In this dissertation, I examine three philosophically important concepts that play a foundational role in developmental psychology: theory, representation, and belief. I describe different ways in which the concepts have been understood and present reasons why a developmental psychologist, or a philosopher attuned to cognitive development, should prefer one understanding of these concepts over another.

Bayesian modeling techniques have proven remarkably successful at representing rational constraints on agents’ degrees of belief. Yet Frank Arntzenius’s “Shangri-La” example shows that these techniques fail for stories involving forgetting. This paper presents a formalized, expanded Bayesian modeling framework that generates intuitive verdicts about agents’ degrees of belief after losing information. The framework’s key result, called Generalized Conditionalization, yields applications like a version of Bas van Fraassen’s Reflection Principle for forgetting. These applications lead to questions about why agents should coordinate (...) their doxastic states over time, and about the commitments an agent can make by assigning degrees of belief. (shrink)

In concrete applications of probability, statistical investigation gives us knowledge of some probabilities, but we generally want to know many others that are not directly revealed by our data. For instance, we may know prob(P/Q) (the probability of P given Q) and prob(P/R), but what we really want is prob(P/Q&R), and we may not have the data required to assess that directly. The probability calculus is of no help here. Given prob(P/Q) and prob(P/R), it is consistent with the probability calculus (...) for prob(P/Q&R) to have any value between 0 and 1. Is there any way to make a reasonable estimate of the value of prob(P/Q&R)? A related problem occurs when probability practitioners adopt undefended assumptions of statistical independence simply on the basis of not seeing any connection between two propositions. This is common practice, but its justification has eluded probability theorists, and researchers are typically apologetic about making such assumptions. Is there any way to defend the practice? This paper shows that on a certain conception of probability — nomic probability — there are principles of “probable probabilities” that license inferences of the above sort. These are principles telling us that although certain inferences from probabilities to probabilities are not deductively valid, nevertheless the second-order probability of their yielding correct results is 1. This makes it defeasibly reasonable to make the inferences. Thus I argue that it is defeasibly reasonable to assume statistical independence when we have no information to the contrary. And I show that there is a function Y(r,s:a) such that if prob(P/Q) = r, prob(P/R) = s, and prob(P/U) = a (where U is our background knowledge) then it is defeasibly reasonable to expect that prob(P/Q&R) = Y(r,s:a). Numerous other defeasible inferences are licensed by similar principles of probable probabilities.. (shrink)

According to the approach made famous by Alchourrón, Gärdenfors and Makinson (1985), revision is a transformation K*h of a potential belief state K by adding h yielding another potential belief state.1 This AGM revision transformation is a composition of two other transformations: contraction and expansion. K*h = [K-~h]+h. This is the expansion by adding h of the contraction K-~h of K by removing ~h.

To be able to say what practical reasoning is, we first need to say what reasoning is and what the conclusion of a process of reasoning is. I shall do this in sections 1 and 2. We can then make a distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning. There are three main ways to do this, which I shall survey in sections 3 to 5. I shall end by suggesting that there are different kinds of practical reasoning.

In the present philosophical reflection my purpose consists of revising two big points based on the book Theory and Practice of Bioethics Principles, written by Ricardo Maliandi and Oscar Thüer. The first point is linked with the problem of foundation of ethics proposed by the authors. The second point is linked with the problem related with the model of ethical applicability proposed by the authors.

This paper provides moderate criticism of so-called normative theories of thinking and reasoning. The discussion focuses on the problems of idealization, adequacy, inconsistent yet non-trivial logics, logical omniscience etc. I called them “internal” to the normative approach, because they stem from the very properties of formal systems used to model these two human activities. Some arguments, however, refer to the current theories in cognitive science, including those which are developed within “descriptive” framework.

I want to talk about a certain epistemic quality that I call “justification,” and inquire whether that quality can ever be had “immediately” or “non-inferentially.” Before we get into substantive issues, we need first to agree about what epistemic quality it is we’ll be talking about, and then we need to clarify what it is to have that quality immediately or non-inferentially. When I say I call this epistemic quality “justification,” you’re liable to think, “Oh I know what that is.” (...) You may. But experience has taught me that different philosophers use and understand the term “justification” differently, even before they start spinning substantive theories about what “justification” amounts to. So we should proceed cautiously. You may use the term “justification” to describe the same epistemic quality as I do; or you may use it to describe some different status or quality. You may use some other term, or no term at all, to describe the quality I call “justification.” I say that you have justification to believe P iff you’re in a position where it would be epistemically appropriate for you to believe P, a position where P is epistemically likely for you to be true. I intend this to be a very inclusive epistemic status.1 Some philosophers say you can know P without “having any justification” for your belief. We can assume that whenever a subject knows P, she’ll be in a position where it’d be epistemically appropriate to believe P. So on my usage, whoever knows P has justification to believe P. (Perhaps she has that justification because she knows.) The philosophers who say otherwise are using “having justification” to mean something different, or more specific, than the epistemic status I am using it to mean. The same goes for philosophers who say a belief can be epistemically appropriate, and so play a role in justifying other beliefs, though you do not “have any justification” for it. On my usage. (shrink)

