Dr Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij, Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, has won a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant for a project entitled ‘Epistemic Consequentialism: Problems and Prospects’.
The award will fund several research events, including a sabbatical visit to Kent from Dr Jeffrey Dunn (DePauw University), a workshop on epistemic consequentialism at the London School of Economics (LSE) in November, and an international conference on the same topic at Kent in 2015.
The question at the foundation of the project is a simple one: What is it for something to be good? That depends on what we mean by ‘good’, of course. We might mean ‘morally good’, i.e., the kind of good that regulates actions from an ethical point of view. Alternatively, we might mean ‘epistemic good’, i.e., the kind of good that regulates how we ought to form beliefs. In this project, we are interested in a particular theory of the epistemic good: epistemic consequentialism. Epistemic consequentialists believe that the epistemic value of a particular policy, process or belief is exhausted by the epistemic goodness of its consequences, e.g., as determined by its ability to generate (further) accurate belief. A wide variety of philosophical projects assume a form of epistemic consequentialism. Still, despite the critical attention that consequentialism has received in ethics, there has never been a systematic investigation into the viability of consequentialism in epistemology. The project attempts to remedy this situation.
The dates of the conference and Dr Dunn’s visit to Kent are to be confirmed. For more details about the British Academy, please see their webpage here: www.britac.ac.uk