Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Hedged testimony.Peter van Elswyk - 2022 - Noûs 57 (2):341-369.
    Speakers offer testimony. They also hedge. This essay offers an account of how hedging makes a difference to testimony. Two components of testimony are considered: how testimony warrants a hearer's attitude, and how testimony changes a speaker's responsibilities. Starting with a norm-based approach to testimony where hearer's beliefs are prima facie warranted because of social norms and speakers acquire responsibility from these same norms, I argue that hedging alters both components simultaneously. It changes which attitudes a hearer is prima facie (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Assertion remains strong.Peter van Elswyk & Matthew A. Benton - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (1):27-50.
    Assertion is widely regarded as an act associated with an epistemic position. To assert is to represent oneself as occupying this position and/or to be required to occupy this position. Within this approach, the most common view is that assertion is strong: the associated position is knowledge or certainty. But recent challenges to this common view present new data that are argued to be better explained by assertion being weak. Old data widely taken to support assertion being strong has also (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • A puzzle about guessing and inquiry.Richard Teague - 2024 - Analysis 84 (2):327-336.
    I discuss a puzzle that arises as an apparent tension between plausible theories of good guessing and intuitive constraints on rational inquiry. Clearly, our best guess at a question should reflect the likelihoods we assign to its possible answers. Your best guess is the answer you judge most likely. Additionally, it seems like a requirement of rational inquiry that our guesses be coherent. Thus, our best guess to a constituent (wh-) questions should cohere with our best guess to a polar (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Good guesses as accuracy-specificity tradeoffs.Mattias Skipper - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (7):2025-2050.
    Guessing is a familiar activity, one we engage in when we are uncertain of the answer to a question under discussion. It is also an activity that lends itself to normative evaluation: some guesses are better than others. The question that interests me here is what makes for a good guess. In recent work, Dorst and Mandelkern have argued that good guesses are distinguished from bad ones by how well they optimize a tradeoff between accuracy and specificity. Here I argue (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • What’s your Opinion? Negation and ‘Weak’ Attitude Verbs.Henry Ian Schiller - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (4):1141-1161.
    Attitude verbs like ‘believe’ and ‘want’ exhibit neg-raising: an ascription of the form a doesn’t believe that p tends to convey that a disbelieves—i.e., believes the negation of—p. In ‘Belief is Weak’, Hawthore et al. observe that neg-raising does not occur with verbs like ‘know’ or ‘need’. According to them, an ascription of the form a believes that p is true just in case a is in a belief state that makes p more likely than not, and so—excepting cases of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • What it takes to believe.Daniel Rothschild - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (5):1345-1362.
    Much linguistic evidence supports the view believing something only requires thinking it likely. I assess and reject a rival view, based on recent work on homogeneity in natural language, according to which belief is a strong, demanding attitude. I discuss the implications of the linguistic considerations about ‘believe’ for our philosophical accounts of belief.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   28 citations  
  • A Puzzle about Weak Belief.Joshua Edward Pearson - forthcoming - Analysis.
    I present an intractable puzzle for the currently popular view that belief is weak—the view that expressions like ‘S believes p’ ascribe to S a doxastic attitude towards p that is rationally compatible with low credence that p. The puzzle concerns issues that arise on considering beliefs in conditionals. I show that proponents of weak belief either cannot consistently apply their preferred methodology when accommodating beliefs in conditionals, or they must deny that beliefs in conditionals can be used in reasoning.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • 'Belief' and Belief.Eric Marcus - forthcoming - European Journal of Philosophy.
    Our interest in understanding belief stems partly from our being creatures who think. However, the term ‘belief’ is used to refer to many states: from the fully conscious rational state that partly constitutes knowledge to the fanciful states of alarm clocks. Which of the many ‘belief’ states must a theory of belief be answerable to? This is the scope question. I begin my answer with a reply to a recent argument that belief is invariably weak, i.e., that the evidential standards (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • 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. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Better guesses.Niels Linnemann & Feraz Azhar - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    It has recently become popular to analyze scenarios in which we guess, in terms of a trade‐off between the accuracy of our guess (namely, its credence) and its specificity (namely, how many answers it rules out). Dorst and Mandelkern describe an account of guessing, based on epistemic utility theory (EUT), in which permissible guesses vary depending on how one weighs accuracy against specificity. We provide a minimal formal account of guessing that: (i) does not employ EUT, but rests on how (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Reasons and belief.Daniel Fogal - 2024 - Philosophical Issues 34 (1):323-348.
