Formal Epistemology, Misc

Social epistemologists should be well-equipped to explain and evaluate the growing vulnerabilities associated with filter bubbles, echo chambers, and group polarization in social media. However, almost all social epistemology has been built for social contexts that involve merely a speaker-hearer dyad. Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and group polarization all presuppose much larger and more complex network structures. In this paper, we lay the groundwork for a properly social epistemology that gives the role and structure of networks their due. In particular, (...) we formally define epistemic constructs that quantify the structural epistemic position of each node within an interconnected network. We argue for the epistemic value of a structure that we call the (m,k)-observer. We then present empirical evidence that (m,k)-observers are rare in social media discussions of controversial topics, which suggests that people suffer from serious problems of epistemic vulnerability. We conclude by arguing that social epistemologists and computer scientists should work together to develop minimal interventions that improve the structure of epistemic networks. (shrink)

Don't form beliefs on the basis of coin flips or random guesses. More generally, don't take belief gambles: if a proposition is no more likely to be true than false given your total body of evidence, don't go ahead and believe that proposition. Few would deny this seemingly innocuous piece of epistemic advice. But what, exactly, is wrong with taking belief gambles? Philosophers have debated versions of this question at least since the classic dispute between William Clifford and William James (...) near the end of the 19th century. Here I reassess the normative standing of belief gambles from the perspective of epistemic decision theory. The main lesson of the paper is a negative one: it turns out that we need to make some surprisingly strong and hard-to-motivate assumptions to establish a general norm against belief gambles within a decision-theoretic framework. I take this to pose a dilemma for epistemic decision theory: it forces us to either (i) make seemingly unmotivated assumptions to secure a norm against belief gambles, or (ii) concede that belief gambles can be rational after all. (shrink)

Triviality results threaten plausible principles governing our credence in epistemic modal claims. This paper develops a new account of modal credence which avoids triviality. On the resulting theory, probabilities are assigned not to sets of worlds, but rather to sets of information state-world pairs. The theory avoids triviality by giving up the principle that rational credence is closed under conditionalization. A rational agent can become irrational by conditionalizing on new evidence. In place of conditionalization, the paper develops a new account (...) of updating: conditionalization with normalization. (shrink)

Recent objections to epistemic permissivism have a metaepistemic flavor. Impermissivists argue that their view best accounts for connections between rationality, planning and deference. Impermissivism is also taken to best explain the value of rational belief and normative assessment. These objections pose a series of metaepistemic explanatory challenges for permissivism. In this paper, I illustrate how permissivists might meet their explanatory burdens by developing two permissivist metaepistemic views which fare well against the explanatory challenges.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. This entry covers epistemology in two parts: one historical, one contemporary. The former provides a brief theological history of epistemology. The latter outlines three categories of contemporary epistemology: traditional epistemology, social epistemology, and formal epistemology, along with corresponding theological questions that arise in each.

Moss (2018) argues that rational agents are best thought of not as having degrees of belief in various propositions but as having beliefs in probabilistic contents, or probabilistic beliefs. Probabilistic contents are sets of probability functions. Probabilistic belief states, in turn, are modeled by sets of probabilistic contents, or sets of sets of probability functions. We argue that this Mossean framework is of considerable interest quite independently of its role in Moss’ account of probabilistic knowledge or her semantics for epistemic (...) modals and probability operators. It is an extremely general model of uncertainty. Indeed, it is at least as general and expressively powerful as every other current imprecise probability framework, including lower probabilities, lower previsions, sets of probabilities, sets of desirable gambles, and choice functions. In addition, we partially answer an important question that Moss leaves open, viz., why should rational agents have consistent probabilistic beliefs? We show that an important subclass of Mossean believers avoid Dutch bookability iff they have consistent probabilistic beliefs. (shrink)

