Harvey Lederman (UT Austin) is the winner of the 2023 Epistemology Prize from the Marc Sanders Foundation.

Professor Lederman won the prize for his paper, “Of Marbles and Matchsticks“.

Here’s the abstract of the paper:

I present a new puzzle about choice under uncertainty for agents with preferences which are sensitive to multiple dimensions of outcomes in such a way as to be incomplete. In response, I develop a new theory of choice under uncertainty for incomplete preferences. I connect the puzzle to central questions in epistemology about the nature of rational requirements, and ask whether it shows that it is rationally required to have complete preferences.

The prize committee, headed by  Tamar Szabó Gendler (Yale), described the paper as a “masterful accomplishment” that “manages the difficult task of bridging the gap between formal and informal work on rationality and epistemology generally—presenting difficult material rigorously enough for precise formalization but doing so in a way that’s appealing even to the less formally inclined among us.”

The prize is $5000 and publication of the paper in Oxford Studies in Epistemology.

You can learn more about the prize, including its past winners, here.