Javier González de Prado: Aims for the uncertain

Tuesday October 31 2023 @12:00 (CEST)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
An attractive idea is that what agents ought to do or think is sensitive to the limitations of their epistemic perspective. This idea is motivated by the thought that such norms need to offer suitable guidance, and that one cannot be guided by facts or information one has no access to. However, authors like Lasonen-Aarnio and Hughes have recently argued that perspectivist norms face problems with guidance that are analogous to those encountered by objectivist norms. I will grant this, but I will argue that norms that are sensitive to the agent’s epistemic position still have a distinctive explanatory role to play. We need to appeal to these perspectivist norms to explain what agent’s aim at when deliberating in circumstances of uncertainty (in other words, what motivates them).

Bio
Javier González de Prado is Associate Professor (Contratado Doctor) at UNED, where he is part of METIS. He is interested in different topics in normativity theory, epistemology and philosophy of language.