The American Philosophical Association is pleased to announce that Dr. Sarah Moss (University of Michigan) has been awarded the 2020 Sanders Book Prize for her book, Probabilistic Knowledge (Oxford University Press).
The selection committee has also awarded honorable mention to Dr. Declan Smithies (Ohio State University) for his book, The Epistemic Role of Consciousness (Oxford University Press).
The Sanders Book Prize is awarded to the best book in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, or epistemology that engages the analytic tradition published in English in the previous five-year period. This prize is funded through the generosity of the Marc Sanders Foundation.
From the selection committee: Sarah Moss’s Probabilistic Knowledge is a philosophically creative work that moves canonically-significant conversations forward in epistemology and philosophy of language, with important and interesting applications in philosophy of mind and ethics. The book contends that the role propositional content plays in epistemology should be supplanted by probabilistic content, with the result that knowledge is constituted by probabilistic epistemic claims and so is justified by richly-pragmatic means. A further distinctive feature of the book is its engagement with a vast and diverse literature.
Sarah Moss is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, working primarily in epistemology and philosophy of language. Her work on probabilistic knowledge also has implications for formal semantics and the philosophy of mind, as well as for social and political questions concerning racial profiling and legal standards of proof. This work was supported in part by the Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship, and by her year spent as the Thomas E. Sunderland Faculty Fellow at the University of Michigan Law School. Moss has recently been developing central themes of Probabilistic Knowledge in her papers “Knowledge and Legal Proof” (winner of the 2019 Sanders Epistemology Prize) and “Full Belief and Loose Speech” (selected for the 2020 Philosopher’s Annual). She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy with a minor in Linguistics from MIT in 2009, her A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard, and the B.Phil in Philosophy from Oxford as a Marshall Scholar in 2004.
