Hoek Wins 2021 Isaac Levi Prize


The Journal of Philosophy has announced that Daniel Hoek, assistant professor of philosophy at Virginia Tech, is the winner of its 2021 Isaac Levi Prize .

The Isaac Levi Prize, created in 2019, is awarded to the best paper submitted for the contest, which solicits work written on the themes that interested Isaac Levi (1930-2018). These include decision theory, epistemology, formal epistemology, pragmatism (especially as developed by Peirce), philosophy of science, social choice theory, ethics of controversy, and the relevance of philosophy in these areas to public life.

The prize is $10,000 and publication of the winning essay in the Journal of Philosophy.

Professor Hoek won the award for his paper, “Questions in Action.”

Here’s the abstract of his paper:

Choices confront us with questions. How we act depends on our answers to those questions. So the way our beliefs guide our choices is not just a function of their informational content, but also depends systematically on the questions those beliefs address. This paper gives a precise account of the interplay between choices, questions and beliefs, harnessing it to obtain a principled approach to the problem of deduction, framed here as a decision-theoretic problem. The result is a principled, novel theory of belief-guided action that explains and predicts the decisions of agents who, like ourselves, fail to be logically omniscient: that is, of agents whose beliefs may not be deductively closed, or even consistent.

A pre-publication draft of the paper is here.

The Levi prize is awarded annually. You can learn more about it here.

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Daniel Greco
Daniel Greco
2 years ago

Congratulations!

Daniel Hoek
2 years ago

Thanks Daniel, and thanks to the jury and everyone who wrote to congratulate. I feel really honoured!