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Beliefs, Degrees of Belief, and the Lockean Thesis

In Franz Huber & Christoph Schmidt-Petri (eds.), Degrees of belief. London: Springer. pp. 37-47 (2009)

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  1. Uncertainty Without All the Doubt.Aaron Norby - 2015 - Mind and Language 30 (1):70-94.
    I investigate whether degreed beliefs are able to play the predictive, explanatory, and modeling roles that they are frequently taken to play. The investigation focuses on evidence—both from sources familiar in epistemology as well as recent work in behavioral economics and cognitive psychology—of variability in agents' apparent degrees of belief. Although such variability has been noticed before, there has been little philosophical discussion of its breadth or of the psychological mechanisms underlying it. Once these are appreciated, the inadequacy of degrees (...)
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  • The Decision-Theoretic Lockean Thesis.Dustin Troy Locke - 2014 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (1):28-54.
    Certain philosophers maintain that there is a ‘constitutive threshold for belief’: to believe that p just is to have a degree of confidence that p above a certain threshold. On the basis of this view, these philosophers defend what is known as ‘the Lockean Thesis ’, according to which it is rational to believe that p just in case it is rational to have a degree of confidence that p above the constitutive threshold for belief. While not directly speaking to (...)
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  • Belief, Degrees of Belief, and Assertion.Peter Milne - 2012 - Dialectica 66 (3):331-349.
    Starting from John MacFarlane's recent survey of answers to the question ‘What is assertion?’, I defend an account of assertion that draws on elements of MacFarlane's and Robert Brandom's commitment accounts, Timothy Williamson's knowledge norm account, and my own previous work on the normative status of logic. I defend the knowledge norm from recent attacks. Indicative conditionals, however, pose a problem when read along the lines of Ernest Adams' account, an account supported by much work in the psychology of reasoning. (...)
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  • Belief, information and reasoning.Bruno Whittle - 2012 - Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1):431-446.
    Here are two plausible ideas about belief. First: beliefs are our means of storing information. Second: if we believe something, then we are willing to use it in reasoning. But in this paper I introduce a puzzle that seems to show that these cannot both be right. The solution, I argue, is a new picture, on which there is a kind of belief for each idea. An account of these two kinds of belief is offered in terms of two components: (...)
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  • Fallibilism.Baron Reed - 2012 - Philosophy Compass 7 (9):585-596.
    Although recent epistemology has been marked by several prominent disagreements – e.g., between foundationalists and coherentists, internalists and externalists – there has been widespread agreement that some form of fallibilism must be correct. According to a rough formulation of this view, it is possible for a subject to have knowledge even in cases where the justification or grounding for the knowledge is compatible with the subject’s being mistaken. In this paper, I examine the motivation for fallibilism before providing a fully (...)
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  • Bayesian Epistemology and Having Evidence.Jeffrey Dunn - 2010 - Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
    Bayesian Epistemology is a general framework for thinking about agents who have beliefs that come in degrees. Theories in this framework give accounts of rational belief and rational belief change, which share two key features: (i) rational belief states are represented with probability functions, and (ii) rational belief change results from the acquisition of evidence. This dissertation focuses specifically on the second feature. I pose the Evidence Question: What is it to have evidence? Before addressing this question we must have (...)
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  • On the “tension” inherent in self-deception.Kevin Lynch - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (3):433-450.
    Alfred Mele's deflationary account of self-deception has frequently been criticised for being unable to explain the “tension” inherent in self-deception. These critics maintain that rival theories can better account for this tension, such as theories which suppose self-deceivers to have contradictory beliefs. However, there are two ways in which the tension idea has been understood. In this article, it is argued that on one such understanding, Mele's deflationism can account for this tension better than its rivals, but only if we (...)
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  • Outright Belief.Ralph Wedgwood - 2012 - Dialectica 66 (3):309–329.
    Sometimes, we think of belief as a phenomenon that comes in degrees – that is, in the many different levels of confidence that a thinker might have in various different propositions. Sometimes, we think of belief as a simple two-place relation that holds between a thinker and a proposition – that is, as what I shall here call "outright belief".
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  • Epistemic anxiety and adaptive invariantism.Jennifer Nagel - 2010 - Philosophical Perspectives 24 (1):407-435.
    Do we apply higher epistemic standards to subjects with high stakes? This paper argues that we expect different outward behavior from high-stakes subjects—for example, we expect them to collect more evidence than their low-stakes counterparts—but not because of any change in epistemic standards. Rather, we naturally expect subjects in any condition to think in a roughly adaptive manner, balancing the expected costs of additional evidence collection against the expected value of gains in accuracy. The paper reviews a body of empirical (...)
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  • Formal Representations of Belief.Franz Huber - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. Belief is thus central to epistemology. It comes in a qualitative form, as when Sophia believes that Vienna is the capital of Austria, and a quantitative form, as when Sophia's degree of belief that Vienna is the capital of Austria is at least twice her degree of belief that tomorrow it will be sunny in Vienna. Formal epistemology, as opposed to mainstream epistemology (Hendricks 2006), is epistemology done in a formal way, (...)
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  • Causal Conditionals, Tendency Causal Claims and Statistical Relevance.Michał Sikorski, van Dongen Noah & Jan Sprenger - 2024 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1:1-26.
    Indicative conditionals and tendency causal claims are closely related (e.g., Frosch and Byrne, 2012), but despite these connections, they are usually studied separately. A unifying framework could consist in their dependence on probabilistic factors such as high conditional probability and statistical relevance (e.g., Adams, 1975; Eells, 1991; Douven, 2008, 2015). This paper presents a comparative empirical study on differences between judgments on tendency causal claims and indicative conditionals, how these judgments are driven by probabilistic factors, and how these factors differ (...)
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  • Are There Counterexamples to the Consistency Principle?Clayton Littlejohn - 2023 - Episteme 20 (4):852-869.
    Must rational thinkers have consistent sets of beliefs? I shall argue that it can be rational for a thinker to believe a set of propositions known to be inconsistent. If this is right, an important test for a theory of rational belief is that it allows for the right kinds of inconsistency. One problem we face in trying to resolve disagreements about putative rational requirements is that parties to the disagreement might be working with different conceptions of the relevant attitudes. (...)
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  • Justification and gradability.Davide Fassio & Artūrs Logins - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (7):2051-2077.
    Recently some epistemologists have approached the question whether epistemic justification comes in degrees from a linguistic perspective. Drawing insights from linguistic analyses of gradable adjectives, they investigate whether epistemic occurrences of ‘justified’ are gradable and if yes what type of gradability they involve. These authors conclude that the adjective passes standard tests for gradability, but they classify it as belonging to different categories: as either an absolute or a relative gradable adjective. The aim of this paper is to further clarify (...)
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  • Knowledge and Prizes.Clayton Littlejohn & Julien Dutant - forthcoming - In Artūrs Logins & Jacques Henri Vollet (eds.), Putting Knowledge to Work: New Directions for Knowledge-First Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    We examine two leading theories of rational belief, the Lockean view and the explanationist view. The first is appealing because it fits with some independently plausible claims about the ways that rational persons pursue their aims. The second is appealing because it seems to account for intuitions that cause trouble for the Lockean view. While fitting the intuitive data is desirable, we are troubled that the explanationist view seems to clash with our theoretical beliefs about what rationality must be like. (...)
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  • What is Rational Belief?Clayton Littlejohn & Julien Dutant - 2024 - Noûs 58 (2):333-359.
    A theory of rational belief should get the cases right. It should also reach its verdicts using the right theoretical assumptions. Leading theories seem to predict the wrong things. With only one exception, they don't accommodate principles that we should use to explain these verdicts. We offer a theory of rational belief that combines an attractive picture of epistemic desirability with plausible principles connecting desirability to rationality. On our view, it's rational to believe when it's sufficiently likely that you'd know (...)
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  • The Uniqueness Thesis: A Hybrid Approach.Tamaz Tokhadze - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Sussex
    This dissertation proposes and defends a hybrid view I call Hybrid Impermissivism, which combines the following two theses: Moderate Uniqueness and Credal Permissivism. Moderate Uniqueness says that no evidence could justify both believing a proposition and its negation. However, on Moderate Uniqueness, evidence could justify both believing and suspending judgement on a proposition (hence the adjective “Moderate”). And Credal Permissivism says that more than one credal attitude could be justified on the evidence. Hybrid Impermissisim is developed into a precise theory (...)
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  • 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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  • The rational dimension of understanding.Miloud Belkoniene - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-16.
    It is natural to regard understanding as having a rational dimension, in the sense that understanding seems to require having justification for holding certain beliefs about the world. Some philosophers however argue that justification is not required to gain understanding of phenomena. In the present paper, my intention is to provide a critical examination of the arguments that have been offered against the view that understanding requires justification in order to show that, contrary to what they purport to establish, justification (...)
