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  1. Two-Context Probabilism and the Dissolution of the 'Lottery' Problem.Gregor Flock - manuscript
    In this paper it will be attempted to dissolve the lottery problem based on fallibilism, probabilism and the introduction of a so far widely neglected second context of knowledge. First, it will be argued that the lottery problem is actually an exemplification of the much wider Humean "future knowledge problem" (ch. 1). Two types of inferences and arguments will be examined, compared and evaluated in respect to their ability to fittingly describe the thought processes behind lottery/future knowledge propositions (ch. 2). (...)
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  2. Rationalizing the Principal Principle for Non-Humean Chance.J. Khawaja - manuscript
    According to Humean theories of objective chance, the chances reduce to patterns in the history of occurrent events, such as frequencies. According to non-Humean accounts, the chances are metaphysically fundamental, existing independently of the "Humean Mosaic" of actually-occurring events. It is therefore possible, by the lights of non-Humeanism, for the chances and the frequencies to diverge wildly. Humeans often allege that this undermines the ability of non-Humean accounts of chance to rationalize adherence to David Lewis' Principal Principle (PP), which states (...)
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  3. The impossibility of non-manipulable probability aggregation.Franz Dietrich & Christian List - 2023
    A probability aggregation rule assigns to each profile of probability functions across a group of individuals (representing their individual probability assignments to some propositions) a collective probability function (representing the group's probability assignment). The rule is “non-manipulable” if no group member can manipulate the collective probability for any proposition in the direction of his or her own probability by misrepresenting his or her probability function (“strategic voting”). We show that, except in trivial cases, no probability aggregation rule satisfying two mild (...)
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  4. Wittgenstein and Contemporary Belief-Credence Dualism.Guy Axtell - forthcoming - In Pritchard Duncan & Venturinha Nuno (eds.), Wittgenstein and the Epistemology of Religion. Oxford University Press.
    This paper examines religious epistemics in relationship to recent defenses of belief-credence dualism among analytic Christian philosophers, connecting what is most plausible and appealing in this proposal to Wittgenstein’s thought on the nature of religious praxis and affectively-engaged language-use. How close or far is Wittgenstein’s thought about faith to the analytic Christian philosophers’ thesis that “beliefs and credences are two epistemic tools used for different purposes”? While I find B-C dualism appealing for multiple reasons, the paper goes on to raise (...)
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  5. Unsettled Belief.Bob Beddor - forthcoming - The Philosophical Quarterly.
    According to many philosophers, belief is a settling state. On this view, someone who believes p is disposed to take p for granted in practical and theoretical reasoning. This paper presents a simple objection to this settling conception of belief: it conflicts with our ordinary patterns of belief ascription. I show that ascriptions of unsettled beliefs are commonplace, and that they pose problems for all of the most promising ways of developing the settling conception. I proceed to explore the implications (...)
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  6. That Does Not Compute: David Lewis on Credence and Chance.Gordon Belot - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science.
    Like Lewis, many philosophers hold reductionist accounts of chance (on which claims about chance are to be understood as claims that certain patterns of events are instantiated) and maintain that rationality requires that credence should defer to chance (in the sense that under certain circumstances one's credence in an event must coincide with the chance of that event). It is a shortcoming of an account of chance if it implies that this norm of rationality is unsatisfiable by computable agents. This (...)
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  7. Belief about Probability.Ray Buchanan & Sinan Dogramaci - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    Credences are beliefs about evidential probabilities. We give the view an assessment-sensitive formulation, show how it evades the standard objections, and give several arguments in support.
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  8. Reasons and belief.Daniel Fogal - forthcoming - Philosophical Issues.
    Much recent work in epistemology has concerned the relationship between the epistemic and the practical, with a particular focus on the question of how, if at all, practical considerations affect what we ought to believe. Two main positive accounts have been proposed: reasons pragmatism and pragmatic encroachment. According to reasons pragmatism, practical (including moral) considerations can affect what we ought to believe by constituting distinctively practical (i.e., non-epistemic) reasons for or against belief. According to pragmatic encroachment, practical considerations bear on (...)
