Results for 'Epistemic Chance'

959 found
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  1. Chance, epistemic probability and saving lives: Reply to Bradley.Michael J. Almeida - 2009 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 2010 (1):1-1.
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  2. What are the chances you’re right about everything? An epistemic challenge for modern partisanship.Hrishikesh Joshi - 2020 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 19 (1):36-61.
    The American political landscape exhibits significant polarization. People’s political beliefs cluster around two main camps. However, many of the issues with respect to which these two camps disagree seem to be rationally orthogonal. This feature raises an epistemic challenge for the political partisan. If she is justified in consistently adopting the party line, it must be true that her side is reliable on the issues that are the subject of disagreements. It would then follow that the other side is (...)
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  3. Emergent Chance.Christian List & Marcus Pivato - 2015 - Philosophical Review 124 (1):119-152.
    We offer a new argument for the claim that there can be non-degenerate objective chance (“true randomness”) in a deterministic world. Using a formal model of the relationship between different levels of description of a system, we show how objective chance at a higher level can coexist with its absence at a lower level. Unlike previous arguments for the level-specificity of chance, our argument shows, in a precise sense, that higher-level chance does not collapse into (...) probability, despite higher-level properties supervening on lower-level ones. We show that the distinction between objective chance and epistemic probability can be drawn, and operationalized, at every level of description. There is, therefore, not a single distinction between objective and epistemic probability, but a family of such distinctions. (shrink)
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  4. How chance explains.Michael Townsen Hicks & Alastair Wilson - 2021 - Noûs 57 (2):290-315.
    What explains the outcomes of chance processes? We claim that their setups do. Chances, we think, mediate these explanations of outcome by setup but do not feature in them. Facts about chances do feature in explanations of a different kind: higher-order explanations, which explain how and why setups explain their outcomes. In this paper, we elucidate this 'mediator view' of chancy explanation and defend it from a series of objections. We then show how it changes the playing field in (...)
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  5. Deterministic chance.Luke Glynn - 2010 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (1):51–80.
    I argue that there are non-trivial objective chances (that is, objective chances other than 0 and 1) even in deterministic worlds. The argument is straightforward. I observe that there are probabilistic special scientific laws even in deterministic worlds. These laws project non-trivial probabilities for the events that they concern. And these probabilities play the chance role and so should be regarded as chances as opposed, for example, to epistemic probabilities or credences. The supposition of non-trivial deterministic chances might (...)
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  6. Does Chance Undermine Would?Alexander W. Kocurek - 2022 - Mind 131 (523):747-785.
    Counterfactual scepticism holds that most ordinary counterfactuals are false. The main argument for this view appeals to a ‘chance undermines would’ principle: if ψ would have some chance of not obtaining had ϕ obtained, then ϕ □→ ψ is false. This principle seems to follow from two fairly weak principles, namely, that ‘chance ensures could’ and that ϕ □→ ψ and ϕ ⋄→ ¬ ψ clash. Despite their initial plausibility, I show that these principles are independently problematic: (...)
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  7. (1 other version)Epistemic innocence and the production of false memory beliefs.Katherine Puddifoot & Lisa Bortolotti - 2018 - Philosophical Studies:1-26.
    Findings from the cognitive sciences suggest that the cognitive mechanisms responsible for some memory errors are adaptive, bringing benefits to the organism. In this paper we argue that the same cognitive mechanisms also bring a suite of significant epistemic benefits, increasing the chance of an agent obtaining epistemic goods like true belief and knowledge. This result provides a significant challenge to the folk conception of memory beliefs that are false, according to which they are a sign of (...)
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  8. Doomsday and objective chance.Teruji Thomas - manuscript
    Lewis’s Principal Principle says that one should usually align one’s credences with the known chances. In this paper I develop a version of the Principal Principle that deals well with some exceptional cases related to the distinction between metaphysical and epistemic modal­ity. I explain how this principle gives a unified account of the Sleeping Beauty problem and chance-­based principles of anthropic reasoning. In doing so, I defuse the Doomsday Argument that the end of the world is likely to (...)
