Daniel Scott Kaplan | No Such Thing as Defeat | Philosophy Speaker Series

Defeat has played an important role in epistemology since Gettier (1963). It has played such an important role that it has led to its own field: defeasible reasoning, which (owing to their complementary aims) has flourished alongside AI and the like. In this talk, I argue that its ubiquity and importance is misplaced, that there is no unified concept or phenomenon of "defeat" and so we should think of putative cases of "defeat" and "defeasible reasoning" without recourse to this concept. In closing, I suggest what that might look like.

Daniel Scott Kaplan is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Concordia University.

This presentation will take place in-person in LB-362 and simultaneously live-streamed on Zoom: