Dr. Toby C. P. Solomon

Personal information

Toby Solomon is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at LMU Munich. His position is supported by a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2021 he completed his PhD at the Australian National University, with a thesis on the connection between free will and causal decision theory. In addition to a B.A. in philosophy, he holds a B.Sc. in advanced mathematics and physics, both from the University of Sydney.

Research interests

Toby's Alexander von Humboldt Foundation project is entitled "What can I do?: Modelling Option-Uncertainty in Decision Theory". As the title suggests, the aim of this project is to develop formal models to understand how rational decision-makers should respond to uncertainty about what their options are (or, in other words, what they can do). He also continues to think about the theme of his PhD research, namely the relationship between traditional problems of free will and decision theory. He defends a view he calls Libertarian Decision Theory: roughly, that rational decision-makers must presuppose that their choices are uncaused and unconstrained by the past and the laws of nature (though they almost certainly should not believe that). More broadly he is interested in carefully characterizing the problems, and their potential solutions, that arise when decision-makers reflect on the causes of their own choices. Some other things he has been thinking about recently include the difficulties that Causal Decision Theory has with dynamic/diachronic decision situations, deflationary truth based solutions to the semantic paradoxes, and self-referential paradoxes in decision theory.

Selected publications

• Causal Decision Theory, Two-Boxing, and Deliberation-Compatibilism: A Reply to Sandgren and Williamson. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100, no. 3 (2022): 620–27.
• Causal Decision Theory’s Predetermination Problem. Synthese 198, no. 6 (2021): 5623–54.