Zeev Goldschmidt
I am a lecturer at the Philosophy Department at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Before that, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Edelstein Center for Philosophy of Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I received my PhD in Philosophy from the London School of Economics. I work primarily in epistemology, decision theory, and ethics. Broadly characterized, my research focuses on the relationships between agents’ mental states and their actions. This includes topics like the role knowledge has to play in decision theory, what moral uncertainty implies for action, and how attitudes to risk shape a rational agent’s preferences.
My email is zeevgo [at] bgu.ac.il
Publications
▶ Moral Uncertainty Resolution as Belief Binarization: An Impossibility Result with Christian List, forthcoming in Economics and Philosophy. [Preprint]
Coming up with a rule to guide a morally-uncertain agent is tricky in ways similar to coming up with a rule governing the relationship between credences and full beliefs. This similarity allows us to apply an impossibility theorem about belief binarization to the problem of moral uncertainty, thereby mapping the logical space of necessarily imperfect solutions to this problem.
▶ Foundations for Knowledge-Based Decision Theories, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2024
How could decision theory incorporate the idea that we ought to act on what we know? I propose a framework for formulating and justifying Knowledge-Based Decision Theories (KDTs), and I prove a representation theorem for a frequently discussed KDT.
▶ The Intrinsic Value of Risky Prospects, with Ittay Nissan-Rozen, Synthese, 2020 [Preprint]
A rational agent may value a risky prospect instrumentally – in virtue of the values of the outcomes it may bring about – or intrinsically – in virtue of its purely probabilistic features. We demonstrate that the value of a risky prospect for a rational agent is the sum of its expected instrumental value and its expected intrinsic value.
Work in Progress
▶ Title Redacted (paper under review).
A paper arguing that the norm of assertion cannot be epistemic – not knowledge, belief, certainty or the like.
▶ Debugging the Turing Test: Towards a Resource-Relative Conception of Intelligence
A paper arguing that intelligence is resource-relative – whether a system is intelligent depends not merely on what it is able to do but also on the resources it requires to do what it is able to do.
▶ Three Equivalent Approaches to Moral Uncertainty – A Consolidation Theorem
I consider three approaches to the problem of moral uncertainty where comparisons of moral value across theories are indeterminate: Non-Domination, Expected Value Maximization, and Nash Bargaining. I demonstrate that the three approaches are, in important ways, equivalent, and face similar arbitrariness objections. The result demonstrates the stubbornness of the problem of indeterminacy and the limited utility of applying the various formal approaches to solving it.
▶ Social Media and Bullshit with Avigail Ferdman
Some environments are Bullshit-conducive in the Frankfurtian sense – they steer their inhabitants to assert in a manner unconcerned by the truth. We argue that social media is an especially large Bullshit Conducive Environment and discuss the normative implications of this fact.
▶ Taste Predicates and Clouds of Contexts
Dialogues involving disagreement about taste pose a challenge for contextualist theories of taste predicates, because there appears to be no way of fixing contextual parameters in a way that respects linguistic intuitions. I propose applying von Fintel and Gillies’ (2011) theory of “Clouds of Contexts” to the case of taste predicates to solve this problem.