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  9. Pascalian Expectations and Explorations.Alan Hajek & Elizabeth Jackson - forthcoming - In Roger Ariew & Yuval Avnur (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Pascal. Wiley-Blackwell.
    Pascal’s Wager involves expected utilities. In this chapter, we examine the Wager in light of two main features of expected utility theory: utilities and probabilities. We discuss infinite and finite utilities, and zero, infinitesimal, extremely low, imprecise, and undefined probabilities. These have all come up in recent literature regarding Pascal’s Wager. We consider the problems each creates and suggest prospects for the Wager in light of these problems.
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  10. How Low Can You Go? A Defense of Believing Philosophical Theories.Elizabeth Jackson - forthcoming - In Mark Walker & Sanford Goldberg (eds.), Philosophy with Attitude. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    What attitude should philosophers take toward their favorite philosophical theories? I argue that the answer is belief and middling to low credence. I begin by discussing why disagreement has motivated the view that we cannot rationally believe our philosophical theories. Then, I show why considerations from disagreement actually better support my view. I provide two additional arguments for my view: the first concerns roles for belief and credence and the second explains why believing one’s philosophical theories is superior to accepting (...)
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  11. Provisional Attitudes.Michele Palmira - forthcoming - In Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy & Matthias Steup (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell.
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  12. How should your beliefs change when your awareness grows?Richard Pettigrew - forthcoming - Episteme:1-25.
    Epistemologists who study credences have a well-developed account of how you should change them when you learn new evidence; that is, when your body of evidence grows. What's more, they boast a diverse range of epistemic and pragmatic arguments that support that account. But they do not have a satisfactory account of when and how you should change your credences when you become aware of possibilities and propositions you have not entertained before; that is, when your awareness grows. In this (...)
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  13. (1 other version)Sleeping Beauty: Awakenings, Chance, Secrets, and Video.Nathan Salmón - forthcoming - In Alessandro Capone, Roberto Graci & Pietro Perconti (eds.), New Frontiers in Pragmalinguistic Studies. Springer Nature.
    A new philosophical analysis is provided of the notorious Sleeping Beauty Problem. It is argued that the correct solution is one-third, but not in the way previous philosophers have typically meant this. A modified version of the Problem demonstrates that neither self-locating information nor amnesia is relevant to the core Problem, which is simply to evaluate the conditional chance of heads given an undated Monday-or-Tuesday awakening. Previous commentators have failed to appreciate the significance of the information that Beauty gains upon (...)
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  14. On Believing and Being Convinced.Paul Silva Jr - forthcoming - Cambridge University Press.
    Our doxastic states are our belief-like states, and these include outright doxastic states and degreed doxastic states. The former include believing that p, having the opinion that p, thinking that p, being sure that p, being certain that p, and doubting that p. The latter include degrees of confidence, credences, and perhaps some phenomenal states. But we also have conviction (being convinced simpliciter that p) and degrees of conviction (being more or less convinced that p). This volume shows: how and (...)
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  15. Doxastic Voluntarism.Mark Boespflug & Elizabeth Jackson - 2024 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Doxastic voluntarism is the thesis that our beliefs are subject to voluntary control. While there’s some controversy as to what “voluntary control” amounts to (see 1.2), it’s often understood as direct control: the ability to bring about a state of affairs “just like that,” without having to do anything else. Most of us have direct control over, for instance, bringing to mind an image of a pine tree. Can one, in like fashion, voluntarily bring it about that one believes a (...)
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  16. Epistemic Probabilities are Degrees of Support, not Degrees of (Rational) Belief.Nevin Climenhaga - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (1):153-176.
