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.

The person:

Elijah Millgram is the E. E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. His research specialties are theories of rationality, focusing on both practical and theoretical thought; his historical interests include Mill, Nietzsche, Hume, Williams, and Nozick. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1991 and taught at Princeton University and Vanderbilt University before moving to Utah in 1999. His research interests and their impact on thinking in disciplines such as moral philosophy and metaphysics are reflected in his writings and the following monographs: *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).