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Colloquium: Laurie Paul

Friday, December 8, 2017 - 3:00pm

Abstract: Big life decisions are naturally framed using the first personal point of view, where we mentally model or imaginatively project different future lived experiences for ourselves. Such decisions are often based on judgments about what these subjective futures will be like. I explore the way that making transformative decisions from this perspective can put us in the position of regarding our future selves as epistemically and psychologically alien to our current perspective. I then frame these sorts of radical epistemic shifts as personal epistemic revolutions: they are cases where a person undergoes a Kuhnian revolution writ small. I’ll close by drawing connections to work in cognitive science on intuitive judgments and simulation, and work in developmental psychology on discontinuities in conceptual development.

Paper Title

Transformative decisions and epistemic revolution