    Much recent work in epistemology has concerned the relationship between the epistemic and the practical, with a particular focus on the question of how, if at all, practical considerations affect what we ought to believe. Two main positive accounts have been proposed: reasons pragmatism and pragmatic encroachment. According to reasons pragmatism, practical (including moral) considerations can affect what we ought to believe by constituting distinctively practical (i.e., non‐epistemic) reasons for or against belief. According to pragmatic encroachment, practical considerations bear on (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Imaginative Beliefs.Joshua Myers - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    I argue for the existence of imaginative beliefs: mental states that are imaginative in format and doxastic in attitude. I advance two arguments for this thesis. First, there are imaginings that play the functional roles of belief. Second, there are imaginings that play the epistemic roles of belief. These arguments supply both descriptive and normative grounds for positing imaginative beliefs. I also argue that this view fares better than alternatives that posit distinct imaginative and doxastic states to account for the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Fictional Reality.Kyle Blumberg & Ben Holguín - forthcoming - Philosophical Review.
    This paper defends a theory of fictional truth. According to this theory, there is a fact of the matter concerning the number of hairs on Sherlock Holmes' head, and likewise for any other meaningful question one could ask about what's true in a work of fiction. We argue that a theory of this form is needed to account for the patterns in our judgments about attitude reports that embed fictional claims. We contrast our view with one of the dominant approaches (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • On Believing and Being Convinced.Paul Silva Jr - forthcoming - Cambridge University Press.
    Our doxastic states are our belief-like states, and these include outright doxastic states and degreed doxastic states. The former include believing that p, having the opinion that p, thinking that p, being sure that p, being certain that p, and doubting that p. The latter include degrees of confidence, credences, and perhaps some phenomenal states. But we also have conviction (being convinced simpliciter that p) and degrees of conviction (being more or less convinced that p). This volume shows: how and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Prefaces, Knowledge, and Questions.Frank Hong - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10.
    The Preface Paradox is often discussed for its implications for rational belief. Much less discussed is a variant of the Preface Paradox for knowledge. In this paper, I argue that the most plausible closure-friendly resolution to the Preface Paradox for Knowledge is to say that in any given context, we do not know much. I call this view “Socraticism”. I argue that Socraticism is the most plausible view on two accounts—(1) this view is compatible with the claim that most of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Review of Reason and Inquiry: The Erotetic Theory, by Philipp Koralus. [REVIEW]Daniel Hoek - forthcoming - Mind:fzad062.
    Philipp Koralus' "Reason and Inquiry" presents a questioning or erotetic theory of reasoning. This review connects ideas from the book to the broader philosophical literature on inquiry and questions, as well as providing a simplified overview of the theory.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The myth of full belief.Jeremy Goodman - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):164-171.
    Belief is typically understood to be the success‐neutral counterpart of knowledge. But there is no success‐neutral counterpart of knowledge.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Norms of Speech Acts.Grzegorz Gaszczyk - 2022 - Studia Semiotyczne 36 (11):45-56.
    This paper offers a systematic classification and characterization of speech acts and their norms. Recently, the normative approach has been applied to various speech acts, most notably to constatives. I start by showing how the work on the norms of assertion has influenced various approaches to the norms of other speech acts. I focus on the fact that various norms of assertion have different extensions, i.e., they denote different clusters of illocutions as belonging to an assertion. I argue that this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Updating without evidence.Yoaav Isaacs & Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2023 - Noûs 57 (3):576-599.
    Sometimes you are unreliable at fulfilling your doxastic plans: for example, if you plan to be fully confident in all truths, probably you will end up being fully confident in some falsehoods by mistake. In some cases, there is information that plays the classical role of evidence—your beliefs are perfectly discriminating with respect to some possible facts about the world—and there is a standard expected‐accuracy‐based justification for planning to conditionalize on this evidence. This planning‐oriented justification extends to some cases where (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Do credences model guesses?Sophie Horowitz - forthcoming - Noûs.
    What are credences? Where do the numbers come from? Some have argued that they are brute and primitive; others, that they model our dispositions to bet, our comparative confidence judgments, or our all‐out beliefs. This paper explores a new answer to this question: credences model our dispositions to guess. I argue that we can think of credences this way, and then consider: should we?
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Knowledge by constraint.Ben Holguín - 2021 - Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1):1-28.
    This paper considers some puzzling knowledge ascriptions and argues that they present prima facie counterexamples to credence, belief, and justification conditions on knowledge, as well as to many of the standard meta-semantic assumptions about the context-sensitivity of ‘know’. It argues that these ascriptions provide new evidence in favor of contextualist theories of knowledge—in particular those that take the interpretation of ‘know’ to be sensitive to the mechanisms of constraint.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Hedging and the Norm of Belief.Peter van Elswyk & Christopher Willard-Kyle - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    We argue that knowledge is not the norm of belief given that ‘I believe’ is used to hedge. We explore the consequences of this argument for the normative relationship between belief and assertion.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Thinking and being sure.Jeremy Goodman & Ben Holguín - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (3):634-654.