    I argue that when we use ‘probability’ language in epistemic contexts—e.g., when we ask how probable some hypothesis is, given the evidence available to us—we are talking about degrees of support, rather than degrees of belief. The epistemic probability of A given B is the mind-independent degree to which B supports A, not the degree to which someone with B as their evidence believes A, or the degree to which someone would or should believe A if they had B as (...)
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  17. Error Management Theory and the Ability to Bias Belief and Doubt.Nathan J. Fox - 2024 - Culture and Evolution 21:1-17.
    Error Management Theory (EMT) suggests that cognitive adaptations evolve to minimize the cost of false negative and false positive errors in detections of consequential environmental conditions. These adaptations manifest as biases tailored to specific environmental conditions. This paper proposes that the same selection pressure fostered the evolution of a self-biasing ability, allowing us to minimize such costs based on experience and culturally transmitted information. The research indicates that this ability specifically applies to productions of belief or doubt about the existence (...)
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  18. Probabilistically coherent credences despite opacity.Christian List - 2024 - Economics and Philosophy 40 (2):497-506.
    Real human agents, even when they are rational by everyday standards, sometimes assign different credences to objectively equivalent statements, such as ‘Orwell is a writer’ and ‘E.A. Blair is a writer’, or credences less than 1 to necessarily true statements, such as not-yet-proven theorems of arithmetic. Anna Mahtani calls this the phenomenon of ‘opacity’. Opaque credences seem probabilistically incoherent, which goes against a key modelling assumption of probability theory. I sketch a modelling strategy for capturing opaque credence assignments without abandoning (...)
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  19. Kierkegaard on belief and credence.Z. Quanbeck - 2024 - European Journal of Philosophy 32 (2):394-412.
    Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus famously defines faith as a risky “venture” that requires “holding fast” to “objective uncertainty.” Yet puzzlingly, he emphasizes that faith requires resolute conviction and certainty. Moreover, Climacus claims that all beliefs about contingent propositions about the external world “exclude doubt” and “nullify uncertainty,” but also that uncertainty is “continually present” in these very same beliefs. This paper argues that these apparent contradictions can be resolved by interpreting Climacus as a belief‐credence dualist. That is, Climacus holds that (...)
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  20. Suspending belief in credal accounts.Andrew del Rio - 2024 - Noûs 58 (1):3-25.
    Traditionally epistemologists have taken doxastic states to come in three varieties—belief, disbelief, and suspension. Recently many epistemologists have taken our doxastic condition to be usefully represented by credences—quantified degrees of belief. Moreover, some have thought that this new credal picture is sufficient to account for everything we want to explain with the old traditional picture. Therefore, belief, disbelief, and suspension must map onto the new picture somehow. In this paper I challenge that possibility. Approaching the question from the angle of (...)
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  21. (1 other version)Sleeping Beauty: Awakenings, Chance, Secrets, and Video.Nathan Salmón - 2024 - In Alessandro Capone, Pietro Perconti & Roberto Graci (eds.), Philosophy, Cognition and Pragmatics. Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 53-65.
    A new philosophical analysis is provided of the notorious Sleeping Beauty Problem. It is argued that the correct solution is one-third, but not in the way previous philosophers have typically meant this. A modified version of the Problem demonstrates that neither self-locating information nor amnesia is relevant to the core Problem, which is simply to evaluate the conditional chance of heads given an undated Monday-or-Tuesday awakening. Previous commentators have failed to appreciate the significance of the information that Beauty gains upon (...)
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  22. Faire évoluer les virus vers des formes plus pathogènes, est-ce vraiment raisonnable ?Antoine Danchin - 2023 - Raison Présente 228 (4):35-43.
    Anticiper les épidémies est le souhait le plus vif de toutes les institutions qui veillent sur la santé publique. Un raisonnement naïf permet de penser qu’il suffit de faire évoluer en laboratoire un organisme potentiellement pathogène pour savoir comment sa descendance pourra devenir plus virulente pour l’homme. Il est alors facile de faire croître cet organisme sur des cellules humaines, qu’il infecte mal pour commencer, puis de retenir ses descendants au fur et à mesure qu’ils deviennent plus infectieux. La vision (...)
