Associate Professor of Philosophy Michael Titelbaum recently received the 2014 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities from the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS).
The Arlt Award is given annually to a young scholar-teacher who has written a book deemed to have made an outstanding contribution to scholarship in the humanities. Titelbaum, who joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty in 2009, is the award's 44th recipient for his book, Quitting Certainties (Oxford University Press, 2013).
Titelbaum’s book presents a new approach for tackling a fundamental problem of epistemology. As a philosopher carefully rationalizes what s/he knows, it becomes necessary to accept that things can be 'known' with varying degrees of certainty. And over time, as new evidence is discovered and considered, the philosopher can update the degree of certainty with which they know what they know. The current standard theory of how individuals should change their degrees of belief over time (Subjective Bayesianism) has a few holes: it can't account for situations where individuals have forgotten information; or in which the degree of certainty was based on self-locating claims. In the book, Titelbaum introduces his Certainty-Loss Framework as a way to reinterpret Bayesian methodology and alter the theory’s updating rules.
Quitting Certainties was selected to receive the Arlt Award based on the impact the book has seen since its publication. Nominators praised Titelbaum for the way his Certainty-Loss Framework is making possible a deeper examination of commitment, consistency, and the nature of information.
The awards ceremony was held Dec. 4 during the CGS 54th Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.