Susanna Rinard

Research Interests: Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, and Formal Epistemology

The goal of Susanna Rinard's research is to determine what we should believe—in science, philosophy, and everyday life—and how probability can be used to model rational belief. She has argued that philosophical reasoning can rationally overturn common sense, and that even skeptics about the external world can be persuaded that we have knowledge of it. She has developed a new Bayesian solution to the paradox of the ravens and a novel decision theory for imprecise credences, and is working on a better probabilistic model of belief. Future research plans concern the ethics of belief and pragmatic responses to the skeptic. Please visit her personal website to download her papers.

Rinard earned a BA from Stanford University and a PhD from MIT, and taught at the University of Missouri - Kansas City for three years before joining the Department of Philosophy at Harvard in 2014.