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  23. Should credence be sensitive to practical factors? A cost–benefit analysis.Jie Gao - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (5):1238-1257.
    According to evidentialist views, credence in a proposition p should be proportional to the degree of evidential support that one has in favor of p. However, empirical evidence suggests that our credences are systematically sensitive to practical factors. In this article, I provide a cost–benefit analysis of credences' practical sensitivity. The upshot of this analysis is that credences sensitive to practical factors fare better than practically insensitive ones along several dimensions. All things considered, our credences should be sensitive to practical (...)
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  24. On Accuracy and Coherence with Infinite Opinion Sets.Mikayla Kelley - 2023 - Philosophy of Science 90 (1):92-128.
    There is a well-known equivalence between avoiding accuracy dominance and having probabilistically coherent credences (see, e.g., de Finetti 1974, Joyce 2009, Predd et al. 2009, Pettigrew 2016). However, this equivalence has been established only when the set of propositions on which credence functions are defined is finite. In this paper, I establish connections between accuracy dominance and coherence when credence functions are defined on an infinite set of propositions. In particular, I establish the necessary results to extend the classic accuracy (...)
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  25. Credences are Beliefs about Probabilities: A Defense from Triviality.Benjamin Lennertz - 2023 - Erkenntnis 89 (3):1235-1255.
    It is often claimed that credences are not reducible to ordinary beliefs about probabilities. Such a reduction appears to be decisively ruled out by certain sorts of triviality results–analogous to those often discussed in the literature on conditionals. I show why these results do not, in fact, rule out the view. They merely give us a constraint on what such a reduction could look like. In particular they show that there is no single proposition belief in which suffices for having (...)
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  26. Reasoning Simplifying Attitudes.Michele Palmira - 2023 - Episteme 20 (3):722-735.
    Several philosophers maintain that outright belief exists because it plays a reasoning simplifying role (Holton 2008; Ross and Schroeder 2014; Staffel 2019; Weisberg 2020). This claim has been recently contested, on the grounds that credences also can simplify reasoning (Dinges 2021). This paper takes a step back and asks: what features of an attitude explain its alleged ability to simplify reasoning? The paper contrasts two explanations, one in terms of dispositions and the other in terms of representation, arguing in favour (...)
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  27. Belief, blame, and inquiry: a defense of doxastic wronging.Z. Quanbeck - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (10-11):2955-2975.
    According to the thesis of doxastic wronging, our beliefs can non-derivatively wrong others. A recent criticism of this view claims that proponents of the doxastic wronging thesis have no principled grounds for denying that credences can likewise non-derivatively wrong, so they must countenance pervasive conflicts between morality and epistemic rationality. This paper defends the thesis of doxastic wronging from this objection by arguing that belief bears distinctive relationships to inquiry and blame that can explain why beliefs, but not credences, can (...)
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  28. The Puzzle of Belief.Neil Van Leeuwen & Tania Lombrozo - 2023 - Cognitive Science 47 (2):e13245.
    The notion of belief appears frequently in cognitive science. Yet it has resisted definition of the sort that could clarify inquiry. How then might a cognitive science of belief proceed? Here we propose a form of pluralism about believing. According to this view, there are importantly different ways to "believe" an idea. These distinct psychological kinds occur within a multi-dimensional property space, with different property clusters within that space constituting distinct varieties of believing. We propose that discovering such property clusters (...)
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  29. Aptness and means-end coherence: a dominance argument for causal decision theory.J. Robert G. Williams - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-19.
