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  1. Gambling with truth.Isaac Levi - 1967 - Cambridge,: MIT Press.
    This comprehensive discussion of the problem of rational belief develops the subject on the pattern of Bayesian decision theory. The analogy with decision theory introduces philosophical issues not usually encountered in logical studies and suggests some promising new approaches to old problems."We owe Professor Levi a debt of gratitude for producing a book of such excellence. His own approach to inductive inference is not only original and profound, it also clarifies and transforms the work of his predecessors. In short, the (...)
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  • Believing by faith: an essay in the epistemology and ethics of religious belief.John Bishop - 2007 - New York : Oxford University Press,: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press.
    Does our available evidence show that some particular religion is correct?
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  • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas S. Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Ian Hacking.
    Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.
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  • Reliabilism in philosophy.Sanford C. Goldberg - 2009 - Philosophical Studies 142 (1):105 - 117.
    The following three propositions appear to be individually defensible but jointly inconsistent: (1) reliability is a necessary condition on epistemic justification; (2) on contested matters in philosophy, my beliefs are not reliably formed; (3) some of these beliefs are epistemically justified. I explore the nature and scope of the problem, examine and reject some candidate solutions, compare the issue with ones arising in discussions about disagreement, and offer a brief assessment of our predicament.
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  • Epistemic Akrasia.David Owens - 2002 - The Monist 85 (3):381-397.
    One way of discerning what sort of control we have over our mental lives is to look at cases where that control is not exercised. This is one reason why philosophers have taken an interest in the phenomenon of akrasia, in an agent's ability to do, freely and deliberately, something that they judge they ought not to do. Akrasia constitutes a failure of control but not an absence of control. The akratic agent is not a compulsive; an akratic agent has (...)
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  • Rational Disagreement Defended.Earl Conee - 2010 - In Richard Feldman & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Disagreement. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter formulates a rational uniqueness principle holding that those who are epistemic peers on a proposition, in that they know that they share all rational considerations concerning the truth of the proposition, cannot be justified in having different attitudes toward it. It then argues against the principle, primarily on the grounds that such peers may rationally regard themselves as differing in their basis for rational belief, or their evidence, on the topic. The rationality of their differing perspectives can justify (...)
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  • When to defer to majority testimony – and when not.Philip Pettit - 2006 - Analysis 66 (3):179–187.
    How sensitive should you be to the testimony of others? You saw the car that caused an accident going through traffic lights on the red; or so you thought. Should you revise your belief on discovering that the majority of bystanders, equally well-equipped, equally well-positioned and equally impartial, reported that it went through on the green? Or take another case. You believe that intelligent design is the best explanation for the order of the living universe. Should you revise that belief (...)
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  • Information and inference.Isaac Levi - 1967 - Synthese 17 (1):369 - 391.
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  • Probability amalgamation and the independence issue: A reply to Laddaga.Keith Lehrer & Carl Wagner - 1983 - Synthese 55 (3):339 - 346.
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  • Disagreement, Dogmatism, and Belief Polarization.Thomas Kelly - 2008 - Journal of Philosophy 105 (10):611-633.
    Suppose that you and I disagree about some non-straightforward matter of fact (say, about whether capital punishment tends to have a deterrent effect on crime). Psychologists have demonstrated the following striking phenomenon: if you and I are subsequently exposed to a mixed body of evidence that bears on the question, doing so tends to increase the extent of our initial disagreement. That is, in response to exactly the same evidence, each of us grows increasingly confident of his or her original (...)
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  • Peer disagreement and higher order evidence.Thomas Kelly - 2011 - In Alvin I. Goldman & Dennis Whitcomb (eds.), Social Epistemology: Essential Readings. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 183--217.
    My aim in this paper is to develop and defend a novel answer to a question that has recently generated a considerable amount of controversy. The question concerns the normative significance of peer disagreement. Suppose that you and I have been exposed to the same evidence and arguments that bear on some proposition: there is no relevant consideration which is available to you but not to me, or vice versa. For the sake of concreteness, we might picture.
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  • Can we do without pragmatic encroachment.Brian Weatherson - 2005 - Philosophical Perspectives 19 (1):417–443.