Orthodox Bayesianism is a highly idealized theory of how we ought to live our epistemic lives. One of the most widely discussed idealizations is that of logical omniscience: the assumption that an agent’s degrees of belief must be probabilistically coherent to be rational. It is widely agreed that this assumption is problematic if we want to reason about bounded rationality, logical learning, or other aspects of non-ideal epistemic agency. Yet, we still lack a satisfying way to avoid logical omniscience within (...) a Bayesian framework. Some proposals merely replace logical omniscience with a different logical idealization; others sacrifice all traits of logical competence on the altar of logical non-omniscience. We think a better strategy is available: by enriching the Bayesian framework with tools that allow us to capture what agents can and cannot infer given their limited cognitive resources, we can avoid logical omniscience while retaining the idea that rational degrees of belief are in an important way constrained by the laws of probability. In this paper, we offer a formal implementation of this strategy, show how the resulting framework solves the problem of logical omniscience, and compare it to orthodox Bayesianism as we know it. (shrink)

Comesaña and Tal have used a contentious account of evidence possession to claim that an ``evidence of evidence is evidence'' principle of R. Feldman (EEE3) is (true but) trivial. We demonstrate to the contrary that, on the Comesaña--Tal account of evidence possession, EEE3 is false.

Enjoying great popularity in decision theory, epistemology, and philosophy of science, Bayesianism as understood here is fundamentally concerned with epistemically ideal rationality. It assumes a tight connection between evidential probability and ideally rational credence, and usually interprets evidential probability in terms of such credence. Timothy Williamson challenges Bayesianism by arguing that evidential probabilities cannot be adequately interpreted as the credences of an ideal agent. From this and his assumption that evidential probabilities cannot be interpreted as the actual credences of human (...) agents either, he concludes that no interpretation of evidential probabilities in terms of credence is adequate. I argue to the contrary. My overarching aim is to show on behalf of Bayesians how one can still interpret evidential probabilities in terms of ideally rational credence and how one can maintain a tight connection between evidential probabilities and ideally rational credence even if the former cannot be interpreted in terms of the latter. By achieving this aim I illuminate the limits and prospects of Bayesianism. (shrink)

If the goal of statistical analysis is to form justified credences based on data, then an account of the foundations of statistics should explain what makes credences justified. I present a new account called statistical reliabilism (SR), on which credences resulting from a statistical analysis are justified (relative to alternatives) when they are in a sense closest, on average, to the corresponding objective probabilities. This places (SR) in the same vein as recent work on the reliabilist justification of credences generally (...) [Dunn, 2015, Tang, 2016, Pettigrew, 2018], but it has the advantage of being action-guiding in that knowledge of objective probabilities is not required to identify the best-justified available credences. The price is that justification is relativized to a specific class of candidate objective probabilities, and to a particular choice of reliability measure. On the other hand, I show that (SR) has welcome implications for frequentist-Bayesian reconciliation, including a clarification of the use of priors; complemen- tarity between probabilist and fallibilist [Gelman and Shalizi, 2013, Mayo, 2018] approaches towards statistical foundations; and the justification of credences outside of formal statistical settings. Regarding the latter, I demonstrate how the insights of statistics may be used to amend other reliabilist accounts so as to render them action-guiding. I close by discussing new possible research directions for epistemologists and statisticians (and other applied users of probability) raised by the (SR) framework. (shrink)

Fading Foundations: Probability and the Regress Problem. By Atkinson David, Peijnenburg Jeanne.

Many epistemologists have responded to the lottery paradox by proposing formal rules according to which high probability defeasibly warrants acceptance. Douven and Williamson present an ingenious argument purporting to show that such rules invariably trivialise, in that they reduce to the claim that a probability of 1 warrants acceptance. Douven and Williamson’s argument does, however, rest upon significant assumptions – amongst them a relatively strong structural assumption to the effect that the underlying probability space is both finite and uniform. In (...) this paper, I will show that something very like Douven and Williamson’s argument can in fact survive with much weaker structural assumptions – and, in particular, can apply to infinite probability spaces. (shrink)

Conditionalization is one of the central norms of Bayesian epistemology. But there are a number of competing formulations, and a number of arguments that purport to establish it. In this paper, I explore which formulations of the norm are supported by which arguments. In their standard formulations, each of the arguments I consider here depends on the same assumption, which I call Deterministic Updating. I will investigate whether it is possible to amend these arguments so that they no longer depend (...) on it. As I show, whether this is possible depends on the formulation of the norm under consideration. (shrink)

