13/10/2025: Sophie Horowitz on Plans, Learning, and Deferring

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.

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.