30/05/22: Miriam Schoenfield on Deferring to Doubt

When we doubt a belief, we examine how things look from a perspective in which that belief is set aside. Sometimes we care about what that perspective recommends and, as a result, we abandon the belief we've been doubting. Other times we don't: we recognize that a perspective in which a certain belief is set aside recommends abandoning it, but we go on believing it anyway. Why is this? In this paper, I'll consider and then reject some proposals concerning when to defer to the perspective of doubt. I'll argue that ultimately the question of whether to defer to doubt on any given occasion can’t be answered through rational deliberation aimed at truth or accuracy. If I’m right, this means that a certain challenge facing defeatist views about higher order evidence cannot be met: namely, providing a motivation for abandoning belief in cases of higher order evidence, but not becoming a global skeptic.

Miriam Schoenfield received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012 and is now an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and an Affiliate Professor at the Dianoia Institute for Philosophy at Australian Catholic University. In addition to teaching at UT Austin, Miriam has served as a Bersoff fellow at New York University, an Associate Professor at MIT, and has taught philosophy in a number of different prison systems. She is the winner of the Marc Sanders Prize in Epistemology and the Young Epistemologist Prize. Her current research focuses on the ways in which Bayesian epistemology, and the aims of truth and accuracy, bear on debates about how to respond to evidence of our own irrationality.

This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Schoenfield's talk - "Deferring to Doubt" - at the Aristotelian Society on 30th May 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.