Speaker: Sena Bozdag (University of Bayreuth)
Date and Time: Thursday, October 9th 2025, 16:30-18:00
Venue: ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107 and online.
Title: Common Knowledge, Sailboats, and Publicity
Abstract. We revisit a recent puzzle about common knowledge, the “sailboat” case by Harvey Lederman (2018), and argue that Lewisian common knowledge allows us to reconcile the pre-theoretical intuition that certain facts are “public” in such situations, while these facts cannot be common knowledge in the classical, iterative sense. The crux of the argument is to understand Lewisian common knowledge as an account of what it means for an event to be public. We first formulate this argument informally to clarify its philosophical commitment and then propose one way to capture it formally in epistemic-plausibility models. Taken together, we take the philosophical and the formal arguments as providing evidence that Lewisian common knowledge is a plausible account of what it means for an event to be public. This talk is based on joint work with Olivier Roy.