Barnett provides an interesting new challenge for Dogmatist accounts of perceptual justification. The challenge is that such accounts, by accepting that a perceptual experience can provide a distinctive kind of boost to one’s credences, would lead to a form of diachronic irrationality in cases where one has already learnt in advance that one will have such an experience. I show that this challenge rests on a misleading feature of using the 0–1 interval to express probabilities and show that if we (...) switch to using Odds or Log-Odds, the misleading appearance that there is only ‘a little room’ for one’s credences to increase evaporates. Moreover, there are familiar, independent reasons for taking the Log-Odds scale to provide a clearer picture of the confirmatory effect of evidence. Thus the Dogmatist can after all escape the charge of diachronic irrationality. (shrink)

To understand something involves some sort of commitment to a set of propositions comprising an account of the understood phenomenon. Some take this commitment to be a species of belief; others, such as Elgin and I, take it to be a kind of cognitive policy. This paper takes a step back from debates about the nature of understanding and asks when this commitment involved in understanding is epistemically appropriate, or `acceptable' in Elgin's terminology. In particular, appealing to lessons from the (...) lottery and preface paradoxes, it is argued that this type of commitment is sometimes acceptable even when it would be rational to assign arbitrarily low probabilities to the relevant propositions. This strongly suggests that the relevant type of commitment is sometimes acceptable in the absence of epistemic justification for belief, which in turn implies that understanding does not require justification in the traditional sense. The paper goes on to develop a new probabilistic model of acceptability, based on the idea that the maximally informative accounts of the understood phenomenon should be optimally probable. Interestingly, this probabilistic model ends up being similar in important ways to Elgin’s proposal to analyze the acceptability of such commitments in terms of ‘reflective equilibrium’. (shrink)

This paper looks at three ways of addressing probabilism’s implausible requirement of logical omniscience. The first and most common strategy says it’s okay to require an ideally rational person to be logically omniscient. I argue that this view is indefensible on any interpretation of ‘ideally rational’. The second strategy says probabilism should be formulated not in terms of logically possible worlds but in terms of doxastically possible worlds, ways you think the world might be. I argue that, on the interpretation (...) of this approach that lifts the requirement of certainty in all logical truths, the view becomes vacuous, issuing no requirements on rational believers at all. Finally, I develop and endorse a new solution to the problem. This view proposes dynamic norms for reasoning with credences. The solution is based on an old proposal of Ian Hacking’s that says you’re required to be sensitive to logical facts only when you know they are logical facts. (shrink)

Epistemic utility theory (EUT) is generally coupled with \emph{veritism}. Veritism is the view that truth is the sole fundamental epistemic value. Veritism, when paired with EUT, entails a methodological commitment: Norms of epistemic rationality are justified only if they can be derived from considerations of accuracy alone. According to EUT, then, believing truly has epistemic value, while believing falsely has epistemic disvalue. This raises the question as to how the rational believer should balance the prospect of true belief against the (...) risk of error. A strong intuitive case can be made for a kind of epistemic \emph{conservatism}---that we should disvalue error more than we value true belief. I argue that none of the ways in which advocates of veritist EUT have sought to motivate conservatism can be squared with their methodological commitments. Short of any such justification, they must therefore either abandon their most central methodological principle or else adopt a permissive line with respect to epistemic risk. (shrink)

Suppose that you have to take a test tomorrow but you do not want to study. Unfortunately you should study, since you care about passing and you expect to pass only if you study. Is there anything you can do to make it the case that you should not study? Is there any way for you to ‘rationalize’ slacking off? I suggest that such rationalization is impossible. Then I show that if evidential decision theory is true, rationalization is not only (...) possible but sometimes advisable. (shrink)

Is normative uncertainty like factual uncertainty? Should it have the same effects on our actions? Some have thought not. Those who defend an asymmetry between normative and factual uncertainty typically do so as part of the claim that our moral beliefs in general are irrelevant to both the moral value and the moral worth of our actions. Here I use the consideration of Jackson cases to challenge this view, arguing that we can explain away the apparent asymmetries between normative and (...) factual uncertainty by considering the particular features of the cases in greater detail. Such consideration shows that, in fact, normative and factual uncertainty are equally relevant to moral assessment. (shrink)