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  9. Epistemic closure under deductive inference: what is it and can we afford it?Assaf Sharon & Levi Spectre - 2013 - Synthese 190 (14):2731-2748.
    The idea that knowledge can be extended by inference from what is known seems highly plausible. Yet, as shown by familiar preface paradox and lottery-type cases, the possibility of aggregating uncertainty casts doubt on its tenability. We show that these considerations go much further than previously recognized and significantly restrict the kinds of closure ordinary theories of knowledge can endorse. Meeting the challenge of uncertainty aggregation requires either the restriction of knowledge-extending inferences to single premises, or eliminating epistemic uncertainty (...)
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  10. Epistemic modality and coordination under uncertainty.Giorgio Sbardolini - 2021 - Proceedings of TARK 355:295--306.
    Communication facilitates coordination, but coordination might fail if there's too much uncertainty. I discuss a scenario in which vagueness-driven uncertainty undermines the possibility of publicly sharing a belief. I then show that asserting an epistemic modal sentence, 'Might p', can reveal the speaker's uncertainty, and that this may improve the chances of coordination despite the lack of a common epistemic ground. This provides a game-theoretic rationale for epistemic modality. The account draws on a standard relational semantics for (...)
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  11. Epistemic Risk and the Demands of Rationality.Richard Pettigrew - 2022 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    How much does rationality constrain what we should believe on the basis of our evidence? According to this book, not very much. For most people and most bodies of evidence, there is a wide range of beliefs that rationality permits them to have in response to that evidence. The argument, which takes inspiration from William James' ideas in 'The Will to Believe', proceeds from two premises. The first is a theory about the basis of epistemic rationality. It's called (...) utility theory, and it says that what it is epistemically rational for you to believe is what it would be rational for you to choose if you were given the chance to pick your beliefs and, when picking them, you were to care only about their epistemic value. So, to say which beliefs are permitted, we must say how to measure epistemic value, and which decision rule to use when picking your beliefs. The second premise is a claim about attitudes to epistemic risk, and it says that rationality permits many different such attitudes. These attitudes can show up in epistemic utility theory in two ways: in the way you measure epistemic value; and in the decision rule you use to pick beliefs. This book explores the latter. The result is permissivism about epistemic rationality: different attitudes to epistemic risk lead to different choices of prior beliefs; given most bodies of evidence, different priors lead to different posteriors; and even once we fix your attitudes to epistemic risk, if they are at all risk-inclined, there is a range of different priors and therefore different posteriors they permit. (shrink)
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  12. Chance, Credence and Circles.Fabrizio Cariani - 2017 - Episteme 14 (1):49-58.
    This is a discussion of Richard Pettigrew's book "Accuracy and the Laws of Credence". I target Pettigrew's application of the accuracy framework to derive chance-credence principles. My principal contention is that Pettigrew's preferred version of the argument might in one sense be circular and, moreover, that Pettigrew's premises have content that go beyond that of standard chance-credence principles.
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  13. Epistemic Democracy and the Truth Connection.Wes Siscoe - forthcoming - Public Reason.
    If political decision-making aims at getting a particular result, like identifying just laws or policies that truly promote the common good, then political institutions can also be evaluated in terms of how often they achieve these results. Epistemic defenses of democracy argue that democracies have the upper hand when it comes to truth, identifying the laws and policies that are truly just or conducive to the common good. A number of epistemic democrats claim that democracies have this beneficial (...)
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  14. Epistemic Luck in Stoicism.Pavle Stojanović - 2022 - Ancient Philosophy 42 (1):273-289.
