Credence for Epistemic Discourse

Abstract

Many recent theories of epistemic discourse exploit an informational notion of consequence, i.e. a notion that defines entailment as preservation of support by an information state. This paper investigates how informational consequence fits with probabilistic reasoning. I raise two problems. First, all informational inferences that are not also classical inferences are, intuitively, probabilistically invalid. Second, all these inferences can be exploited, in a systematic way, to generate triviality results. The informational theorist is left with two options, both of them radical: they can either deny that epistemic modal claims have probability at all, or they can move to a nonstandard probability theory.

Author's Profile

Paolo Santorio
University of Maryland, College Park

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2018-11-04

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