Hilary Kornblith

Professor of Philosophy

University of Massachusetts

"The Myth of Epistemic Agency"

Monday, November 16, 2009

4:00 p.m.

Edmund J. Cain Hall (EJCH) 108H

University of Nevada, Reno

Many of our beliefs are formed unreflectively. But sometimes we stop and ask ourselves, "Is this what I really ought to believe?" On these occasions, it seems, the beliefs we form are ones which, in some sense, we choose. Believing, at least on these occasions, is not something that just happens to us; it is something that we do. This is the idea that there is such a thing as epistemic agency. A great many philosophers are committed to the view that there is such a thing as epistemic agency, and they believe that it is connected, in important ways, to epistemic responsibility, the possibility of having justified belief, and, on some views, the possibility of having beliefs at all. This paper takes a careful look at the very idea of epistemic agency.

Hilary Kornblith received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. For many years he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont, and is currently at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Inductive Inference and Its Natural Ground (1993), and editor of Naturalizing Epistemology (1985), and of Epistemology: Internalism And Externalism (2001), and many influential articles in the Theory of Knowledge, and The Philosophy of Science.
 

Sponsored by

The Philosophy Department, UNR, 784-6846

and
The Leonard Endowment

http://www.unr.edu/philosophy
 

Free and open to the public

Lecture Flyer in pdf (Acrobat Reader) format