You have higher-order uncertainty iff you are uncertain of what opinions you should have. I defend three claims about it. First, the higher-order evidence debate can be helpfully reframed in terms of higher-order uncertainty. The central question becomes how your first- and higher-order opinions should relate—a precise question that can be embedded within a general, tractable framework. Second, this question is nontrivial. Rational higher-order uncertainty is pervasive, and lies at the foundations of the epistemology of disagreement. Third, the answer is (...) not obvious. The Enkratic Intuition---that your first-order opinions must “line up” with your higher-order opinions---is incorrect; epistemic akrasia can be rational. If all this is right, then it leaves us without answers---but with a clear picture of the question, and a fruitful strategy for pursuing it. (shrink)

The externalist says that your evidence could fail to tell you what evidence you do or not do have. In that case, it could be rational for you to be uncertain about what your evidence is. This is a kind of uncertainty which orthodox Bayesian epistemology has difficulty modeling. For, if externalism is correct, then the orthodox Bayesian learning norms of conditionalization and reflection are inconsistent with each other. I recommend that an externalist Bayesian reject conditionalization. In its stead, I (...) provide a new theory of rational learning for the externalist. I defend this theory by arguing that its advice will be followed by anyone whose learning dispositions maximize expected accuracy. I then explore some of this theory’s consequences for the rationality of epistemic akrasia, peer disagreement, undercutting defeat, and uncertain evidence. (shrink)

Logic arguably plays a role in the normativity of reasoning. In particular, there are plausible norms of belief/disbelief whose antecedents are constituted by claims about what follows from what. But is logic also relevant to the normativity of agnostic attitudes? The question here is whether logical entailment also puts constraints on what kinds of things one can suspend judgment about. In this paper I address that question and I give a positive answer to it. In particular, I advance two logical (...) norms of agnosticism, where the first one allows us to assess situations in which the subject is agnostic about the conclusion of a valid argument and the second one allows us to assess situations in which the subject is agnostic about one of the premises of a valid argument. (shrink)

Accuracy-first accounts of rational learning attempt to vindicate the intuitive idea that, while rationally-formed belief need not be true, it is nevertheless likely to be true. To this end, they attempt to show that the Bayesian's rational learning norms are a consequence of the rational pursuit of accuracy. Existing accounts fall short of this goal, for they presuppose evidential norms which are not and cannot be vindicated in terms of the single-minded pursuit of accuracy. I propose an alternative account, according (...) to which learning experiences rationalize changes in the way you value accuracy, which in turn rationalize changes in belief. I show that this account is capable of vindicating the Bayesian's rational learning norms in terms of the single-minded pursuit of accuracy, so long as accuracy is rationally valued. (shrink)

A novel solution to the knowability paradox is proposed based on Kant’s transcendental epistemology. The ‘paradox’ refers to a simple argument from the moderate claim that all truths are knowable to the extreme claim that all truths are known. It is significant because anti-realists have wanted to maintain knowability but reject omniscience. The core of the proposed solution is to concede realism about epistemic statements while maintaining anti-realism about non-epistemic statements. Transcendental epistemology supports such a view by providing for a (...) sharp distinction between how we come to understand and apply epistemic versus non-epistemic concepts, the former through our capacity for a special kind of reflective self-knowledge Kant calls ‘transcendental apperception’. The proposal is a version of restriction strategy: it solves the paradox by restricting the anti-realist’s knowability principle. Restriction strategies have been a common response to the paradox but previous versions face serious difficulties: either they result in a knowability principle too weak to do the work anti-realists want it to, or they succumb to modified forms of the paradox, or they are ad hoc. It is argued that restricting knowability to non-epistemic statements by conceding realism about epistemic statements avoids all versions of the paradox, leaves enough for the anti-realist attack on classical logic, and, with the help of transcendental epistemology, is principled in a way that remains compatible with a thoroughly anti-realist outlook. (shrink)

