Rate My Professor Richard Pettigrew

Professor Richard Pettigrew is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol. He obtained his BA from the University of Oxford, MA from the University of Bristol, and PhD from the University of Bristol in 2008. His doctoral thesis, titled 'Natural, Rational, and Real Arithmetic in a Finitary Theory of Finite Sets,' was supervised by Philip D. Welch. Throughout his career at the University of Bristol, Pettigrew has focused his scholarly efforts within the Department of Philosophy, contributing to research groups such as Welfare and Value Theory and Mathematical and Scientific Philosophy.

Pettigrew's primary research specializations lie in formal epistemology and philosophy of mathematics. In formal epistemology, he has advanced a research programme called epistemic utility theory, which employs decision-theoretic methods to justify key epistemic norms, including Probabilism, Conditionalization, Jeffrey Conditionalization, the Principle of Indifference, and the Principal Principle. In philosophy of mathematics, he explores anti-platonist positions, encompassing eliminativist structuralism and instrumental nominalism. His influential publications include six books, notably Accuracy and the Laws of Credence (Oxford University Press, 2016), Choosing for Changing Selves (Oxford University Press, 2019), Epistemic Risk and the Demands of Rationality (Oxford University Press, 2022), Who Are Universities For? (Bristol University Press, 2018, co-authored with Tom Sperlinger and Josie McLellan), and the forthcoming Opinion Pooling (Cambridge University Press, 2025, co-authored with Lee Elkin). He has produced 53 academic journal articles, eight book chapters, and four reviews, totaling 75 research outputs. Pettigrew has served as principal investigator on multiple funded projects, including 'Credence and Chance in a Pluralist Approach to Quantum Theories' (2024–2027), 'Towards an accuracy-first approach to judgment aggregation' (2021–2022), and received a Leverhulme Grant in 2023 for 'Foundations of Longtermism,' which investigates risk attitudes in moral decision-making. He has delivered keynote and plenary speeches at events such as the Formal Epistemology Workshop (2016), the 3rd Topoi Conference (2016), and the Workshop on Population Ethics and Epistemology (2016).