Justin Snedegar

Here is the second call for papers:

The 12th Annual Oxford Graduate Philosophy Conference



We invite submissions of papers by graduate students to the 12th Annual Oxford

Graduate Philosophy Conference, to be held on the weekend of 22 – 23 November

2008. Papers should be approximately 4000 words in length, and may be on any

topic in academic philosophy. We encourage papers that are accessible to a

general audience, and hope to represent a diverse range of philosophical

interests in our selections.



Keynote Speakers:



Jonathan Dancy (University of Reading and University of Texas at Austin)

Ernest Lepore (Rutgers University)



Oxford is one of only a few graduate conferences in which student presentations

are followed by a response from faculty members, making the conference a

unique opportunity for students to get feedback on their work from Oxford

faculty.



Submission deadline: 1 August 2008 Please send the following to

gradconf@philosophy.ox.ac.uk in .doc, .rtf, or .pdf format:



1) A cover letter containing the author's name, the title of the paper,

institutional affiliation, contact information, word count, and the area(s) of

philosophy the paper deals with.



2) The paper itself, including the title and a short abstract (no more than 200

words), and with no information identifying the author or the author's

institutional affiliation.



Please direct any questions to gradconf@philosophy.ox.ac.uk.



Conference committee: David Egan, Louise Hanson, Andrew Stephenson.



The conference made possible by the generous support of:



The Aristotelian Society

The Mind Association

The Analysis Trust

Philosophical Studies

Philosophical Quarterly

Oxford University Philosophy Faculty

Justin Snedegar

I don't think this topic is especially important, but I was thinking about it the other day. What's worse:

(i) Having blatantly contradictory beliefs

or

(ii) Having obviously false beliefs?

So, someone could probably have lots and lots of false beliefs, but have no contradictory beliefs (at least none that we would expect her to recognize as contradictory). So, here's a made-up case that doesn't even sound so plausible: Imagine someone has some fixed set of beliefs, at least one of which is false - call it B. The problem is, she cannot change her beliefs. She comes across some new information that should make her form belief C. It is obvious, however, that C implies ~B. So, if she forms belief C, she will also form the belief that C implies ~B. So, what should she do? Would we think it was worse if she went ahead and formed belief C (and the belief that C implies ~B), even though it would easily lead to a contradiction, or if she formed belief ~C, even though it's false?