I submit that epistemic progress in key areas of contemporary academic philosophy has been compromised by politically correct ideology. First, guided by an evolutionary account of ideology, results from social and cognitive psychology and formal philosophical methods, I expose evidence for political bias in contemporary Western academia and sketch a formalization for the contents of beliefs from the PC worldview taken to be of core importance, the theory of social oppression and the thesis of anthropological mental egalitarianism. Then, aided by (...) discussions from contemporary epistemology on epistemic values, I model the problem of epistemic appraisal using the frameworks of multi-objective optimization theory and multi-criteria decision analysis and apply it to politically correct philosophy. I conclude that philosophy guided by politically correct values is bound to produce constructs that are less truth-conducive and that spurious values which are ideologically motivated should be abandoned. Objections to my framework stemming from contextual empiricism, the feminine voice in ethics and political philosophy are considered. I conclude by prescribing the epistemic value of empirical adequacy, the contextual value of political diversity and the moral virtue of moral courage to reverse unwarranted trends in academic philosophy due to PC ideology. (shrink)

All reasoners described in the most widespread models of a rational reasoner exhibit logical omniscience, which is impossible for finite reasoners (real reasoners). The most common strategy for dealing with the problem of logical omniscience is to interpret the models using a notion of beliefs different from explicit beliefs. For example, the models could be interpreted as describing the beliefs that the reasoner would hold if the reasoner were able reason indefinitely (stable beliefs). Then the models would describe maximum rationality, (...) which a finite reasoner can only approach in the limit of a reasoning sequence. This strategy has important consequences for epistemology. If a finite reasoner can only approach maximum rationality in the limit of a reasoning sequence, then the efficiency of reasoning is epistemically (and not only pragmatically) relevant. In this paper, I present an argument to this conclusion and discuss its consequences, as, for example, the vindication of the principle 'no rationality through brute-force'. (shrink)

How should we update our beliefs when we learn new evidence? Bayesian confirmation theory provides a widely accepted and well understood answer – we should conditionalize. But this theory has a problem with self-locating beliefs, beliefs that tell you where you are in the world, as opposed to what the world is like. To see the problem, consider your current belief that it is January. You might be absolutely, 100%, sure that it is January. But you will soon believe it (...) is February. This type of belief change cannot be modelled by conditionalization. We need some new principles of belief change for this kind of case, which I call belief mutation. In part 1, I defend the Relevance-Limiting Thesis, which says that a change in a purely self-locating belief of the kind that results in belief mutation should not shift your degree of belief in a non-self-locating belief, which can only change by conditionalization. My method is to give detailed analyses of the puzzles which threaten this thesis: Duplication, Sleeping Beauty, and The Prisoner. This also requires giving my own theory of observation selection effects. In part 2, I argue that when self-locating evidence is learnt from a position of uncertainty, it should be conditionalized on in the normal way. I defend this position by applying it to various cases where such evidence is found. I defend the Halfer position in Sleeping Beauty, and I defend the Doomsday Argument and the Fine-Tuning Argument. (shrink)

هل يمكن إذن أن أكون أنا لست أنا بانطباعات الزمان على جسدي وفكري؟ أليس لي جوهرٌ ثابتٌ تتبدل عليه الأعراض من حين إلى آخر، ومن ثم لا أفقد هويتي الحقيقية؟ لقد وُلدت منذ سنوات خلت، وتعلمت وعلمت أنني هو أنا، ويعلم المحيطون بي أنني هو أنا، بل يستطيع العلم المعاصر أن يُثبت أن لي تركيبًا جينيًا وراثيًا يميزني عن غيري، وأن لي بصمات أصابع وبصمة صوت لا تتطابق مع بصمات غيري، وسيحاسبني ربي يوم العرض عليه بوصفي شخصًا واحدًا هو أنا؛ (...) والشجرة التي تظلل باب منزلي هي ذات الشجرة التي أراها منذ سنوات، حقًا لقد تغيرت أعراضها، لكن جوهرها بالضرورة ثابت؛ وكوكب الزهرة المضيء مساءً وصباحًا هو ذات الكوكب الذي أراه كل يوم، قد تعتريه تغييرات عرضية، لكن جوهره قطعًا ثابت. ألسنا جميعًا نشترك في معرفة أن هذه الأشياء هي هي مهما تغيرت أعراضها؟. (shrink)