    The Stoics thought that knowledge depends on a special kind of appearances which they called ‘apprehensive’, which are by definition true. Interestingly, Sextus Empiricus reports in M 7.247 that they held that there are appearances that are true but that are not apprehensive because they are true merely by chance and thus cannot constitute knowledge. I believe that this suggests that the Stoics were aware of what is in modern literature known as the problem of epistemic luck. Unfortunately, (...)
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  15. Rationalizing the Principal Principle for Non-Humean Chance.J. Khawaja - manuscript
    According to Humean theories of objective chance, the chances reduce to patterns in the history of occurrent events, such as frequencies. According to non-Humean accounts, the chances are metaphysically fundamental, existing independently of the "Humean Mosaic" of actually-occurring events. It is therefore possible, by the lights of non-Humeanism, for the chances and the frequencies to diverge wildly. Humeans often allege that this undermines the ability of non-Humean accounts of chance to rationalize adherence to David Lewis' Principal Principle (PP), (...)
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  16. Knowledge Closure and Knowledge Openness: A Study of Epistemic Closure Principles.Levi Spectre - 2009 - Stockholm: Stockholm University.
    The principle of epistemic closure is the claim that what is known to follow from knowledge is known to be true. This intuitively plausible idea is endorsed by a vast majority of knowledge theorists. There are significant problems, however, that have to be addressed if epistemic closure – closed knowledge – is endorsed. The present essay locates the problem for closed knowledge in the separation it imposes between knowledge and evidence. Although it might appear that all that stands (...)
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  17. The Structural Links Between Ecology, Evolution and Ethics: The Virtuous Epistemic Circle.Donato Bergandi (ed.) - 2013 - Dordrecht, Netherland: Springer.
    Abstract - Evolutionary, ecological and ethical studies are, at the same time, specific scientific disciplines and, from an historical point of view, structurally linked domains of research. In a context of environmental crisis, the need is increasingly emerging for a connecting epistemological framework able to express a common or convergent tendency of thought and practice aimed at building, among other things, an environmental policy management respectful of the planet’s biodiversity and its evolutionary potential. -/- Evolutionary biology, ecology and ethics: at (...)
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  18. Knowledge, Hope, and Fallibilism.Matthew A. Benton - 2021 - Synthese 198:1673-1689.
    Hope, in its propositional construction "I hope that p," is compatible with a stated chance for the speaker that not-p. On fallibilist construals of knowledge, knowledge is compatible with a chance of being wrong, such that one can know that p even though there is an epistemic chance for one that not-p. But self-ascriptions of propositional hope that p seem to be incompatible, in some sense, with self-ascriptions of knowing whether p. Data from conjoining hope self-ascription (...)
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  19. On the Nature of Coincidental Events.Alessandra Melas & Pietro Salis - 2022 - Axiomathes 32 (1):143-68.
    It is a common opinion that chance events cannot be understood in causal terms. Conversely, according to a causal view of chance, intersections between independent causal chains originate accidental events, called “coincidences.” The present paper takes into proper consideration this causal conception of chance and tries to shed new light on it. More precisely, starting from Hart and Honoré’s view of coincidental events, this paper furnishes a more detailed account on the nature of coincidences, according to which (...)
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  20. Bigger, Badder Bugs.Benjamin A. Levinstein & Jack Spencer - forthcoming - Mind.
    In this paper we motivate the ‘principles of trust’, chance-credence principles that are strictly stronger than the New Principle yet strictly weaker than the Principal Principle, and argue, by proving some limitative results, that the principles of trust conflict with Humean Supervenience.
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  21.  66
    (1 other version)We Owe It to Others to Think for Ourselves.Finnur Dellsén - 2021 - In Jonathan Matheson & Kirk Lougheed (eds.), Epistemic Autonomy. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 306-322.
    We are often urged to figure things out for ourselves rather than to rely on other people’s say-so, and thus be ‘epistemically autonomous’ in one sense of the term. But why? For almost any important question, there will be someone around you who is at least as well placed to answer it correctly. So why bother making up your own mind at all? I consider, and then reject, two ‘egoistic’ answers to this question according to which thinking for oneself is (...)