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  • Conditionals, Causal Claims and Objectivity.Michał Sikorski - 2020 - Dissertation, Università di Torino
    In my thesis, I develop two distinct themes. The first part of my thesis is devoted to indicative conditionals and approaching them from an empirically informed perspective. In the second part, I am developing classical topics of philosophy of science, specifically, scientific objectivity and the role of values in science, in connection to recent methodological developments, revolving around the Replication Crisis.
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  • Rethinking the Acceptability and Probability of Indicative Conditionals.Michał Sikorski - 2022 - In Stefan Kaufmann, Over David & Ghanshyam Sharma (eds.), Conditionals: Logic, Linguistics and Psychology. Palgrave-Macmillan.
    The chapter is devoted to the probability and acceptability of indicative conditionals. Focusing on three influential theses, the Equation, Adams’ thesis, and the qualitative version of Adams’ thesis, Sikorski argues that none of them is well supported by the available empirical evidence. In the most controversial case of the Equation, the results of many studies which support it are, at least to some degree, undermined by some recent experimental findings. Sikorski discusses the Ramsey Test, and Lewis’s triviality proof, with special (...)
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  • Risky belief.Martin Smith - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (3):597-611.
    In this paper I defend the claim that justification is closed under conjunction, and confront its most alarming consequence — that one can have justification for believing propositions that are unlikely to be true, given one's evidence.
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  • 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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  • Coherence and Knowability.Luis Rosa - 2022 - The Philosophical Quarterly 72 (4):960-978.
    Why should we avoid incoherence? An influential view tells us that incoherent combinations of attitudes are such that it is impossible for all of those attitudes to be simultaneously vindicated by the evidence. But it is not clear whether this view successfully explains what is wrong with certain akratic doxastic states. In this paper I flesh out an alternative response to that question, one according to which the problem with incoherent combinations of attitudes is that it is impossible for all (...)
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  • 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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  • Non-Measurability, Imprecise Credences, and Imprecise Chances.Yoaav Isaacs, Alan Hájek & John Hawthorne - 2021 - Mind 131 (523):892-916.
    – We offer a new motivation for imprecise probabilities. We argue that there are propositions to which precise probability cannot be assigned, but to which imprecise probability can be assigned. In such cases the alternative to imprecise probability is not precise probability, but no probability at all. And an imprecise probability is substantially better than no probability at all. Our argument is based on the mathematical phenomenon of non-measurable sets. Non-measurable propositions cannot receive precise probabilities, but there is a natural (...)
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  • Goodness, availability, and argument structure.Anna-Sara Malmgren - 2021 - Synthese 198:10395-10427.
    According to a widely shared generic conception of inferential justification—‘the standard conception’—an agent is inferentially justified in believing that p only if she has antecedently justified beliefs in all the non-redundant premises of a good argument for p. This conception tends to serve as the starting-point in contemporary debates about the nature and scope of inferential justification: as neutral common ground between various competing, more specific, conceptions. But it’s a deeply problematic starting-point. This paper explores three questions that haven’t been (...)
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  • 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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  • Even if it might not be true, evidence cannot be false.Clayton Littlejohn & Julien Dutant - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (3):801-827.
    Wordly internalists claim that while internal duplicates always share the same evidence, our evidence includes non-trivial propositions about our environment. It follows that some evidence is false. Worldly internalism is thought to provide a more satisfying answer to scepticism than classical internalist views that deny that these propositions about our environment might belong to our evidence and to provide a generally more attractive account of rationality and reasons for belief. We argue that worldly internalism faces serious difficulties and that its (...)
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  • 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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  • Collective Opinion as Tendency Towards Consensus.Chenwei Shi - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 50 (3):593-613.
    Group beliefs in social networks are often construed as arising from individual beliefs through processes of update and aggregation. In this paper, we explore an alternative ‘arational’ perspective. More specifically, we focus on group attitudes as neutral tendencies toward alignment of opinions driven by influence patterns among agents modeled in a Markov dynamics. In addition, we investigate logical patterns in the resulting potential group beliefs or, in more neutral arational terminology: collective opinion structures.
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  • Should agents be immodest?Marc-Kevin Daoust - 2020 - Analytic Philosophy 62 (3):235-251.
    Epistemically immodest agents take their own epistemic standards to be among the most truth-conducive ones available to them. Many philosophers have argued that immodesty is epistemically required of agents, notably because being modest entails a problematic kind of incoherence or self-distrust. In this paper, I argue that modesty is epistemically permitted in some social contexts. I focus on social contexts where agents with limited cognitive capacities cooperate with each other (like juries).
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  • (1 other version)Losing Confidence in Luminosity.Simon Goldstein & Daniel Waxman - 2020 - Noûs (4):1-30.
    A mental state is luminous if, whenever an agent is in that state, they are in a position to know that they are. Following Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and Its Limits, a wave of recent work has explored whether there are any non-trivial luminous mental states. A version of Williamson’s anti-luminosity appeals to a safety- theoretic principle connecting knowledge and confidence: if an agent knows p, then p is true in any nearby scenario where she has a similar level of confidence (...)
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  • Do you see what I know? On reasons, perceptual evidence, and epistemic status.Clayton Littlejohn - 2020 - Philosophical Issues 30 (1):205-220.
    Our epistemology can shape the way we think about perception and experience. Speaking as an epistemologist, I should say that I don’t necessarily think that this is a good thing. If we think that we need perceptual evidence to have perceptual knowledge or perceptual justification, we will naturally feel some pressure to think of experience as a source of reasons or evidence. In trying to explain how experience can provide us with evidence, we run the risk of either adopting a (...)
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  • Belief, Credence and Statistical Evidence.Davide Fassio & Jie Gao - 2020 - Theoria 86 (4):500-527.
    According to the Rational Threshold View, a rational agent believes p if and only if her credence in p is equal to or greater than a certain threshold. One of the most serious challenges for this view is the problem of statistical evidence: statistical evidence is often not sufficient to make an outright belief rational, no matter how probable the target proposition is given such evidence. This indicates that rational belief is not as sensitive to statistical evidence as rational credence. (...)
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  • The Relationship Between Belief and Credence.Elizabeth G. Jackson - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (6):1–13.
    Sometimes epistemologists theorize about belief, a tripartite attitude on which one can believe, withhold belief, or disbelieve a proposition. In other cases, epistemologists theorize about credence, a fine-grained attitude that represents one’s subjective probability or confidence level toward a proposition. How do these two attitudes relate to each other? This article explores the relationship between belief and credence in two categories: descriptive and normative. It then explains the broader significance of the belief-credence connection and concludes with general lessons from the (...)
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  • Two-state solution to the lottery paradox.Arturs Logins - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (11):3465-3492.
    This paper elaborates a new solution to the lottery paradox, according to which the paradox arises only when we lump together two distinct states of being confident that p under one general label of ‘belief that p’. The two-state conjecture is defended on the basis of some recent work on gradable adjectives. The conjecture is supported by independent considerations from the impossibility of constructing the lottery paradox both for risk-tolerating states such as being afraid, hoping or hypothesizing, and for risk-averse, (...)
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  • Against legal probabilism.Martin Smith - 2021 - In Jon Robson & Zachary Hoskins (eds.), The Social Epistemology of Legal Trials. Routledge.
    Is it right to convict a person of a crime on the basis of purely statistical evidence? Many who have considered this question agree that it is not, posing a direct challenge to legal probabilism – the claim that the criminal standard of proof should be understood in terms of a high probability threshold. Some defenders of legal probabilism have, however, held their ground: Schoeman (1987) argues that there are no clear epistemic or moral problems with convictions based on purely (...)
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  • The Logic of Conditional Belief.Benjamin Eva - 2020 - Philosophical Quarterly 70 (281):759-779.
    The logic of indicative conditionals remains the topic of deep and intractable philosophical disagreement. I show that two influential epistemic norms—the Lockean theory of belief and the Ramsey test for conditional belief—are jointly sufficient to ground a powerful new argument for a particular conception of the logic of indicative conditionals. Specifically, the argument demonstrates, contrary to the received historical narrative, that there is a real sense in which Stalnaker’s semantics for the indicative did succeed in capturing the logic of the (...)
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  • Lying and knowing.Ben Holguín - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5351-5371.
    This paper defends the simple view that in asserting that p, one lies iff one knows that p is false. Along the way it draws some morals about deception, knowledge, Gettier cases, belief, assertion, and the relationship between first- and higher-order norms.
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  • Ranking Theory.Franz Huber - 2019 - In Richard Pettigrew & Jonathan Weisberg (eds.), The Open Handbook of Formal Epistemology. PhilPapers Foundation. pp. 397-436.
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  • (1 other version)Infinitesimal Probabilities.Sylvia Wenmackers - 2019 - In Richard Pettigrew & Jonathan Weisberg (eds.), The Open Handbook of Formal Epistemology. PhilPapers Foundation. pp. 199-265.
    Non-Archimedean probability functions allow us to combine regularity with perfect additivity. We discuss the philosophical motivation for a particular choice of axioms for a non-Archimedean probability theory and answer some philosophical objections that have been raised against infinitesimal probabilities in general.
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  • Rational understanding: toward a probabilistic epistemology of acceptability.Finnur Dellsén - 2019 - Synthese 198 (3):2475-2494.
    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 (...)
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  • A Puzzle About Knowledge, Blame, and Coherence.Marc-Kevin Daoust - 2019 - Acta Analytica 34 (4):493-503.
    Many philosophers have offered arguments in favor of the following three theses: A is epistemically permitted to believe P only if A is in a position to know that P, incoherent agents fail to satisfy the aforementioned knowledge norm of belief, and A’s apparent reasons are relevant to determining what A is blameworthy for believing. In this paper, I argue that the above three theses are jointly inconsistent. The main upshot of the paper is this: even if the knowledge norm (...)
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  • On the Normativity of Rationality and of Normative Reasons.Clayton Littlejohn & Julien Dutant - manuscript
    This paper is an early draft of something that we've polished up and posted above: n-1 Guilty Men. Check that one out, if interested.
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  • The joint aggregation of beliefs and degrees of belief.Paul D. Thorn - 2018 - Synthese 197 (12):5389-5409.
    The article proceeds upon the assumption that the beliefs and degrees of belief of rational agents satisfy a number of constraints, including: consistency and deductive closure for belief sets, conformity to the axioms of probability for degrees of belief, and the Lockean Thesis concerning the relationship between belief and degree of belief. Assuming that the beliefs and degrees of belief of both individuals and collectives satisfy the preceding three constraints, I discuss what further constraints may be imposed on the aggregation (...)
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  • Evidence: A Guide for the Uncertain.Kevin Dorst - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (3):586-632.
    Assume that it is your evidence that determines what opinions you should have. I argue that since you should take peer disagreement seriously, evidence must have two features. (1) It must sometimes warrant being modest: uncertain what your evidence warrants, and (thus) uncertain whether you’re rational. (2) But it must always warrant being guided: disposed to treat your evidence as a guide. Surprisingly, it is very difficult to vindicate both (1) and (2). But diagnosing why this is so leads to (...)
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  • The explanatory role of consistency requirements.Marc-Kevin Daoust - 2020 - Synthese 197 (10):4551-4569.
    Is epistemic inconsistency a mere symptom of having violated other requirements of rationality—notably, reasons-responsiveness requirements? Or is inconsistency irrational on its own? This question has important implications for the debate on the normativity of epistemic rationality. In this paper, I defend a new account of the explanatory role of the requirement of epistemic consistency. Roughly, I will argue that, in cases where an epistemically rational agent is permitted to believe P and also permitted to disbelieve P, the consistency requirement plays (...)
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  • A new puzzle about belief and credence.Andrew Moon - 2018 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (2):272-291.
    I present a puzzle about belief and credence, which takes the form of three independently supported views that are mutually inconsistent. The first is the view that S has a modal belief that p (e.g., S believes that probably-p) if and only if S has a corresponding credence that p. The second is the view that S believes that p only if S has some credence that p. The third is the view that, possibly, S believes that p without a (...)
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  • From probabilities to categorical beliefs: Going beyond toy models.Igor Douven & Hans Rott - 2018 - Journal of Logic and Computation 28 (6):1099-1124.
    According to the Lockean thesis, a proposition is believed just in case it is highly probable. While this thesis enjoys strong intuitive support, it is known to conflict with seemingly plausible logical constraints on our beliefs. One way out of this conflict is to make probability 1 a requirement for belief, but most have rejected this option for entailing what they see as an untenable skepticism. Recently, two new solutions to the conflict have been proposed that are alleged to be (...)
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  • The Limitations of the Open Mind.Jeremy Fantl - 2018 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    When should you engage with difficult arguments against your cherished controversial beliefs? The primary conclusion of this book is that your obligations to engage with counterarguments are more limited than is often thought. In some standard situations, you shouldn't engage with difficult counterarguments and, if you do, you shouldn't engage with them open-mindedly. This conclusion runs counter to aspects of the Millian political tradition and political liberalism, as well as what people working in informal logic tend to say about argumentation. (...)
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