ABELARD PODGORSKI

Assistant Professor Abelard Podgorski (NUS Department of Philosophy) was recently granted the FASS Award for Promising Researcher (APR). This award is presented to researchers who have produced research that shows potential impact and promise.

Dr Podgorski received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Southern California, and his BA in mathematics and philosophy from Michigan State University. His primary research interests are in rationality, normative and applied ethics, metaethics, and epistemology. His major recent projects concern the role of idealization in normative theory, the development of a process-oriented model of rationality, how to manage uncertainty about normative facts, and puzzles arising from cases where how we should evaluate our choices seems to depend on which decision we end up making. Dr Podgorski is also interested in applied ethics, including animal ethics and the ethics of procreation He has published eight single-authored journal articles in the past four years, four in top-five journals.

We congratulated Dr Podgorski and spoke to him about his research work.

1. What initially drew you to the study of rationality, ethics, and epistemology?

I was always struck by the gap between how central questions about how we ought to think and what we ought to do were to our lives, and how little most people understood about how to answer those questions. These were the questions that puzzled me as a student, and I felt like I had to figure them out before I could move on to thinking about other things. I still haven’t figured them out, so here I am.

 

 

2. How can your process-oriented model of rationality be applied to current events?

It is painfully clear, in light of the proliferation of wild conspiracy theories and other affronts to right thinking, that people are vulnerable to serious rational failures. The process-oriented model tells us that if we want to find the source of this rational failure, we can’t just look at peoples’ beliefs and their evidence, as it is now. We have to look at their history, and at the processes by which their beliefs were formed and maintained. Coming up with good principles to guide these processes will tell us both where our failures are, and how we can do better.

 

3. How would your process-oriented model of rationality take into account:
1) A person’s ability to crowdsource suggestions to assist in making choices?
2) A person’s liability to be influenced by direct peer pressure (i.e. from friends, family, or colleagues) in coming to a decision?
3) A person’s potential to seek expert advice (i.e. ‘Dear Abby’) on how to make an important decision they are grappling with?

The process-oriented model is compatible with a wide range of answers to this kind of question. An important distinction is between using the opinions of others as evidence for things (that we have reason to think they’d know), and being influenced by their opinions in non-evidential ways. Someone affected by peer pressure is not using their peers’ opinions as evidence about what to believe – they are responding to the social pressure those opinions impose. And this is irrational, as far as belief is concerned.

4. In “Normative Uncertainty and the Dependence Problem” (Mind, 2019), you make the case for being sensitive to both descriptive and normative uncertainty and their relationship when examining how the mind tackles decision-making. How can the option of leaving the decision-making purely to chance (i.e. a coin flip or roll of the dice) be integrated into the decision-making process under the various conditions of uncertainty and example decision-making situations you elaborated on in the article?

I think it’s probably almost never reasonable to leave a decision to chance. The reasons to choose one thing rather than another will almost never be exactly tied, and when they aren’t, why flip a coin rather than pick the one with more reason in its favour? Coin flipping is sometimes tempting because we have a hard time weighing reasons and flipping a coin lets us take the easy way out. But maybe we should try a little harder!

 

 

 5. Which philosopher has been most influential for you?

Socrates, for the obvious reason that his life and thought inspired all Western philosophy after him, because his optimism about the power of philosophy to make us happy and morally good warms my heart even when I’m feeling most cynical, and because he is a constant reminder of the virtues of intellectual humility.

6. Which research publication are you most proud of and why?

I am fond of my paper “Tournament Decision Theory”, because aside from clever-if-I-may-say-so-myself, it contains a lot of things I don’t normally have in my papers – mathematical proofs, colourful diagrams, and an indulgent narrative digression.

7. What has been your most memorable teaching experience at NUS?

In one of my courses on Plato, one of my quietest students wrote a brilliant and very funny dialogue in the Socratic style for their final paper, in which a character tries to philosophically convince their interlocutor that they deserve the highest grade.

8. Could you discuss your plans for a future research study or studies?

My next goal is to try and solve issues in population ethics – how we should act and design policy when we can affect the number and the identity of people who exist in the future. There are a lot of interesting puzzles about those kinds of cases, and I think the view I developed in my decision theory paper has a promising application there.

Thank you very much for taking the time to answer these questions, Dr Podgorwski! And congratulations again on being awarded Promising Researcher!