We argue that philosophers ought to distinguish epistemic decision theory and epistemology, in just the way ordinary decision theory is distinguished from ethics. Once one does this, the internalist arguments that motivate much of epistemic decision theory make sense, given specific interpretations of the formalism. Making this distinction also causes trouble for the principle called Propriety, which says, roughly, that the only acceptable epistemic utility functions make probabilistically coherent credence functions immodest. We cast doubt on this requirement, but then argue (...) that epistemic decision theorists should never have wanted such a strong principle in any case. (shrink)

A handful of well-known arguments (the 'diachronic Dutch book arguments') rely upon theorems establishing that, in certain circumstances, you are immune from sure monetary loss (you are not 'diachronically Dutch bookable') if and only if you adopt the strategy of conditionalizing (or Jeffrey conditionalizing) on whatever evidence you happen to receive. These theorems require non-trivial assumptions about which evidence you might acquire---in the case of conditionalization, the assumption is that, if you might learn that e, then it is not the (...) case that you might learn something else that is consistent with e. These assumptions may not be relaxed. When they are, not only will non-(Jeffrey) conditionalizers be immune from diachronic Dutch bookability, but (Jeffrey) conditionalizers will themselves be diachronically Dutch bookable. I argue: 1) that there are epistemic situations in which these assumptions are violated; 2) that this reveals a conflict between the premise that susceptibility to sure monetary loss is irrational, on the one hand, and the view that rational belief revision is a function of your prior beliefs and the acquired evidence alone, on the other; and 3) that this inconsistency demonstrates that diachronic Dutch book arguments for (Jeffrey) conditionalization are invalid. (shrink)

The notion of an ideal reasoner has several uses in epistemology. Often, ideal reasoners are used as a parameter of (maximum) rationality for finite reasoners (e.g. humans). However, the notion of an ideal reasoner is normally construed in such a high degree of idealization (e.g. infinite/unbounded memory) that this use is unadvised. In this dissertation, I investigate the conditions under which an ideal reasoner may be used as a parameter of rationality for finite reasoners. In addition, I present and justify (...) the research program of computational epistemology, which investigates the parameter of maximum rationality for finite reasoners using computer simulations. (shrink)

Permissivism about rationality is the view that there is sometimes more than one rational response to a given body of evidence. In this paper I discuss the relationship between permissivism, deference to rationality, and peer disagreement. I begin by arguing that—contrary to popular opinion—permissivism supports at least a moderate version of conciliationism. I then formulate a worry for permissivism. I show that, given a plausible principle of rational deference, permissive rationality seems to become unstable and to collapse into unique rationality. (...) I conclude with a formulation of a way out of this problem on behalf of the permissivist. (shrink)

Consider two epistemic experts—for concreteness, let them be two weather forecasters. Suppose that you aren’t certain that they will issue identical forecasts, and you would like to proportion your degrees of belief to theirs in the following way: first, conditional on either’s forecast of rain being x, you’d like your own degree of belief in rain to be x. Secondly, conditional on them issuing different forecasts of rain, you’d like your own degree of belief in rain to be some weighted (...) average of the forecast of each. Finally, you’d like your degrees of belief to be given by an orthodox probability measure. Moderate ambitions, all. But you can’t always get what you want. (shrink)

The Lockean Thesis says that you must believe p iff you’re sufficiently confident of it. On some versions, the 'must' asserts a metaphysical connection; on others, it asserts a normative one. On some versions, 'sufficiently confident' refers to a fixed threshold of credence; on others, it varies with proposition and context. Claim: the Lockean Thesis follows from epistemic utility theory—the view that rational requirements are constrained by the norm to promote accuracy. Different versions of this theory generate different versions of (...) Lockeanism; moreover, a plausible version of epistemic utility theory meshes with natural language considerations, yielding a new Lockean picture that helps to model and explain the role of beliefs in inquiry and conversation. Your beliefs are your best guesses in response to the epistemic priorities of your context. Upshot: we have a new approach to the epistemology and semantics of belief. And it has teeth. It implies that the role of beliefs is fundamentally different than many have thought, and in fact supports a metaphysical reduction of belief to credence. (shrink)

