Sophie Horowitz (Amherst)
Plans, Learning, and Deferring

2025 | 2026

ISSUE NO. 1 | VOLUME CXXVI

MONDAY 13 october 2025

18.15 - 19.45
Woburn suite, Senate House

Sophie Horowitz

about

Sophie Horowitz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, focusing on epistemology. Her interests include higher-order evidence, permissivism, and accuracy. Her monograph in progress, Guesswork, develops a view of accuracy according to which partial beliefs are more accurate insofar as they license true forced-choice guesses.

abstract

 It is currently fashionable to talk about “synchronic conditionalization” – and more generally, synchronic or time-slice versions of norms that are normally understood as diachronic. But what is a synchronic version of conditionalization? Few authors address this question directly,1 but one often sees this synchronic entity labeled as a “plan”, “policy”, or “disposition”.  I want to look at these labels a little more carefully. I will argue that conditionalization is a bad plan. More precisely: the way we naturally assess plans makes conditionalization look bad. But being disposed to conditionalize is good. That is, the way we naturally assess dispositions makes conditionalization look good like a good one to have. So if we want to defend a synchronic analog to conditionalization, we should go with dispositions, not plans.  At the end of the paper I’ll argue that our way of assessing plans has more in affinity with another important epistemic concept: deference. 

Meeting Address

Our meetings usually take place in Senate House, University of London, Malet St, London WC1E 7HU. See top of page for specific location. 

meeting time

The Society’s philosophy talks take place every fortnight on Mondays throughout the academic year. Each talk starts at 18.15 and lasts for 45 minutes. The remainder of the time is dedicated to discussion, which ends at 19.45

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Draft Papers

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Final Papers

For the past 142 years, the Proceedings has featured widely respected papers delivered by a range of prominent philosophers, such as Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, A.J. Ayer, P.F. Strawson, Karl Popper, Elizabeth Anscombe, Bernard Williams, Hubert Dreyfus, Alexander Nehamas, and Onora O’Neill. Final drafts of the papers – including discussion notes and exemplary graduate papers – are published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.

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