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  22. Objectivity and the Method of Arbitrary Functions.Chloé de Canson - 2022 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (3):663-684.
    There is widespread excitement in the literature about the method of arbitrary functions: many take it to show that it is from the dynamics of systems that the objectivity of probabilities emerge. In this paper, I differentiate three ways in which a probability function might be objective, and I argue that the method of arbitrary functions cannot help us show that dynamics objectivise probabilities in any of these senses.
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  23. Live Skeptical Hypotheses.Bryan Frances - 2008 - In John Greco (ed.), The Oxford handbook of skepticism. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 225-245.
    Those of us who take skepticism seriously typically have two relevant beliefs: (a) it’s plausible (even if false) that in order to know that I have hands I have to be able to epistemically neutralize, to some significant degree, some skeptical hypotheses, such as the brain-in-a-vat (BIV) one; and (b) it’s also plausible (even if false) that I can’t so neutralize those hypotheses. There is no reason for us to also think (c) that the BIV hypothesis, for instance, is plausible (...)
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  24. Making Fit Fit.Michael Townsen Hicks - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (5):931-943.
    Reductionist accounts of objective chance rely on a notion of fit, which ties the chances at a world to the frequencies at that world. Here, I criticize extant measures of the fit of a chance system and draw on recent literature in epistemic utility theory to propose a new model: chances fit a world insofar as they are accurate at that world. I show how this model of fit does a better job of explaining the normative features (...)
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  25. Are We Playing a Moral Lottery? Moral Disagreement from a Metasemantic Perspective.Sinan Dogramaci - 2021 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (1):523-550.
    If someone disagrees with my moral views, or more generally if I’m in a group of n people who all disagree with each other, but I don’t have any special evidence or basis for my epistemic superiority, then it’s at best a 1-in-n chance that my views are correct. The skeptical threat from disagreement is thus a kind of moral lottery, to adapt a similar metaphor from Sharon Street. Her own genealogical debunking argument, as I discuss, relies on (...)
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  26. Debunking arguments.Daniel Z. Korman - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (12):e12638.
    Debunking arguments—also known as etiological arguments, genealogical arguments, access problems, isolation objec- tions, and reliability challenges—arise in philosophical debates about a diverse range of topics, including causation, chance, color, consciousness, epistemic reasons, free will, grounding, laws of nature, logic, mathematics, modality, morality, natural kinds, ordinary objects, religion, and time. What unifies the arguments is the transition from a premise about what does or doesn't explain why we have certain mental states to a negative assessment of their epistemic (...)
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  27. Possibility Precedes Actuality.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (8):3583-3603.
    This paper is inspired by and develops on E. J. Lowe’s work, who writes in his book The Possibility of Metaphysics that ‘metaphysical possibility is an inescapable determinant of actuality’ (1998: 9). Metaphysics deals with possibilities – metaphysical possibilities – but is not able to determine what is actual without the help of empirical research. Accordingly, a delimitation of the space of possibilities is required. The resulting – controversial – picture is that we generally need to know whether something is (...)
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  28. Rehabilitating Statistical Evidence.Lewis Ross - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (1):3-23.
    Recently, the practice of deciding legal cases on purely statistical evidence has been widely criticised. Many feel uncomfortable with finding someone guilty on the basis of bare probabilities, even though the chance of error might be stupendously small. This is an important issue: with the rise of DNA profiling, courts are increasingly faced with purely statistical evidence. A prominent line of argument—endorsed by Blome-Tillmann 2017; Smith 2018; and Littlejohn 2018—rejects the use of such evidence by appealing to epistemic (...)
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  29. The Nature of Evolutionary Biology: At the Borderlands Between Historical and Experimental Science.Massimo Pigliucci - 2013 - In Kostas Kampourakis (ed.), The Philosophy of Biology: a Companion for Educators. Dordrecht: Springer.