    How is what we believe related to how we act? That depends on what we mean by ‘believe’. On the one hand, there is what we're sure of: what our names are, where we were born, whether we are sitting in front of a screen. Surety, in this sense, is not uncommon — it does not imply Cartesian absolute certainty, from which no possible course of experience could dislodge us. But there are many things that we think that we are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Epistemology Normalized.Jeremy Goodman & Bernhard Salow - 2023 - Philosophical Review 132 (1):89-145.
    We offer a general framework for theorizing about the structure of knowledge and belief in terms of the comparative normality of situations compatible with one’s evidence. The guiding idea is that, if a possibility is sufficiently less normal than one’s actual situation, then one can know that that possibility does not obtain. This explains how people can have inductive knowledge that goes beyond what is strictly entailed by their evidence. We motivate the framework by showing how it illuminates knowledge about (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • A Question-Sensitive Theory of Intention.Bob Beddor & Simon Goldstein - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (2):346-378.
    This paper develops a question-sensitive theory of intention. We show that this theory explains some puzzling closure properties of intention. In particular, it can be used to explain why one is rationally required to intend the means to one’s ends, even though one is not rationally required to intend all the foreseen consequences of one’s intended actions. It also explains why rational intention is not always closed under logical implication, and why one can only intend outcomes that one believes to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Statistical resentment, or: what’s wrong with acting, blaming, and believing on the basis of statistics alone.David Enoch & Levi Spectre - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):5687-5718.
    Statistical evidence—say, that 95% of your co-workers badmouth each other—can never render resenting your colleague appropriate, in the way that other evidence (say, the testimony of a reliable friend) can. The problem of statistical resentment is to explain why. We put the problem of statistical resentment in several wider contexts: The context of the problem of statistical evidence in legal theory; the epistemological context—with problems like the lottery paradox for knowledge, epistemic impurism and doxastic wrongdoing; and the context of a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • The Ethics of Expectations.Rima Basu - 2023 - In Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, vol 13. Oxford University Press. pp. 149-169.
    This chapter asks two questions about the ethics of expectations: one about the nature of expectations, and one about the wrongs of expectations. On the first question, expectations involve a rich constellation of attitudes ranging from beliefs to also include imaginings, hopes, fears, and dreams. As a result, sometimes expectations act like predictions, like your expectation of rain tomorrow, sometimes prescriptions, like the expectation that your students will do the reading, sometimes like proleptic reasons like the hope that your mentee (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Changes in attitude.Daniel Drucker - 2021 - Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1):151-169.
    I formulate and tentatively defend the view that we cannot be rationally required to have one type of doxastic attitude (e.g., beliefs, credences, imprecise credences, etc.) because we have another type; in other words, we can only be required to have, say, given credences because we have some other credences already. I explore an argument that appeals to the idea that there is no good reasoning from one type to the other type. I consider some important possible responses, and conclude (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Consequences of Comparability.Cian Dorr, Jacob M. Nebel & Jake Zuehl - 2021 - Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1):70-98.
    We defend three controversial claims about preference, credence, and choice. First, all agents (not just rational ones) have complete preferences. Second, all agents (again, not just rational ones) have real-valued credences in every proposition in which they are confident to any degree. Third, there is almost always some unique thing we ought to do, want, or believe.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Being Rational and Being Wrong.Kevin Dorst - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23 (1).
    Do people tend to be overconfident? Many think so. They’ve run studies on whether people are calibrated: whether their average confidence in their opinions matches the proportion of those opinions that are true. Under certain conditions, people are systematically ‘over-calibrated’—for example, of the opinions they’re 80% confident in, only 60% are true. From this empirical over-calibration, it’s inferred that people are irrationally overconfident. My question: When and why is this inference warranted? Answering it requires articulating a general connection between being (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Good Guesses.Kevin Dorst & Matthew Mandelkern - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (3):581-618.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • Strong Belief is Ordinary.Roger Clarke - forthcoming - Episteme:1-21.
    In an influential recent paper, Hawthorne, Rothschild, and Spectre (“HRS”) argue that belief is weak. More precisely: they argue that the referent of believe in ordinary language is much weaker than epistemologists usually suppose; that one needs very little evidence to be entitled to believe a proposition in this sense; and that the referent of believe in ordinary language just is the ordinary concept of belief. I argue here to the contrary. HRS identify two alleged tests of weakness – the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations