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Switch to: References
Citations of:
Dilating and contracting arbitrarily
Noûs 56 (1):3-20 (2020)
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When a belief has been influenced, in part or whole, by factors that, by the believer's own lights, do not bear on the truth of the believed proposition, we can say that the belief has been, in a sense, arbitrarily formed. Can such beliefs ever be rational? It might seem obvious that they can't. After all, belief, supposedly, “aims at the truth.” But many epistemologists have come to think that certain kinds of arbitrary beliefs can, indeed, be rational. In this (...) |
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In this paper I’ll suggest that a certain challenge facing defeatist views about higher-order evidence cannot be met, namely, motivating principles that recommend abandoning belief in cases of higher order defeat, but do not recommend global scepticism. I’ll propose that, ultimately, the question of whether to abandon belief in response to the realization that our belief can’t be recovered from what I’ll call ‘a perspective of doubt’ can’t be answered through rational deliberation aimed at truth or accuracy. |
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It is a widespread intuition that the coherence of independent reports provides a powerful reason to believe that the reports are true. Formal results by Huemer, M. 1997. “Probability and Coherence Justification.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 35: 463–72, Olsson, E. 2002. “What is the Problem of Coherence and Truth?” Journal of Philosophy XCIX : 246–72, Olsson, E. 2005. Against Coherence: Truth, Probability, and Justification. Oxford University Press., Bovens, L., and S. Hartmann. 2003. Bayesian Epistemology. Oxford University Press, prove that, under (...) |
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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView. |
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It is a consequence of the theory of imprecise credences that there exist situations in which rational agents inevitably become less opinionated toward some propositions as they gather more evidence. The fact that an agent's imprecise credal state can dilate in this way is often treated as a strike against the imprecise approach to inductive inference. Here, we show that dilation is not a mere artifact of this approach by demonstrating that opinion loss is countenanced as rational by a substantially (...) |
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This paper is about guessing: how people respond to a question when they aren’t certain of the answer. Guesses show surprising and systematic patterns that the most obvious theories don’t explain. We argue that these patterns reveal that people aim to optimize a tradeoff between accuracy and informativity when forming their guess. After spelling out our theory, we use it to argue that guessing plays a central role in our cognitive lives. In particular, our account of guessing yields new theories (...) |
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This paper offers a novel account of practical factor effects on knowledge attributions that is consistent with the denial of contextualism, relativism and pragmatic encroachemt. The account goes as follows. Knowledge depends on factors like safety, reliability or probability. In many cases, it is uncertain just how safe, how reliably formed or how probable the target proposition is. This means that we have to estimate these quantities in order to form knowledge judgements. Such estimates of uncertain quantities are independently known (...) |
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Many philosophers have been attracted to a restricted version of the principle of indifference in the case of self-locating belief. Roughly speaking, this principle states that, within any given possible world, one should be indifferent between different hypotheses concerning who one is within that possible world, so long as those hypotheses are compatible with one’s evidence. My first goal is to defend a more precise version of this principle. After responding to several existing criticisms of such a principle, I argue (...) |
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Epistemic decision theory aims to defend a variety of epistemic norms in terms of their facilitation of epistemic ends. One of the most important components of EpDT is known as a scoring rule. This thesis addresses some problems about scoring rules in EpDT. I consider scoring rules both for precise credences and for imprecise credences. For scoring rules in the context of precise credences, I examine the rationale for requiring a scoring rule to be strictly proper, and argue that no (...) |
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