    The scientific status of evolutionary theory seems to be more or less perennially under question. I am not referring here (just) to the silliness of young Earth creation- ism (Pigliucci 2002; Boudry and Braeckman 2010), or even of the barely more intel- lectually sophisticated so-called Intelligent Design theory (Recker 2010; Brigandt this volume), but rather to discussions among scientists and philosophers of science concerning the epistemic status of evolutionary theory (Sober 2010). As we shall see in what follows, this (...)
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  30. General Dynamic Triviality Theorems.Jeffrey Sanford Russell & John Hawthorne - 2016 - Philosophical Review 125 (3):307-339.
    Famous results by David Lewis show that plausible-sounding constraints on the probabilities of conditionals or evaluative claims lead to unacceptable results, by standard probabilistic reasoning. Existing presentations of these results rely on stronger assumptions than they really need. When we strip these arguments down to a minimal core, we can see both how certain replies miss the mark, and also how to devise parallel arguments for other domains, including epistemic “might,” probability claims, claims about comparative value, and so on. (...)
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  31. A Bayesian explanation of the irrationality of sexist and racist beliefs involving generic content.Paul Silva - 2020 - Synthese 197 (6):2465-2487.
    Various sexist and racist beliefs ascribe certain negative qualities to people of a given sex or race. Epistemic allies are people who think that in normal circumstances rationality requires the rejection of such sexist and racist beliefs upon learning of many counter-instances, i.e. members of these groups who lack the target negative quality. Accordingly, epistemic allies think that those who give up their sexist or racist beliefs in such circumstances are rationally responding to their evidence, while those who (...)
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  32. Duplicating thoughts.Kirk Ludwig - 1996 - Mind and Language 11 (1):92-102.
    Suppose that a physical duplicate of me, right down to the arrangements of subatomic particles, comes into existence at the time at which I finish this sentence. Suppose that it comes into existence by chance, or at least by a causal process entirely unconnected with me. It might be so situated that it, too, is seated in front of a computer, and finishes this paragraph and paper, or a corresponding one, just as I do. (i) Would it have the (...)
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  33. Impossible Odds.Nathan Salmón - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (3):644-662.
    A thesis (“weak BCP”) nearly universally held among philosophers of probability connects the concepts of objective chance and metaphysical modality: Any prospect (outcome) that has a positive chance of obtaining is metaphysically possible—(nearly) equivalently, any metaphysically impossible prospect has zero chance. Particular counterexamples are provided utilizing the monotonicity of chance, one of them related to the four world paradox. Explanations are offered for the persistent feeling that there cannot be chancy metaphysical necessities or chancy metaphysical impossibilities. (...)
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  34. Reasons and belief.Daniel Fogal - forthcoming - Philosophical Issues.
    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 (...)
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  35. Legal evidence and knowledge.Georgi Gardiner - 2024 - In Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & Clayton Littlejohn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence. New York, NY: Routledge.
    This essay is an accessible introduction to the proof paradox in legal epistemology. -/- In 1902 the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine filed an influential legal verdict. The judge claimed that in order to find a defendant culpable, the plaintiff “must adduce evidence other than a majority of chances”. The judge thereby claimed that bare statistical evidence does not suffice for legal proof. -/- In this essay I first motivate the claim that bare statistical evidence does not suffice for legal (...)
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  36. On luck and significance.Jesse Hill - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-18.
    It is often assumed that all lucky events are significant. The thought is that a chancy event such as winning the lottery is lucky for you in part because it affects your interests or well-being. But whether you win an Absurdist Raffle in which there are no prizes, is, intuitively, not a matter of luck. This is because this event—even if chancy—is not significant for any subject. However, a few philosophers have recently claimed not only that luck does not necessarily (...)
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  37. Blame for me and Not for Thee: Status Sensitivity and Moral Responsibility.Henry Argetsinger - 2022 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (2):265-282.
