Episode 104: Seth Yalcin discusses the question-sensitivity of belief
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What is the question‑sensitivity of belief and why does it matter?
Hey, Matt Techman here from Elucidations. Before we get going, I just thought I'd put in a quick plug for Pippa. We've been doing our hosting with them since two thousand sixteen. It's been a fantastic experience. So if you have a podcast You might check 'em out. They have great analytics, the service is free, and they make it easy to migrate. So if you're curious, visit their website at PIPPA dot IO. All right, thanks.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast ordinarily recorded at the University of Chicago, but which today is being brought to you from Berkeley, California. With me is Seth Yalson, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Member of the Group in Logic and Methodology of Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is here to discuss the question sensitivity of belief. Seth Yelson, welcome. Hey Matt, it's great to be here. So a lot of modern theories of the content of a person's beliefs, that is to say, like what information it is that they believe or something like that, departs from this notion of a possible world and uh sometimes it's referred to as possible world semantics.
What exactly is a possible world? It sounds a little bit like science fiction here something. Is it it wh what are these possible worlds?
So philosophers are interested in the nature of possibility and the idea of a possible world is one kind of conceptual tool for approaching that issue. So What do I mean when I say philosophers are interested in possibility? Well, you know, if I flip a coin and it comes up Heads, it seems kind of natural and intuitive and true to say that it might not have come up heads, it might have come up tails. So one way to make that to regiment that talk, to start to theorize about it, is to put that thought like this, there's a possible world where the coin didn't come up heads, there's a possible world where it came up tails. So the idea of a possible world is part of a particular kind of approach to modeling
this kind of discourse in ordinary language that's called modal discourse, so words like possibly, necessarily, or it might have been that or it must have been that. All these words are used to describe what's possible or necessary, and possible world semantics is a an approach that philosophers can use to theorize a bit more precisely about that language. But there's further debate about what exactly possible worlds are, you know, even in the context of possible world semantics. So um If you're the kind of philosopher that likes to talk about possible worlds, that doesn't yet mean that you sign up for a particular kind of conception of what possible worlds are. Sometimes people get in mind a particular idea of possible worlds which I view as totally optional and
This is a view that's most associated with David Lewis. The idea is that a possible world is literally another place. So in reality, in addition to Paris and Mars, there's this other possible world where the coin came up differently than it actually did. And there's a real place in reality um where that happened. And as for a indeed for every possibility, there's going to be a place in reality where that possibility is actually realized. So there are these concrete locations in reality that correspond to possible worlds. That's just one view of the nature or metaphysics of possible worlds. It doesn't happen to be the view of them that I take, but I in a way I think There's a lot of fruitful theorizing you can do in abstraction from a particular metaphysics of possible worlds.
We all think that things might have been different than they actually are, or at least most of us think that. Um and if you're okay with that thought, then you should be okay, at least for a little while, theorizing with possible worlds, because they help to kind of clarify the structure of this language and they help to frame these metaphysical questions about, well, what is possibility exactly?
Okay, good, right. So it's we're not necessarily saying That You know, these are actual worlds that we can like rip through the space time continuum and travel to or something.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the question‑sensitivity of belief and why does it matter?
0:00–5:50
2
How do possible worlds help us model what we believe?
5:50–10:54
3
Why isn’t the “possible world as another place” view the only option?
10:54–16:28
4
How does a single belief correspond to a set of possible worlds?
16:28–21:44
5
What is the problem of logical omniscience for belief models?
21:44–27:46
6
How does fragmentation or compartmentalization address logical omniscience?
27:46–33:13
7
Why do questions act like maps that guide our belief compartments?
33:13–38:37
8
How can the question‑sensitive view illuminate ideology and flawed beliefs?
38:37–38:38
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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