Hempel’s Converse Consequence Condition (CCC), Entailment Condition (EC), and Special Consequence Condition (SCC) have some prima facie plausibility when taken individually. Hempel, though, shows that they have no plausibility when taken together, for together they entail that E confirms H for any propositions E and H. This is “Hempel’s paradox”. It turns out that Hempel’s argument would fail if one or more of CCC, EC, and SCC were modified in terms of explanation. This opens up the possibility that Hempel’s paradox (...) can be solved by modifying one or more of CCC, EC, and SCC in terms of explanation. I explore this possibility by modifying CCC and SCC in terms of explanation and considering whether CCC and SCC so modified are correct. I also relate that possibility to Inference to the Best Explanation. (shrink)

A common view among nontheists combines the de jure objection that theism is epistemically unacceptable with agnosticism about the de facto objection that theism is false. Following Plantinga, we can call this a “proper” de jure objection—a de jure objection that does not depend on any de facto objection. In his Warranted Christian Belief, Plantinga has produced a general argument against all proper de jure objections. Here I first show that this argument is logically fallacious (it makes subtle probabilistic fallacies (...) disguised by scope ambiguities), and proceed to lay the groundwork for the construction of actual proper de jure objections. (shrink)

Bayesian confirmation theory is rife with confirmation measures. Zalabardo focuses on the probability difference measure, the probability ratio measure, the likelihood difference measure, and the likelihood ratio measure. He argues that the likelihood ratio measure is adequate, but each of the other three measures is not. He argues for this by setting out three adequacy conditions on confirmation measures and arguing in effect that all of them are met by the likelihood ratio measure but not by any of the other (...) three measures. Glass and McCartney, hereafter “G&M,” accept the conclusion of Zalabardo’s argument along with each of the premises in it. They nonetheless try to improve on Zalabardo’s argument by replacing his third adequacy condition with a weaker condition. They do this because of a worry to the effect that Zalabardo’s third adequacy condition runs counter to the idea behind his first adequacy condition. G&M have in mind confirmation in the sense of increase in probability: the degree to which E confirms H is a matter of the degree to which E increases H’s probability. I call this sense of confirmation “IP.” I set out four ways of precisifying IP. I call them “IP1,” “IP2,” “IP3,” and “IP4.” Each of them is based on the assumption that the degree to which E increases H’s probability is a matter of the distance between p and a certain other probability involving H. I then evaluate G&M’s argument in light of them. (shrink)

Alan Hájek launches a formidable attack on the idea that deliberation crowds out prediction – that when we are deliberating about what to do, we cannot rationally accommodate evidence about what we are likely to do. Although Hájek rightly diagnoses the problems with some of the arguments for the view, his treatment falls short in crucial ways. In particular, he fails to consider the most plausible version of the view, the best argument for it, and why anyone would ever believe (...) it in the first place. In doing so, he misses a deep puzzle about deliberation and prediction – a puzzle which all of us, as agents, face, and which we may be able to resolve by recognizing the complicated relationship between deliberation and prediction. (shrink)

There is a long-standing debate in epistemology on the structure of justification. Some recent work in formal epistemology promises to shed some new light on that debate. I have in mind here some recent work by David Atkinson and Jeanne Peijnenburg, hereafter “A&P”, on infinite regresses of probabilistic support. A&P show that there are probability distributions defined over an infinite set of propositions {\ such that \ is probabilistically supported by \ for all i and \ has a high probability. (...) Let this result be “APR”. A&P oftentimes write as though they believe that APR runs counter to foundationalism. This makes sense, since there is some prima facie plausibility in the idea that APR runs counter to foundationalism, and since some prominent foundationalists argue for theses inconsistent with APR. I argue, though, that in fact APR does not run counter to foundationalism. I further argue that there is a place in foundationalism for infinite regresses of probabilistic support. (shrink)

The main question of this paper is: how do we manage to know what our own degrees of belief are? Section 1 briefly reviews and criticizes the traditional functionalist view, a view notably associated with David Lewis and sometimes called the theory-theory. I use this criticism to motivate the approach I want to promote. Section 2, the bulk of the paper, examines and begins to develop the view that we have a special kind of introspective access to our degrees of (...) belief. I give an initial assessment of the view by examining its compatibility with leading theories of introspection. And I identify a challenge for the view, and explain why I'm optimistic that the view can overcome it. (shrink)

I argue that coherence is truth-conducive in that coherence implies an increase in the probability of truth. Central to my argument is a certain principle for transitivity in probabilistic support. I then address a question concerning the truth-conduciveness of coherence as it relates to (something else I argue for) the truth-conduciveness of consistency, and consider how the truth-conduciveness of coherence bears on coherentist theories of justification.