    In our day-to-day lives, we form responsibility judgements about one another – but we are imperfect beings, and our judgments can be mistaken. This paper suggests that we get things wrong not merely by chance, but predictably and systematically. In particular, these miscues are common when we are dealing with large gaps in social status and power. That is, when we form judgements about those who are much more or less socially powerful than ourselves, it is increasingly likely that (...)
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  38.  96
    A Pragmatist Approach to Aesthetic Disagreement.E. Cantalamessa - forthcoming - In Alex King (ed.), Philosophy and Art: New Essays at the Intersection. Oxford University Press.
    This chapter introduces and defends a pragmatist model of aesthetic disagreement that avoids many of the philosophical puzzles generated by the traditional, semantic, approach. Mainstream philosophical inquiry into aesthetic disagreement begins with a rather innocuous assumption: to understand what’s going on we must first explain what disputants are saying, which involves identifying the meaning of the relevant expressions or determining how aesthetic claims could be true. However, this task brings with it a new host of semantic and epistemic puzzles (...)
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  39. Moral encroachment and reasons of the wrong kind.James Fritz - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (10):3051-3070.
    According to the view that there is moral encroachment in epistemology, whether a person has knowledge of p sometimes depends on moral considerations, including moral considerations that do not bear on the truth or likelihood of p. Defenders of moral encroachment face a central challenge: they must explain why the moral considerations they cite, unlike moral bribes for belief, are reasons of the right kind for belief (or withheld belief). This paper distinguishes between a moderate and a radical version of (...)
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  40. Counterfactual skepticism is (just) skepticism.David Boylan - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (1):259-286.
    Counterfactual skepticism says that most ordinary counterfactuals are false. While few endorse counterfactual skepticism, the precise costs of the view are disputed and not generally well-understood. I have two aims in this paper. My first and primary aim is to establish, on grounds acceptable to all parties, that counterfactual skepticism is not benign. I argue it leads to significant skepticism about the future: if counterfactual skepticism is true, then we can have only very limited knowledge about the future. I give (...)
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  41. La objetividad de la ciencia.Howard Sankey - 2022 - In Juan Carlos Aguirre Garcia & L. Jaramillo (eds.), La Objetividad en las ciencias humanas. Samava Ediciones. pp. 15-35. Translated by Juan Carlos Aguirre Garcia.
    I distinguish three primary notions of objectivity that may be applied to the sciences. There is an ontological sense of objectivity which relates to the way in which the natural world exists independently of human thought. There is a semantic form of objectivity which relates to the nature of truth. There is an epistemic notion of objectivity which relates to the methodological norms and procedures which are employed in the sciences, and the epistemic justification of beliefs and theories (...)
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  42. How to Change People’s Beliefs? Doxastic Coercion vs. Evidential Persuasion.Gheorghe-Ilie Farte - 2016 - Argumentum. Journal of the Seminar of Discursive Logic, Argumentation Theory and Rhetoric 14 (2):47-76.
    The very existence of society depends on the ability of its members to influence formatively the beliefs, desires, and actions of their fellows. In every sphere of social life, powerful human agents (whether individuals or institutions) tend to use coercion as a favorite shortcut to achieving their aims without taking into consideration the non-violent alternatives or the negative (unintended) consequences of their actions. This propensity for coercion is manifested in the doxastic sphere by attempts to shape people’s beliefs (and doubts) (...)
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  43. Judging as Inviting Self-Trust.Edward Hinchman - 2007 - Center for 21st Century Studies Working Papers.
    [This draft is dated November 2007. I wrote it while I was a fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies at UW-Milwaukee, in 2005-06, and published it only on the Center's website as a working paper. Many of the core ideas in this paper wound up in "Receptivity and the Will," Nous 2009, "Assertion, Sincerity, and Knowledge," Nous 2013, and "Assurance and Warrant," Philosophers' Imprint 2014 -- though formulated rather differently. What follows is the original abstract.] This working paper (...)