    Why should we be means-end rational? Why care whether someone’s mental states exhibit certain formal patterns, like the ones formalized in causal decision theory? This paper establishes a dominance argument for these constraints in a finite setting. If you violate the norms of causal decision theory, then your desires will be aptness dominated. That is, there will be some alternative set of desires that you could have had, which would be more apt (closer to the actual values fixed by your (...)
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  30. I Hear You Feel Confident.Adam Michael Bricker - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (1):24-43.
    Here I explore a new line of evidence for belief–credence dualism, the thesis that beliefs and credences are distinct and equally fundamental types of mental states. Despite considerable recent disagreement over this thesis, little attention has been paid in philosophy to differences in how our mindreading systems represent the beliefs and credences of others. Fascinatingly, the systems we rely on to accurately and efficiently track others’ mental states appear to function like belief–credence dualists: Credence is tracked like an emotional state, (...)
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  31. Absence of evidence against belief as credence 1.Andrew del Rio - 2022 - Analysis 83 (1):31-39.
    On one view of the traditional doxastic attitudes, belief is credence 1, disbelief is credence 0 and suspension is any precise credence between 0 and 1. In ‘Rational agnosticism and degrees of belief’ (2013) Jane Friedman argues, against this view, that there are cases where a credence of 0 is required but where suspension is permitted. If this were so, belief, disbelief and suspension could not be identified or reduced to the aforementioned credences. I argue that Friedman relies on two (...)
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  32. Suspicious conspiracy theories.M. R. X. Dentith - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-14.
    Conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists have been accused of a great many sins, but are the conspiracy theories conspiracy theorists believe epistemically problematic? Well, according to some recent work, yes, they are. Yet a number of other philosophers like Brian L. Keeley, Charles Pigden, Kurtis Hagen, Lee Basham, and the like have argued ‘No!’ I will argue that there are features of certain conspiracy theories which license suspicion of such theories. I will also argue that these features only license a (...)
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  33. Categorical versus graded beliefs.Franz Dietrich - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 18.
    This essay discusses the difficulty to reconcile two paradigms about beliefs: the binary or categorical paradigm of yes/no beliefs and the probabilistic paradigm of degrees of belief. The possibility for someone to hold both types of belief simultaneously is challenged by the lottery paradox, and more recently by a general impossibility theorem by Dietrich and List (2018, 2021). The nature, relevance, and implications of the tension are explained and assessed.
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  34. Comparativism and the Measurement of Partial Belief.Edward Elliott - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (6):2843-2870.
    According to comparativism, degrees of belief are reducible to a system of purely ordinal comparisons of relative confidence. (For example, being more confident that P than that Q, or being equally confident that P and that Q.) In this paper, I raise several general challenges for comparativism, relating to (i) its capacity to illuminate apparently meaningful claims regarding intervals and ratios of strengths of belief, (ii) its capacity to draw enough intuitively meaningful and theoretically relevant distinctions between doxastic states, and (...)
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  35. What Is ‘Real’ in Interpersonal Comparisons of Confidence.Edward Elliott - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (1):102-116.
    ABSTRACT According to comparativism, comparative confidence is more fundamental than absolute confidence. In two recent AJP papers, Stefánsson has argued that comparativism is capable of explaining interpersonal confidence comparisons. In this paper, I will argue that Stefansson’s proposed explanation is inadequate; that we have good reasons to think that comparativism cannot handle interpersonal comparisons; and that the best explanation of interpersonal comparisons requires thinking about confidence in a fundamentally different way than that which comparativists propose: specifically, we should think of (...)
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  36. Thinking, Guessing, and Believing.Ben Holguin - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22 (1):1-34.
    This paper defends the view, put roughly, that to think that p is to guess that p is the answer to the question at hand, and that to think that p rationally is for one’s guess to that question to be in a certain sense non-arbitrary. Some theses that will be argued for along the way include: that thinking is question-sensitive and, correspondingly, that ‘thinks’ is context-sensitive; that it can be rational to think that p while having arbitrarily low credence (...)
