My central research project has to do with a special kind of defeating evidence: evidence that your belief (or other attitude) is empty. According to such evidence, your belief (or other attitude) lacks a propositional (truth-apt) content. I call such evidence truth-aptness defeat. For example: suppose you are (say) 95% confident that the Mona Lisa sublime, but then you receive evidence that the notion of "the sublime" is utter nonsense. That evidence indicates that your 95% degree of confidence fails to have any propositional content at all.
Upon receiving this evidence, how should you adjust your confidence that the Mona Lisa is sublime? I…
My central research project has to do with a special kind of defeating evidence: evidence that your belief (or other attitude) is empty. According to such evidence, your belief (or other attitude) lacks a propositional (truth-apt) content. I call such evidence truth-aptness defeat. For example: suppose you are (say) 95% confident that the Mona Lisa sublime, but then you receive evidence that the notion of "the sublime" is utter nonsense. That evidence indicates that your 95% degree of confidence fails to have any propositional content at all.
Upon receiving this evidence, how should you adjust your confidence that the Mona Lisa is sublime? In my dissertation, I argue that you should not lower your confidence, even though the truth-aptness defeater makes that degree of confidence less likely to have a true content. Indeed, I argue that none of the usual responses to defeaters would be satisfactory. This makes for a real puzzle. I resolve it by introducing a new dimension along which we can adjust our attitudes, which I call how firmly they are held. Reducing how firmly you hold an attitude is the right way to respond to truth-aptness defeat.
I have several papers in progress which explore the theoretical significance of truth-aptness defeat; in addition to these, I have further papers in progress in epistemology, metaethics, and the philosophy of language.