    I consider the problem of how to derive what an agent believes from their credence function and utility function. I argue the best solution of this problem is pragmatic, i.e. it is sensitive to the kinds of choices actually facing the agent. I further argue that this explains why our notion of justified belief appears to be pragmatic, as is argued e.g. by Fantl and McGrath. The notion of epistemic justification is not really a pragmatic notion, but it is being (...)
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  • The moral evil demons.Ralph Wedgwood - 2010 - In Richard Feldman & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Disagreement. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Moral disagreement has long been thought to create serious problems for certain views in metaethics. More specifically, moral disagreement has been thought to pose problems for any metaethical view that rejects relativism—that is, for any view that implies that whenever two thinkers disagree about a moral question, at least one of those thinkers’ beliefs about the question is not correct. In this essay, I shall outline a solution to one of these problems. As I shall argue, it turns out in (...)
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  • The division of cognitive labor.Philip Kitcher - 1990 - Journal of Philosophy 87 (1):5-22.
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  • Rational resolve.Richard Holton - 2004 - Philosophical Review 113 (4):507-535.
    Empirical findings suggest that temptation causes agents not only to change their desires, but also to revise their beliefs, in ways that are not necessarily irrational. But if this is so, how can it be rational to maintain a resolution to resist? For in maintaining a resolution it appears that one will be acting against what one now believes to be best. This paper proposes a two-tier account according to which it can be rational neither to reconsider the question of (...)
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  • On the principle of total evidence.Irving John Good - 1966 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 17 (4):319-321.
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  • Evidence, pragmatics, and justification.Jeremy Fantl & Matthew McGrath - 2002 - Philosophical Review 111 (1):67-94.
    Evidentialism is the thesis that epistemic justification for belief supervenes on evidential support. However, we claim there are cases in which, even though two subjects have the same evidential support for a proposition, only one of them is justified. What make the difference are pragmatic factors, factors having to do with our cares and concerns. Our argument against evidentialism is not based on intuitions about particular cases. Rather, we aim to provide a theoretical basis for rejecting evidentialism by defending a (...)
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  • Reflection and disagreement.Adam Elga - 2007 - Noûs 41 (3):478–502.
    How should you take into account the opinions of an advisor? When you completely defer to the advisor's judgment, then you should treat the advisor as a guru. Roughly, that means you should believe what you expect she would believe, if supplied with your extra evidence. When the advisor is your own future self, the resulting principle amounts to a version of the Reflection Principle---a version amended to handle cases of information loss. When you count an advisor as an epistemic (...)
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  • If you're an egalitarian, how come you're so rich.Gerald Allan Cohen - 2000 - The Journal of Ethics 4 (1-2):1-26.
    Many people, including many egalitarian political philosophers, professa belief in equality while enjoying high incomes of which they devotevery little to egalitarian purposes. The article critically examinesways of resolving the putative inconsistency in the stance of thesepeople, in particular, that favouring an egalitarian society has noimplications for behaviour in an unequal one; that what''s bad aboutinequality is a social division that philanthropy cannot reduce; thatprivate action cannot ensure that others have good lives; that privateaction can only achieve a ``drop in (...)
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  • Epistemology of disagreement: The good news.David Christensen - 2007 - Philosophical Review 116 (2):187-217.
    How should one react when one has a belief, but knows that other people—who have roughly the same evidence as one has, and seem roughly as likely to react to it correctly—disagree? This paper argues that the disagreement of other competent inquirers often requires one to be much less confident in one’s opinions than one would otherwise be.
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  • How to Solve the Puzzle of Peer Disagreement.Michele Palmira - 2019 - American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (1):83-96.
    While it seems hard to deny the epistemic significance of a disagreement with our acknowledged epistemic peers, there are certain disagreements, such as philosophical disagreements, which appear to be permissibly sustainable. These two claims, each independently plausible, are jointly puzzling. This paper argues for a solution to this puzzle. The main tenets of the solution are two. First, the peers ought to engage in a deliberative activity of discovering more about their epistemic position vis-à-vis the issue at stake. Secondly, the (...)
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  • A pragmatic argument against equal weighting.Ittay Nissan-Rozen & Levi Spectre - 2019 - Synthese 196 (10):4211-4227.
