Pursuit of Platonic Tethering to the Truth: An Outline of Learning-Theoretic Epistemology

24 July, 3:30-5:30pm

Sir Roland Wilson Building, 3.03/3.04

Note the unusual location.


Hanti Lin (UC Davis)

Pursuit of Platonic Tethering to the Truth: An Outline of
Learning-Theoretic Epistemology

I will defend an epistemological tradition that, I believe, is
underappreciated in philosophy today. It has not yet obtained an official
name, but it does have a long history. It takes seriously an ideal of
learning that Plato praises in Meno---the ideal of coming to have one's
opinions be "tethered" to the truth, aka convergence to the truth. And it
employs this platonic ideal of learning to evaluate inductive procedures,
as recommended by Peirce, Reichenbach, and Putnam. In addition to its
history in philosophy, this tradition has been practiced in science---very
influential in statistics (both classical and Bayesian), and almost
dominant in learning theory (developed to serve as the foundation of
machine learning). Unfortunately, this epistemological tradition receives
almost no attention from today's philosophers. Worse, (1) its core thesis
seems to have never been formulated clearly and distinguished from highly
misleading add-ons, and (2) certain longstanding worries about it, such as
"We are all dead in the long run so who cares about convergence to the
truth?", remain to be addressed. My goal is to fix those problems, (1) and
(2), and refine this tradition into what I call learning-theoretic
epistemology.

Date & time

Tue 24 Jul 2018, 3:30pm to 5:30pm

Location

Sir Roland Wilson Building, 3.03/3.04

Speakers

Hanti Lin (UC Davis)

Event series

Contacts

Tim Williamson

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