Transformative experience couples epistemic discovery with the possibility of significant personal change. Transformative decisions concern transformative experiences, and often involve major life choices to undergo—or forgo—significant life events. Reflection on how we should approach and evaluate these decisions raises questions about how rational decision-making fits with normative concerns about how a person should think about her goals and self-conception. Such concerns are especially pressing when the possibility of transformative change implies a change into a radically different, unfamiliar self. To explore these and related issues, work on transformative decision-making ties together the value of experience and its role in the first personal perspective with formal tools drawn from formal epistemology, causal modeling, psychology, and the social sciences to explore questions about imagination, prediction, rationality and authenticity in first personal decision-making.

This interdisciplinary workshop brings together experts in formal epistemology, philosophy of social science, behavioral economics, philosophy of mind and ethics to explore the formal and informal features of transformative decisions made across contexts of radical personal and epistemic change, the role of imagination in transformative choice, how transformative change could affect prosocial attitudes and decision making, and how our understanding of such decision-making connects to topics such as empathy, addiction, and self-understanding.

Confirmed Speakers are: Nomy Arpaly (Brown), John Campbell (Berkeley), Molly Crockett (Oxford), Hanna Pickard (Birmingham), Richard Pettigrew (Bristol), Katie Steele (LSE), and Greg Wheeler (LMU Munich).

Schedule
Thursday 23rd June
09.30-09.45 Welcome
09.45-11.00 Greg Wheeler Epistemic hazard and moral gambles
11.00-11.30 Coffee/Tea
11.30-12.45 Hanna Pickard Choosing to Quit When you Self-identify as an Addict
12.45-14.00 Lunch
14.00-15.15 Molly Crockett Moral Decision Making and Interpersonal Uncertainty
15.15-15.45 Coffee/Tea
15.45-17.00: Nomy Arpaly What is it Like to have a Crappy Imagination?
19.30 Workshop Dinner
Friday 24th June
09.30-10.45 Richard Pettigrew Choosing for Changing Selves
10.45-11.15 Coffee/Tea
11.15-12.30 Katie Steele One’s own future: factual versus evaluative uncertainty
12.30-13.45 Lunch
13.30-14:45 John Campbell tba
Co-organisers: Katherine Hawley (St Andrews) and L.A. Paul (St Andrews/UNC)

Space at this workshop is strictly limited, and if you would like to attend, please send a request to arche@st-andrews.ac.uk by Wednesday 15th June.