I develop a probabilistic account of coherence, and argue that at least in certain respects it is preferable to (at least some of) the main extant probabilistic accounts of coherence: (i) Igor Douven and Wouter Meijs’s account, (ii) Branden Fitelson’s account, (iii) Erik Olsson’s account, and (iv) Tomoji Shogenji’s account. Further, I relate the account to an important, but little discussed, problem for standard varieties of coherentism, viz., the “Problem of Justified Inconsistent Beliefs.”.

Some recent work in formal epistemology shows that “witness agreement” by itself implies neither an increase in the probability of truth nor a high probability of truth—the witnesses need to have some “individual credibility.” It can seem that, from this formal epistemological result, it follows that coherentist justification (i.e., doxastic coherence) is not truth-conducive. I argue that this does not follow. Central to my argument is the thesis that, though coherentists deny that there can be noninferential justification, coherentists do not (...) deny that there can be individual credibility. (shrink)

In this paper, I present an argument for a rational norm involving a kind of credal attitude called a quantificational credence – the kind of attitude we can report by saying that Lucy thinks that each record in Schroeder’s collection is 5% likely to be scratched. I prove a result called a Dutch Book Theorem, which constitutes conditional support for the norm. Though Dutch Book Theorems exist for norms on ordinary and conditional credences, there is controversy about the epistemic significance (...) of these results. So, my conclusion is that if Dutch Book Theorems do, in general, support norms on credal states, then we have support for the suggested norm on quantificational credences. Providing conditional support for this norm gives us a fuller picture of the normative landscape of credal states. (shrink)

Responsibility has entered the academic discourse of logicians hardly more than few decades ago. I suggest a logical concept of responsibility which employs ideas both from a number of theories belonging to different branches of logic as well from other academic areas. As a comment to this concept, I suggest five steps narrative scenario in order to show how the logical dimension of responsibility emerges from diverse tendencies in logic and other sciences. Here are the five steps briefly stated: Step (...) 1. Developing modal formalisms capable of evaluative analysis of situations (deontic, epistemic and etc.). Step 2. Drawing a conceptual borderline between normal and non-normal (weak) logical systems. Step 3. Using different kinds of models. Step 4. Agent- and action- friendly turn in logic. Step 5. Creating formalisms for modeling different types of agency. An idea advocated here within 5-Steps route to responsibility is that this concept is a complex causal and evaluative (axiological) relation. A logical account may be given for causal and normative aspects of this relation. Unfolding the responsibility back and forth through 5 Steps will result in different concepts. The technicalities are minimized for the sake of keeping the philosophical scope of the paper. For the same reason I also refrain from discussing legal and juridical ramifications of the issue. (shrink)

Social scientists use many different methods, and there are often substantial disagreements about which method is appropriate for a given research question. In response to this uncertainty about the relative merits of different methods, W. E. B. Du Bois advocated for and applied “methodological triangulation”. This is to use multiple methods simultaneously in the belief that, where one is uncertain about the reliability of any given method, if multiple methods yield the same answer that answer is confirmed more strongly than (...) it could have been by any single method. Against this, methodological purists believe that one should choose a single appropriate method and stick with it. Using tools from voting theory, we show Du Boisian methodological triangulation to be more likely to yield the correct answer than purism, assuming the scientist is subject to some degree of diffidence about the relative merits of the various methods. This holds even when in fact only one of the methods is appropriate for the given research question. (shrink)

A number of philosophers of science and statisticians have attempted to justify conclusions drawn from a finite sequence of evidence by appealing to results about what happens if the length of that sequence tends to infinity. If their justifications are to be successful, they need to rely on the finite sequence being either indefinitely increasing or of a large size. These assumptions are often not met in practice. This paper analyzes a simple model of collecting evidence and finds that the (...) practice of collecting only very small sets of evidence before taking a question to be settled is rationally justified. This shows that the appeal to long run results can be used neither to explain the success of actual scientific practice nor to give a rational reconstruction of that practice. (shrink)