knowledge. The main result is a complete characterization of the epistemic closure principles that hold according to these formalized theories. Analysis of this result shows that two parameters of an epistemological theory affect whether closure fails according to the theory. Finally, extending the formal framework in the style of dynamic epistemic logic, I relate failures of closure in a fixed context to failures of closure across context changes, as suggested by contextualist versions of the RA and tracking theories.

TBA

In this paper we confront various notions of strategic rationality, that
is various choice rules for decision making in interaction, with the
idea that rationality consists, at least partly, in being responsive to
reasons. Our perspective is broadly Humean, and we are concerned with
subjective-normative reasons: facts that the agents believe to hold and,
if they were the case, would promote the satisfaction of the agents’
desires. From that point of view responsiveness to reasons amounts to
(in)variance under certain changes in the agents’ beliefs about the
context of the game. We provide a general classification of well-known
notions of strategic rationality in terms of how much, and to which type
of reasons they are responsive to.
Note: this is a different talk from the one Eric Pacuit recently gave at
the GROLOG colloquium.