2025-01-09
16 分钟How can we make decisions under conditions of indeterminacy? Robert Williams discusses this challenging issue with Nigel Warburton. This episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast has been made in association with Vagueness & Ethics, a research project funded by the European Commission (grant agreement number 101028625 — H2020-MSCA-IF-2020) and led by Miguel Dos Santos at Uppsala University.
This is Philosophy Bytes with me, David.
Edmonds and me, Nigel Warburton.
Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
there's a difference between uncertainty and indeterminacy.
As Robert Williams explains the latter, indeterminacy poses the deeper problems, for it seems to suggest that there are cases where we can't apply in any conventional sense the concepts of true and false.
This episode of Philosophy Bites is made in association with Vagueness and Ethics, a research project funded by the European Commission and based at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Robert Williams, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
Very glad to be here, Nigel.
The topic we're going to focus on today is decision making under indeterminacy.
Now, is indeterminacy just when you don't know something?
I think it's distinct from that.
Uncertainty will be the sort of situation, like if we're thinking about a decision situation.
You know, I can decide whether to put my money in the bank or not put it in the bank.
And if I'm doing that under uncertainty, it might be because, say, I don't know what the bank's going to do with the money, don't know whether they're going to invest it in an ethical way or an unethical way.
And that ignorance of what's going to happen combined with a thought that there is a fact of the matter out there about what's going to happen.
It's just my shortcoming that's preventing me knowing it.
That's the uncertainty place.
And there's a question about what are the right rational rules to guide our decision making under uncertainty.
But indeterminacy will be a different thing.
Let's maybe introduce a few examples of it.