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  37. Why Credences Are Not Beliefs.Elizabeth Jackson - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2):360-370.
    A question of recent interest in epistemology and philosophy of mind is how belief and credence relate to each other. A number of philosophers argue for a belief-first view of the relationship between belief and credence. On the belief-first view, what it is to have a credence just is to have a particular kind of belief, that is, a belief whose content involves probabilities or epistemic modals. Here, I argue against the belief-first view: specifically, I argue that it cannot account (...)
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  38. On the Independence of Belief and Credence.Elizabeth Jackson - 2022 - Philosophical Issues 32 (1):9-31.
    Much of the literature on the relationship between belief and credence has focused on the reduction question: that is, whether either belief or credence reduces to the other. This debate, while important, only scratches the surface of the belief-credence connection. Even on the anti-reductive dualist view, belief and credence could still be very tightly connected. Here, I explore questions about the belief-credence connection that go beyond reduction. This paper is dedicated to what I call the independence question: just how independent (...)
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  39. Faith and Reason.Elizabeth Jackson - 2022 - In Mark A. Lamport (ed.), The Handbook of Philosophy and Religion. Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 167-177.
    What is faith? How is faith different than belief and hope? Is faith irrational? If not, how can faith go beyond the evidence? This chapter introduces the reader to philosophical questions involving faith and reason. First, we explore a four-part definition of faith. Then, we consider the question of how faith could be rational yet go beyond the evidence.
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  40. Probing the Mind of God: Divine Beliefs and Credences.Elizabeth Jackson & Justin Mooney - 2022 - Religious Studies 58 (1):S61–S75.
    Although much has been written about divine knowledge, and some on divine beliefs, virtually nothing has been written about divine credences. In this essay we comparatively assess four views on divine credences: (1) God has only beliefs, not credences; (2) God has both beliefs and credences; (3) God has only credences, not beliefs; and (4) God has neither credences nor beliefs, only knowledge. We weigh the costs and benefits of these four views and draw connections to current discussions in philosophical (...)
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  41. Epistemic Akrasia and Belief‐Credence Dualism.Elizabeth Jackson & Peter Tan - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (3):717–727.
    We call attention to certain cases of epistemic akrasia, arguing that they support belief-credence dualism. Belief-credence dualism is the view that belief and credence are irreducible, equally fundamental attitudes. Consider the case of an agent who believes p, has low credence in p, and thus believes that they shouldn’t believe p. We argue that dualists, as opposed to belief-firsters (who say credence reduces to belief) and credence-firsters (who say belief reduces to credence) can best explain features of akratic cases, including (...)
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  42. Immoral lies and partial beliefs.Neri Marsili - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (1):117-127.
    In a recent article, Krauss (2017) raises some fundamental questions concerning (i) what the desiderata of a definition of lying are, and (ii) how definitions of lying can account for partial beliefs. This paper aims to provide an adequate answer to both questions. Regarding (i), it shows that there can be a tension between two desiderata for a definition of lying: 'descriptive accuracy' (meeting intuitions about our ordinary concept of lying), and 'moral import' (meeting intuitions about what is wrong with (...)
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  43. Uncertainty Phobia and Epistemic Forbearance in a Pandemic.Nicholas Shackel - 2022 - In Anneli Jefferson, S. Orestis Palermos, Panos Paris & Jonathan Webber (eds.), Values and Virtues for a Challenging World. Cambridge University Press. pp. 271-291.
    In this chapter I show how challenges to our ability to tame the uncertainty of a pandemic leaves us vulnerable to uncertainty phobia. This is because not all the uncertainty that matters can be tamed by our knowledge of the relevant probabilities, contrary to what many believe. We are vulnerable because unrelievable wild uncertainty is a hard burden to bear, especially so when we must act in the face of it. -/- The source of unrelievable wild uncertainty is that the (...)
