Philosophy Colloquium: Malte Willer (U of Chicago)

Room TBA

Judgement, Opinion, and Ground: Decomposing Subjective Attitudes

It has been frequently observed in the literature that certain kinds of judgments — most notably aesthetic and taste judgments — require the subject to be directly acquainted with the object under consideration. It has also between observed that this requirement is preserved if such a judgment is ascribed using a subjective attitude verb such as English find (as in “Mary finds the Eiffel Tower beautiful”), but not in plain belief attributions using think or believe (as in “Mary believes the Eiffel Tower to be beautiful”). The goal of this talk is to arrive at a more fine-grained understanding of the (broadly speaking) evidential requirements that subjective attitude attributions put into play, focusing not only on English find but also on its very interesting cousin consider. The upshot of this discussion will be that these requirements constitute a rich multidimensional phenomenon that resists a simple categorization in terms of direct acquaintance. We will then explore the prospects of deriving these complexities from the very fact that the attitudes ascribed are marked as subjective. Time permitting we will also explore how the resulting framework accounts for the evidential requirements arising from subjective assertions, based on the idea that such assertions are expressions of subjective judgments.