Religious Epistemology, Contextualism, and Pragmatic Encroachment

New Insights and Directions in Religious Epistemology, a series of workshops held in Oxford University on 13th-14th March and 12th-13th June 2013. The aim of this project is to make a bold and lasting impact on religious epistemology. This project aims to bring recent developments in epistemology to bear on topics in the philosophy of religion in a way that will open up new channels of research in religious epistemology. The project is centered around, but not limited to, interesting and novel applications developing out of six main topics: (i) contextualism and pragmatic encroachment, (ii) safety and knowledge, (iii) epistemic defeat, (iv) testimony, (v) formal epistemology, and (vi) etiology of belief. The project will be led by John Hawthorne and will involve 3 postdoctoral researchers, 3 PhD students, 22 visiting research fellowships, 9 public lectures, 4 roundtable discussions, 6 workshops, and 1 major international conference. This project, valued at 1.3 million GBP, has been made possible by the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation. Alan Hájek (Australian National University) gives a talk for the New Insights seminar series on 21st May 2015. Abstract: A number of prominent authors—Levi, Spohn, Gilboa, Seidenfeld, and Price among them—hold that rational agents cannot assign subjective probabilities to their options while deliberating about which one they will choose. This has been called the “deliberation crowds out prediction” thesis. The thesis, if true, has important ramifications for many aspects of Bayesian epistemology, decision theory, and game theory. The stakes are high. The thesis is not true—or so I maintain. After some scene-setting, I will precisify and rebut several of the main arguments for the thesis. I will defend the rationality of assigning probabilities to options while deliberating about them: deliberation welcomes prediction. I will also consider application of the thesis, and its denial, to Pascal’s Wager.