Professor Richard Pettigrew
BA (Oxon.), MA (Bristol), PhD (Bristol)
Current positions
Professor of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy
Contact
Press and media
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Research interests
My recent research has been mainly in formal epistemology. In recent papers, I have pursued a research programme that I call epistemic utility theory. The strategy is to appeal to the notion of purely epistemic value as well as to the techniques of rational choice theory to provide novel and purely epistemic justifications for a range of epistemic norms. So far, I have considered the norms of Probabilism, Conditionalization, Jeffrey Conditionalization, the Principle of Indifference, and the Principal Principle.
I have a second research interest in the philosophy of mathematics, where I defend a variety of anti-platonist positions, such as eliminativist structuralism and instrumental nominalism.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
IF23\100451 Credence and Chance in a Pluralist Approach to Quantum Theories
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of PhilosophyDates
01/03/2024 to 01/03/2027
The Climate Crisis: What Best Hope To Tell Now?
Role
Co-Investigator
Description
Authors, scientists and academics discover how to use storytelling to help people and communities prepare for the climate catastrophe.Managing organisational unit
Department of EnglishDates
22/02/2022 to 26/07/2022
Towards an accuracy-first approach to judgment aggregation
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of PhilosophyDates
01/09/2021 to 31/08/2022
Maths Poems
Role
Co-Investigator
Description
A collaboration between mathematicians and poets to explore how they express barely expressible concepts, and how they might learn forms of expression from each other.Managing organisational unit
Department of EnglishDates
01/02/2019 to 01/07/2019
Choosing for Changing Selves
Principal Investigator
Description
What you value and how much you value it changes during your life. Given that we make our decisions on the basis of what we believe and what we value,…Managing organisational unit
Department of PhilosophyDates
01/09/2017 to 31/12/2018
Thesis supervisions
Publications
Recent publications
01/03/2025Three questions for liberals
Social Research: An International Quarterly
What is the characteristic wrong of testimonial injustice?
Philosophical Quarterly
Should Longtermists Recommend Hastening Extinction Rather Than Delaying It?
The Monist
Updating on the evidence of others
Philosophical Studies
Opinion Pooling
Opinion Pooling
Thesis
Natural, Rational, and Real Arithmetic in a Finitary Theory of Finite Sets
Supervisors
Award date
01/01/2008
