Kenny Easawran
Kenny Easawran
On Pi Day, Kenny Easawran from UC Irvine joins us for our Colloquium series, to talk about his work on collective decision making and formal epistemology.
Title: Puzzles: Epistemology as Art
Abstract: Timothy Williamson defines a "cognitive home" as a domain in which knowledge works in an idealized way --- all facts are knowable, when we have knowledge we are in a position to know that we do, and when we lack knowledge we are in a position to know that we do. He argues that there is no cognitive home, and in fact that all of these principles fail quite drastically in every context. I argue that an important aspect of the aesthetic appeal of puzzles is that they are created in such a way that they often provide a cognitive home for us. Just as Thi Nguyen argues that games are a domain of artistic production whose medium is the agency of the players, I argue that puzzles are a domain of artistic production whose medium is the epistemic faculties of the solver. By investigating the tools and conventions by which puzzle constructors in different genres (American crosswords, British crosswords, jigsaw puzzles, sudokus, "mystery hunt" puzzles, etc.) are able to provide us something like a cognitive home, we can identify features of epistemic situations that mitigate some of Williamson's sweeping conclusions about the limitations we face as knowers.