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  44. Accuracy Across Doxastic Attitudes: Recent Work on the Accuracy of Belief.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2022 - American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (2):201-217.
    James Joyce's article “A Nonpragmatic Vindication of Probabilism” introduced an approach to arguing for credal norms by appealing to the epistemic value of accuracy. The central thought was that credences ought to accurately represent the world, a guiding thought that has gone on to generate an entire research paradigm on the rationality of credences. Recently, a number of epistemologists have begun to apply this same thought to full beliefs, attempting to explain and argue for norms of belief in terms of (...)
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  45. Two Concepts of Belief Strength: Epistemic Confidence and Identity Centrality.Neil Van Leeuwen - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13:1-4.
    What does it mean to have “strong beliefs”? My thesis is that it can mean two very different things. That is, there are two distinct psychological features to which “strong belief” can refer, and these often come apart. I call the first feature epistemic confidence and the second identity centrality. They are conceptually distinct and, if we take ethnographies of religion seriously, distinct in fact as well. If that’s true, it’s methodologically important for the psychological sciences to have measures that (...)
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  46. The Limits of Partial Doxasticism.Facundo M. Alonso - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2):326-345.
    Doxasticism is the thesis that intention is or involves belief in the forthcoming action (Velleman, Harman). Supporters claim that it is only by accepting that thesis that we can explain a wide array of important phenomena, including the special knowledge we have of intentional action, the roles intention plays in facilitating coordination, and the norms of rationality for intention. Others argue that the thesis is subject to counterexample (Davidson, Bratman). Yet some others contend that the thesis can be reformulated in (...)
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  47. The Problem of State-Dependent Utility: A Reappraisal.Jean Baccelli - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (2):617-634.
    State-dependent utility is a problem for the behavioural branch of decision theory under uncertainty. It questions the very possibility that beliefs be revealed by choice data. According to the current literature, all models of beliefs are equally exposed to the problem. Moreover, the problem is solvable only when the decision-maker can influence the resolution of uncertainty. This article gives grounds to reject these two views. The various models of beliefs can be shown to be unequally exposed to the problem of (...)
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  48. How to Believe Long Conjunctions of Beliefs: Probability, Quasi-Dogmatism and Contextualism.Stefano Bonzio, Gustavo Cevolani & Tommaso Flaminio - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (3):965-990.
    According to the so-called Lockean thesis, a rational agent believes a proposition just in case its probability is sufficiently high, i.e., greater than some suitably fixed threshold. The Preface paradox is usually taken to show that the Lockean thesis is untenable, if one also assumes that rational agents should believe the conjunction of their own beliefs: high probability and rational belief are in a sense incompatible. In this paper, we show that this is not the case in general. More precisely, (...)
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  49. Machine-Believers Learning Faiths & Knowledges: The Gospel According to Chat GPT.Virgil W. Brower - 2021 - Internationales Jahrbuch Für Medienphilosophie 7 (1):97-121.
    One is occasionally reminded of Foucault's proclamation in a 1970 interview that "perhaps, one day this century will be known as Deleuzian." Less often is one compelled to update and restart with a supplementary counter-proclamation of the mathematician, David Lindley: "the twenty-first century would be a Bayesian era..." The verb tenses of both are conspicuous. // To critically attend to what is today often feared and demonized, but also revered, deployed, and commonly referred to as algorithm(s), one cannot avoid the (...)
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  50. A Faithful Response to Disagreement.Lara Buchak - 2021 - The Philosophical Review 130 (2):191-226.
    In the peer disagreement debate, three intuitively attractive claims seem to conflict: there is disagreement among peers on many important matters; peer disagreement is a serious challenge to one’s own opinion; and yet one should be able to maintain one’s opinion on important matters. I show that contrary to initial appearances, we can accept all three of these claims. Disagreement significantly shifts the balance of the evidence; but with respect to certain kinds of claims, one should nonetheless retain one’s beliefs. (...)
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