John Locke Lectures (Wednesday - Week 2, TT25)

Jonardon Ganeri

The Faculty is delighted to welcome Professor Richard Pettigrew as the John Locke lecturer of 2025. Richard is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol.

 

Lecture 2: 'On Uncertainty: priors, credal hinges, and epistemic risk'

In Lecture 2, I aim to fill two apparently independent gaps in the inventory of norms I enumerated in Lecture 1: further norms that govern our initial point of view, before we acquire any evidence; and norms that say how our uncertain beliefs should change when we gain new representational resources, such as concepts or logical capacities or awareness of new objects. In fact, I argue that both gaps should be filled in the same way. I offer a particular reading William James’ essay ‘The Will to Believe’, and I build on this to understand how we should answer both questions.

 

Further information about the John Locke Lectures can be found on the John Locke Lectures page