    We present a minimal pragmatic restriction on the interpretation of the weights in the “Equal Weight View” regarding peer disagreement and show that the view cannot respect it. Based on this result we argue against the view. The restriction is the following one: if an agent, $$\hbox {i}$$ i, assigns an equal or higher weight to another agent, $$\hbox {j}$$ j,, he must be willing—in exchange for a positive and certain payment—to accept an offer to let a completely rational and (...)
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  • The Epistemic Value of Deep Disagreements.Kirk Lougheed - 2018 - Informal Logic 38 (2):263-292.
    In the epistemology of disagreement literature an underdeveloped argument defending the claim that an agent need not conciliate when she becomes aware of epistemic peer disagreement is based on the idea that there are epistemic benefits to be gained from disagreement. Such benefits are unobtainable if an agent conciliates in the face of peer disagreement. I argue that there are good reasons to embrace this line of argument at least in inquiry-related contexts. In argumentation theory a deep disagreement occurs when (...)
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  • Enkrasia or evidentialism? Learning to love mismatch.Maria Lasonen-Aarnio - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (3):597-632.
    I formulate a resilient paradox about epistemic rationality, discuss and reject various solutions, and sketch a way out. The paradox exemplifies a tension between a wide range of views of epistemic justification, on the one hand, and enkratic requirements on rationality, on the other. According to the enkratic requirements, certain mismatched doxastic states are irrational, such as believing p, while believing that it is irrational for one to believe p. I focus on an evidentialist view of justification on which a (...)
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  • Elgin’s community-oriented steadfastness.Klaas J. Kraay - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):4985-5008.
    In recent years, epistemologists have devoted enormous attention to this question: what should happen when two epistemic peers disagree about the truth-value of some proposition? Some have argued that that in all such cases, both parties are rationally required to revise their position in some way. Others have maintained that, in at least some cases, neither party is rationally required to revise her position. In this paper, I examine a provocative and under-appreciated argument for the latter view due to Elgin (...)
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  • Belief and Credence: Why the Attitude-Type Matters.Elizabeth Grace Jackson - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (9):2477-2496.
    In this paper, I argue that the relationship between belief and credence is a central question in epistemology. This is because the belief-credence relationship has significant implications for a number of current epistemological issues. I focus on five controversies: permissivism, disagreement, pragmatic encroachment, doxastic voluntarism, and the relationship between doxastic attitudes and prudential rationality. I argue that each debate is constrained in particular ways, depending on whether the relevant attitude is belief or credence. This means that epistemologists should pay attention (...)
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  • The epistemic significance of political disagreement.Bjørn G. Hallsson - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (8):2187-2202.
    The degree of doxastic revision required in response to evidence of disagreement is typically thought to be a function of our beliefs about (1) our interlocutor’s familiarity with the relevant evidence and arguments, and their intellectual capacities and virtues, relative to our own, or (2) the expected probability of our interlocutor being correct, conditional on our disagreeing. While these two factors are typically used interchangeably, I show that they have an inverse correlation in cases of disagreement about politically divisive propositions. (...)
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  • Moral Steadfastness and Meta-ethics.James Fritz & Tristram McPherson - 2019 - American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (1):43-56.
    Call the following claim Asymmetry: rationality often requires a more steadfast response to pure moral disagreement than it does to otherwise analogous non-moral disagreement. This paper briefly motivates Asymmetry and explores its implications for meta-ethics. Some philosophers have thought that anti-realists are better-placed than realists to explain Asymmetry because, if anti-realism is true, disagreement cannot provide evidence against the reliability of one's thinking about objective moral facts. This paper argues that this simple diagnosis fails to support otherwise plausible anti-realisms. It (...)
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  • Rational endorsement.Will Fleisher - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (10):2649-2675.
    It is valuable for inquiry to have researchers who are committed advocates of their own theories. However, in light of pervasive disagreement, such a commitment is not well explained by the idea that researchers believe their theories. Instead, this commitment, the rational attitude to take toward one’s favored theory during the course of inquiry, is what I call endorsement. Endorsement is a doxastic attitude, but one which is governed by a different type of epistemic rationality. This inclusive epistemic rationality is (...)
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  • Resolving Religious Disagreements.Katherine Dormandy - 2018 - Faith and Philosophy 35 (1):56-83.
