Elijah Millgram (Salt Lake City): Selecting for Defeasibility

Almost all of our reasoning is defeasible -- that is, you're ready to take back the conclusion when it's brought to your attention that there's a difficulty you've overlooked. But we engage not only in division of labor, but in division of intellectual and even evaluative labor; when it's your job to know *these* things, but not *those*, there's a lot for you to overlook (namely, all those things it's not your job to know).

How can our reasoning, in our highly specialized society, be good enough to get by on? I will explore the hypothesis that what picks up the slack is selection effects operating on our institutions and practices:  when a practice or a technology doesn't make it easy enough to anticipate what might go wrong when you interact with it, it is likely to be avoided and drop out of the social mix.

Zur Person:

Elijah Millgram ist E. E. Ericksen Professor für Philosophie an der University of Utah. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Theorien der Rationalität, wobei sowohl das Praktische als auch das Theoretische Denken in seinem Fokus stehen; zu seinen historischen Interessen gehören Mill, Nietzsche, Hume, Williams und Nozick. Er promovierte 1991 an der Harvard University und lehrte an der Princeton University und der Vanderbilt University, bevor er 1999 nach Utah zog. Seine Forschungsinteressen und deren Auswirkungen auf Überlegungen in Disziplinen wie etwa der Moralphilosophie und der Metaphysik spiegeln sich u.a. in seinen Monographien wider: *John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life* (OUP 2019), *The Great Endarkenment* (OUP 2015), *Hard Truths* (Wiley-Blackwell 2009), *Ethics Done Right* (CUP 2005), *Practical Induction* (HUP 1997).