Anna Mahtani

London School of Economics
London School of Economics And Political Science
  • London School of Economics
    Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
    Regular Faculty
  • London School of Economics And Political Science
    Department of Philosophy
    Assistant Professor
University of Sheffield
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2005
PhilPapers Editorships
The Reflection Principle
  •  418
    Williamson on inexact knowledge
    Philosophical Studies 139 (2). 2008.
    Timothy Williamson claims that margin for error principles govern all cases of inexact knowledge. I show that this claim is unfounded: there are cases of inexact knowledge where Williamson’s argument for margin for error principles does not go through. The problematic cases are those where the value of the relevant parameter is fixed across close cases. I explore and reject two responses to my objection, before concluding that Williamson’s account of inexact knowledge is not compelling.
  •  1148
    Diachronic Dutch Book Arguments
    Philosophical Review 121 (3): 443-450. 2012.
    The Reflection Principle can be defended with a Diachronic Dutch Book Argument (DBA), but it is also defeated by numerous compelling counter-examples. It seems then that Diachronic DBAs can lead us astray. Should we reject them en masse—including Lewis’s Diachronic DBA for Conditionalization? Rachael Briggs’s “suppositional test” is supposed to differentiate between Diachronic DBAs that we can safely ignore (including the DBA for Reflection) and Diachronic DBAs that we should find compelling (in…Read more
  •  407
    We present a new argument for the claim that in the Sleeping Beauty problem, the probability that the coin comes up heads is 1/3. Our argument depends on a principle for the updating of probabilities that we call ‘generalized conditionalization’, and on a species of generalized conditionalization we call ‘synchronic conditionalization on old information’. We set forth a rationale for the legitimacy of generalized conditionalization, and we explain why our new argument for thirdism is immune to t…Read more
  •  304
    Deference, respect and intensionality
    Philosophical Studies (1): 1-21. 2016.
    This paper is about the standard Reflection Principle :235–256, 1984) and the Group Reflection Principle :478–502, 2007; Bovens and Rabinowicz in Episteme 8:281–300, 2011; Titelbaum in Quitting certainties: a Bayesian framework modeling degrees of belief, OUP, Oxford, 2012; Hedden in Mind 124:449–491, 2015). I argue that these principles are incomplete as they stand. The key point is that deference is an intensional relation, and so whether you are rationally required to defer to a person at a t…Read more