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  44. Zetetic Intransigence and Democratic Participation.Hrishikesh Joshi - forthcoming - Episteme.
    A pervasive feature of democracy is disagreement. And in general, when we encounter disagreement from someone who is at least more reliable than chance, this puts some pressure on us to moderate our beliefs. But this raises the specter of asymmetric compliance—it’s not obvious what to do when we moderate our beliefs but the other party refuses to do so. Whereas an elegant solution is available when it comes to how we can to respond to our higher-order evidence while (...)
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  45.  47
    The Ecology of (dis-)Engagement in Digital Environments.Emanuele Arielli - 2024 - Topoi 43 (4):1-10.
    This paper explores some features of the epistemic environment in social media and online communication. We argue that digital environments differ from offline ones in at least two ways: (a) online environments are thoroughly structured and programmed. Every action is defined and limited by the underlying code created by the system’s developers, providing the tools users need to navigate the online space. In contrast, offline environments are open to chance and unpredictability, allowing for events and actions that the (...)
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  46. Kantian Non-evidentialism and its German Antecedents: Crusius, Meier, and Basedow.Brian A. Chance - 2019 - Kantian Review 3 (24):359-384.
    This article aims to highlight the extent to which Kant’s account of belief draws on the views of his contemporaries. Situating the non-evidentialist features of Crusius’s account of belief within his broader account, I argue that they include antecedents to both Kant’s distinction between pragmatic and moral belief and his conception of a postulate of pure practical reason. While moving us closer to Kant’s arguments for the first postulate, however, both Crusius’s and Meier’s arguments for the immortality of the soul (...)
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  47. The Myth of Stochastic Infallibilism.Adam Michael Bricker - 2021 - Episteme 18 (4):523-538.
    There is a widespread attitude in epistemology that, if you know on the basis of perception, then you couldn't have been wrong as a matter of chance. Despite the apparent intuitive plausibility of this attitude, which I'll refer to here as “stochastic infallibilism”, it fundamentally misunderstands the way that human perceptual systems actually work. Perhaps the most important lesson of signal detection theory (SDT) is that our percepts are inherently subject to random error, and here I'll highlight some key (...)
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  48. Kant and the Discipline of Reason.Brian A. Chance - 2015 - European Journal of Philosophy 23 (1):87-110.
    Kant's notion of ‘discipline’ has received considerable attention from scholars of his philosophy of education, but its role in his theoretical philosophy has been largely ignored. This omission is surprising since his discussion of discipline in the first Critique is not only more extensive and expansive in scope than his other discussions but also predates them. The goal of this essay is to provide a comprehensive reading of the Discipline that emphasizes its systematic importance in the first Critique. I argue (...)
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  49. Scepticism and the Development of the Transcendental Dialectic.Brian A. Chance - 2012 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20 (2):311-331.
    Kant's response to scepticism in the Critique of Pure Reason is complex and remarkably nuanced, although it is rarely recognized as such. In this paper, I argue that recent attempts to flesh out the details of this response by Paul Guyer and Michael Forster do not go far enough. Although they are right to draw a distinction between Humean and Pyrrhonian scepticism and locate Kant's response to the latter in the Transcendental Dialectic, their accounts fail to capture two important aspects (...)
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  50. Sensibilism, Psychologism, and Kant's Debt to Hume.Brian A. Chance - 2011 - Kantian Review 16 (3):325-349.
    Hume’s account of causation is often regarded a challenge Kant must overcome if the Critical philosophy is to be successful. But from Kant’s time to the present, Hume’s denial of our ability to cognize supersensible objects, a denial that relies heavily on his account of causation, has also been regarded as a forerunner to Kant’s critique of metaphysics. After identifying reasons for rejecting Wayne Waxman’s recent account of Kant’s debt to Hume, I present my own, more modest account of this (...)
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