Week 4: Hume and Kant

New lessons about giving philosophical talks?

What is the philosophical role of the history of philosophy?

Extreme positions:

• Anti-historical: ignore history.
• Ultra-historical: philosophy is primarily its history.
• What other positions are more plausible?

What is the relation between the descriptive and the normative?

Positions:

• The normative (what ought to be) is completely independent of the descriptive.
• The normative reduces to the descriptive.
• Norms specify what people do when they're reasoning or behaving the best the are capable.

What are the objects of rational appraisal?

Propositions? Propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires)?

Mental representations?

Neural structures?

Discussion Questions for Week 5

1. How can mathematics contribute to the study of theoretical and practical rationality?
2. What is the Bayesian approach to theoretical rationality?
3. Is it wrong to have beliefs that contravene the laws of probability?
4. Is the theory of expected utility descriptive or normative?
5. Can a theory of morality be constructed from decision theory?
6. To what kinds of practical reasoning is game theory relevant?
7. Does game theory provide an adequate descriptive or normative theory of reasoning about interactions?

PHIL 680

Computational Epistemology Laboratory.

Paul Thagard

This page updated Oct. 3, 2005.