Episode 96: Nic Koziolek discusses the role of belief in reasoning
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What is the overall focus of the episode and who is the guest?
Hey, Matt Techman here from Elucidations. I just want to say thanks very much for all the iTunes reviews. They've been very helpful and please keep 'em coming. As always you can find us on Twitter at adelucidations pod And you can check out our blog at Lucian, that's L U C I A N Lucian dot usicago dot edu slash blogs slash elucidations. One other thing I wanted to mention is that since August we've been doing our hosting through a new startup called Pippa, which is pretty cool. It's actually founded by some former philosophers. And I have to say I've been very impressed so far. The service is totally free, provides detailed analytics, makes it very easy for you to migrate from your previous host to them.
So all in all, it's been a very positive experience and it's enabled us to get much more detailed stats on who's listening and when. So if you have a podcast and you're looking for a hosting service, you might check them out. They can be found at pippa.io, P I P P A dot IO. All right, thanks.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Tykman.
How does Nic Koziolek define a judgment in philosophical terms?
And with me today is Nick Kazalek, instructor of philosophy at Auburn University, and he is here to discuss the role of belief in reasoning. Nick Kazalek, welcome. Thanks, Matt. So one of the topics you've worked on is what philosophers have called judgment. Uh so I thought maybe we could begin by talking about what judgments are. We're not talking about like the judge in a court of law or something. Uh so what is a judgment in this sense of the term?
Right, good. I should start by saying actually that What I call a judgment is maybe importantly different in certain respects from what other philosophers have called judgment. But the way that I understand judgment is actually Essentially as a component of a larger mental act. And so I'll explain judgments by talking about their role in these larger mental acts. So for example, I think that a judgment is the only kind of component in an act of inferring, that is, an act of coming to believe something on the basis of something else you already believe. So for example, if I believe that all philosophers are wise and I believe that Socrates is a philosopher, I might infer that Socrates is wise, and so come to form this new belief.
Now I think of those kinds of acts as essentially involving judgments. So although I just described that act of inferring in terms of belief by saying it's an act of coming to believe something. You can also describe the same act on my view in terms of judgment, and so you can say that What that act of inferring is is an act of judging that Socrates is wise on the basis of your judgments that all philosophers are wise and that Socrates is a philosopher.
So it sounds a little bit like you know, I think to myself, Gee, Matt, you know what?
What role do judgments play in inference and everyday reasoning?
Socrates is a philosopher. Is that the same thing as judging that Socrates is a philosopher?
This is kind of a hard and complicated question in a certain respect. So one w way that a lot of philosophers have talked about judgment is by analogy with assertion. So they say that To judge something is like saying something out loud to yourself, only not doing it out loud necessarily. So it's like saying something to yourself in your mind. Part of the idea of explaining judgments in terms of acts like inferring is that it I think brings out certain aspects of the act of judgment that that other way of describing it by comparing it with assertion sort of leaves out. The connection of judgment with you're figuring out what to believe, you're figuring out what you know, what you should think about the way that the world is.
So one way of thinking about this is that I'm actually a little bit skeptical of the idea that you can just judge something by itself without doing so in doing anything else. So what I mean is I'm sort of skeptical of the idea that you can just like be sitting around and just judge to yourself There are trucks in the street. And even if you can do that kind of thing, I think it's much more revealing of the nature of judgment to think of the kind of role that it plays in these larger acts like inferring or perceiving.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the overall focus of the episode and who is the guest?
0:00–1:24
2
How does Nic Koziolek define a judgment in philosophical terms?
1:24–3:11
3
What role do judgments play in inference and everyday reasoning?
3:11–10:47
4
How does the guest distinguish between belief, knowledge, and perfect belief?
10:47–18:33
5
Why does Koziolek treat knowledge as the foundational concept for thought and judgment?
18:33–26:12
6
How does the appointment‑with‑Nathan example illustrate successful and failed reasoning?
26:12–35:45
7
What differentiates a good inference from a fallacious one in this framework?
35:45–41:05
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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