    Resolving religious disagreements is difficult, for beliefs about religion tend to come with strong biases against other views and the people who hold them. Evidence can help, but there is no agreed-upon policy for weighting it, and moreover bias affects the content of our evidence itself. Another complicating factor is that some biases are reliable and others unreliable. What we need is an evidence-weighting policy geared toward negotiating the effects of bias. I consider three evidence-weighting policies in the philosophy of (...)
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  • The Epistemic Significance of Religious Disagreements: Cases of Unconfirmed Superiority Disagreements.Frederick Choo - 2021 - Topoi 40 (5):1139-1147.
    Religious disagreements are widespread. Some philosophers have argued that religious disagreements call for religious skepticism, or a revision of one’s religious beliefs. In order to figure out the epistemic significance of religious disagreements, two questions need to be answered. First, what kind of disagreements are religious disagreements? Second, how should one respond to such disagreements? In this paper, I argue that many religious disagreements are cases of unconfirmed superiority disagreements, where parties have good reason to think they are not epistemic (...)
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  • On behalf of controversial view agnosticism.J. Adam Carter - 2018 - European Journal of Philosophy 26 (4):1358-1370.
    Controversial view agnosticism is the thesis that we are rationally obligated to withhold judgment about a large portion of our beliefs in controversial subject areas, such as philosophy, religion, morality and politics. Given that one’s social identity is in no small part a function of one’s positive commitments in controversial areas, CVA has unsurprisingly been regarded as objectionably ‘spineless.’ That said, CVA seems like an unavoidable consequence of a prominent view in the epistemology of disagreement—conformism—according to which the rational response (...)
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  • Religious Disagreement and Epistemic Intuitions.Michael Bergmann - 2017 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 81:19-43.
    Religious disagreement is, quite understandably, viewed as a problem for religious belief. In this paper, I consider why religious disagreement is a problem—why it is a potential defeater for religious belief—and I propose a way of dealing with this sort of potential defeater. I begin by focusing elsewhere—on arguments for radical skepticism. In section 1, I consider skeptical arguments proposed as potential defeaters for all of our perceptual and memory beliefs and explain what I think the rational response is to (...)
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  • Disagreement, Deference, and Religious Commitment.John Pittard - 2019 - New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
    Every known religious or explicitly irreligious outlook is contested by large contingents of informed and reasonable people. Many philosophers have argued that reflection on this fact should lead us to abandon confident religious or irreligious belief and to embrace religious skepticism. John Pittard critically assesses the case for such disagreement-motivated religious skepticism. While the book focuses on religious disagreement, it makes a number of significant contributions to the more general discussion of the rational significance of disagreement as well.
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  • Religious Disagreement Is Not Unique.Margaret Greta Turnbull - 2021 - In Matthew A. Benton & Jonathan L. Kvanvig (eds.), Religious Disagreement and Pluralism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 90-106.
    In discussions of religious disagreement, some epistemologists have suggested that religious disagreement is distinctive. More specifically, they have argued that religious disagreement has certain features which make it possible for theists to resist conciliatory arguments that they must adjust their religious beliefs in response to finding that peers disagree with them. I consider what I take to be the two most prominent features which are claimed to make religious disagreement distinct: religious evidence and evaluative standards in religious contexts. I argue (...)
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  • Peer Disagreement and Higher Order Evidence.Thomas Kelly - 2010 - In Richard Feldman & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Disagreement. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
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  • Moral Disagreement and Moral Expertise.Sarah McGrath - 2008 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 3:87-108.
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  • How Rational Level-Splitting Beliefs Can Help You Respond to Moral Disagreement.Margaret Greta Turnbull & Eric Sampson - 2020 - In Michael Klenk (ed.), Higher Order Evidence and Moral Epistemology. New York: Routledge. pp. 239-255.
    We provide a novel defense of the possibility of level-splitting beliefs and use this defense to show that the steadfast response to peer disagreement is not, as it is often claimed to be, unnecessarily dogmatic. To provide this defense, a neglected form of moral disagreement is analysed. Within the context of this particular kind of moral disagreement, a similarly neglected form of level-splitting belief is identified and then defended from critics of the rationality of level-splitting beliefs. The chapter concludes by (...)
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  • Moral Disagreement and Moral Expertise.Sarah McGrath - 2008 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume Iii. Oxford University Press.
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  • Reasonable Disagreement.Catherine Elgin - 2018 - In Voicing Dissent. New York USA: Routledge. pp. 10-21.
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