The requirement of mutual justification (MJ) is one or the fundamental ideas shared by some of the most influential deliberative theories of democracy. The aim of the present paper is to defend the plausibility of MJ against two possible objections. The first one states that MJ involves the commitment to a controversial conception of the notion of justification, which is incompatible with what is commonly understood by the epistemic justification of a belief. The second objection claims that satisfying MJ undermines (...) the epistemic quality of political deliberation. (shrink)

"To some people, life is very simple . . . no shadings and grays, all blacks and whites. . . . Now, others of us find that good, bad, right, wrong, are many-sided, complex things. We try to see every side; but the more we see, the less sure we are.".

Over the past few decades, reasoning and rationality have been the focus of enormous interdisciplinary attention, attracting interest from philosophers, psychologists, economists, statisticians and anthropologists, among others. The widespread interest in the topic reflects the central status of reasoning in human affairs. But it also suggests that there are many different though related projects and tasks which need to be addressed if we are to attain a comprehensive understanding of reasoning.

Argumentation is a dialogical attempt to bring about a desired change in the beliefs of another agent – that is, to trigger a specific belief revision process in the mind of such agent. However, so far formal models of belief revision widely neglected any systematic comparison with argumentation theories, to the point that even the simplest argumentation structures cannot be captured within such models. In this essay, we endeavour to bring together argumentation and belief revision in the same formal framework, (...) and to highlight the important role played by Toulmin’s layout of argument in fostering such integration. (shrink)

This paper will argue that some notion of coherence and/or explanatory coherence is essential to understanding epistemic justification and to clarifying the rational support that our beliefs or commitments lend to each other, and that the requisite notion of coherence cannot be fully explicated on the basis of logic and/or epistemology. Two candidates for explicating coherence will be examined: narrative coherence and the sort of coherence that obtains when gestalt closure is achieved. The paper will attempt to determine under what (...) conditions acceptance that is determined or guided by these sorts of coherence can be construed as rational acceptance. (shrink)

A discussion of L.A. Paul's 'Transformative Experience' from an Author Meets Critics session at the 2015 Pacific APA.

Agents typically revise their beliefs when confronted with evidence that contradicts those beliefs, selecting from a number of possible revisions sufficient to reestablish consistency. In cases where an individual’s beliefs concern spatial relations, belief revision has been fruitfully treated as a decision about which features of an initially constructed spatial mental model to modify. A normative claim about belief revision maintains that agents should prefer minimal belief revisions. Yet recent studies have rebutted the preceding claim, where minimality is understood to (...) consist in modifying the position of the fewest objects, showing instead that reasoners prefer revisions that modify the position of an object x while retaining the position of an object y, when the agent’s new evidence is a relational statement of the form ‘xRy’. We here present cases where the preceding effect is reduced, and show an effect of minimality as measured by the number of initial premises preserved. (shrink)

In the methodology of theory construction, the concept of "intuitions" is commonly assigned a central role. This is especially true of philosophical and social scientific theories or rational human agency. An equally important trait of such accounts is the theorist's employment of "ideal models" or rational agency. It is frequently supposed that the concept of intuitions and the concept of ideal models link in such a way as to give rise to a coherent and load-bearing notion of "objective normativity." This (...) paper shows, with reference to a wide range of contemporary theories, that the employment of ideal models is otiose, and that the supposedly related concept of objective normativity is groundless. (shrink)

In her 1997 OSSA paper, Trudy Govier discusses in detail my thesis that arguers have dialectical obligations. In a 1998 paper she further examines this thesis to see whether it is viable and concludes that it faces serious problems. In this paper, I assess the state of the thesis in light of Govier's discussion of it. I urge that we have something to gain from the empirical turn--from investigating best practices. At the end, I take a step back to ask (...) what is really at issue here and how it connect s to other issues in the theory of argument. (shrink)