Rational Delay

The Department of Philosophy as part of the Discovery Themes Colloquium presents Abelard Podgorski, University of Southern California, who will present “Rational Delay.”

 

Abstract: The overwhelming majority of rational norms proposed and discussed by philosophers are state-oriented – they place constraints on the states of mind that rational agents may have at a time, or the relation between their states at different times. In this talk, I will argue that this is a mistake, by appealing to the way processes of updating our attitudes are extended in time, a phenomenon I call rational delay. Neither synchronic nor diachronic state-oriented norms, I will show, are well-placed to account for rational delay, and we should reject such norms in favor of a robustly process-oriented picture of rationality.