This paper concentrates on a particular sort of case where it’s plausible that epistemic requirements can conflict: cases where an agent’s higher-order evidence supports doubting her reliability in reacting to her ordinary evidence. Conflicting epistemic requirements can be seen as generating epistemic dilemmas. The paper examines two ways that people have sought to recognize conflicting requirements without allowing them to generate epistemic dilemmas: separating epistemic norms into two different varieties, and positing rational indeterminacy in cases where principles conflict. It argues (...) that these views incur costs, and that the sense in which they avoid dilemmas does not gain them an advantage over a view that simply recognizes dilemmas as a natural outgrowth of agents’ rational reflection on their own thinking. (shrink)

This chapter explains Franz Brentano's metaethical theory and how it purports to deal with such difficulties. Brentano explains correctness in emotions by analogy with correctness in judgements. For a judgement to be correct is for it to concord with a judgement made by someone who judges with self-evidence (Evidenz). Self-evident judgements are guaranteed to be correct, and they are based either on "inner perception" or on presentations of objects that are rejected apodictically. Brentano's metaethical theory concerns first and foremost the (...) psychology of valuing and of moral judgement. Brentano is clearly a cognitivist about evaluative and moral judgement; such judgements are judgements about the correctness of feelings, and judgements are cognitive acts. However, one aspect of his position that seems congenial to contemporary expressivism. This has to do with expressivist treatments of disagreement. Brentano's views seem akin to the kind of foundationalist intuitionism that is traditionally associated with non-naturalism. (shrink)

This paper explores the individualism-holism debate in social ontology and proposes a novel approach to the formalization of our intuitions and claims about social entities. Responding to recent calls for gradualist approaches in lieu of traditional sum-zero scenarios, it is argued that formal tools can be extracted from Integrated Information Theory (IIT) that provide a suitable logical language for gradualist descriptions and analyses of social entities.

This paper concerns how extant theorists of predictive coding conceptualize and explain possible instances of cognitive penetration. §I offers brief clarification of the predictive coding framework and relevant mechanisms, and a brief characterization of cognitive penetration and some challenges that come with defining it. §II develops more precise ways that the predictive coding framework can explain, and of course thereby allow for, genuine top-down causal effects on perceptual experience, of the kind discussed in the context of cognitive penetration. §III develops (...) these insights further with an eye towards tracking one extant criterion for cognitive penetration, namely, that the relevant cognitive effects on perception must be sufficiently direct. Throughout these discussions, we extend the analyses of the predictive coding models, as we know them. So one open question that surfaces is how much of the extended analyses are genuinely just part of the predictive coding models, or something that must be added to them in order to generate these additional explanatory benefits. In §IV, we analyze and criticize a claim made by some theorists of predictive coding, namely, that (interesting) instances of cognitive penetration tend to occur in perceptual circumstances involving substantial noise or uncertainty. It is here that our analysis is most critical. We argue that, when applied, the claim fails to explain (or perhaps even be consistent with) a large range of important and uncontroversially interesting possible cases of cognitive penetration. We conclude with a general speculation about how the recent work on the predictive mind may influence the current dialectic concerning top-down effects on perception. (shrink)

Scientific realism is typically associated with metaphysics. One current incarnation of such an association concerns the requirement of a metaphysical characterization of the entities one is being a realist about. This is sometimes called “Chakravartty’s Challenge”, and codifies the claim that without a metaphysical characterization, one does not have a clear picture of the realistic commitments one is engaged with. The required connection between metaphysics and science naturally raises the question of whether such a demand is appropriately fulfilled, and how (...) metaphysics engages with science in order to produce what is called “scientific metaphysics”. Here, we map some of the options available in the literature, generating a conceptual spectrum according to how each view approximates science and metaphysics. This is done with the purpose of enlightening the current debate on the possibility of epistemic warrant that science could grant to such a metaphysics, and how different positions differently address the thorny issue concerning such a warrant. (shrink)

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.

Sometimes we get evidence of our own epistemic malfunction. This can come from finding out we’re fatigued, or have been drugged, or that other competent and well-informed thinkers disagree with our beliefs. This sort of evidence seems to seems to behave differently from ordinary evidence about the world. In particular, getting such evidence can put agents in a position where the most rational response involves violating some epistemic ideal.

‘There is no place in the phenomenology of fully absorbed coping’, writes Hubert Dreyfus, ‘for mindfulness. In flow, as Sartre sees, there are only attractive and repulsive forces drawing appropriate activity out of an active body’1. Among the many ways in which history animates dynamical systems at a range of distinctive timescales, the phenomena of embodied human habit, skilful movement, and absorbed coping are among the most pervasive and mundane, and the most philosophically puzzling. In this essay we examine both (...) habitual and skilled movement, sketching the outlines of a multidimensional framework within which the many differences across distinctive cases and domains might be fruitfully understood. Both the range of movement phenomena which can plausibly be seen as instances of habit or skill, and the space of possible theories of such phenomena are richer and more disparate than philosophy easily encompasses. We seek to bring phenomenology into contact with relevant movements in psychological theories of skilful action, in the belief that phenomenological philosophy and cognitive science can be allies rather than antagonists. (shrink)

This paper sets out to undermine the view that a commitment to the early modern conception of the mind as immortalized in Ryle’s metaphor of the (Cartesian) ghost in the machine and in Quine’s metaphor of the (Lockean) myth of the museum is required to articulate a defence of the sui generis character of humanistic explanations. These powerful metaphors have not only contributed to undermining the claim for methodological pluralism by caricaturizing the arguments for disunity in the sciences; they have (...) also, and more worryingly, planted red herrings that have diverted attention away from the genuine issues at stake. This paper is an exercise in removing these false clues to reveal what the claim for the autonomy of humanistic explanations really amounts to. (shrink)

Understanding when it is acceptable to interrupt a joint activity is an important part of understanding what cooperation entails. Philosophical analyses have suggested that we should release our partner from a joint activity anytime the activity conflicts with fulfilling a moral obligation. To probe young children’s understanding of this aspect, we investigated whether 3-year-old children (N = 60) are sensitive to the legitimacy of motives (selfish condition vs. moral condition) leading agents to intentionally interrupt their joint activity. We measured whether (...) children protested or released their partner by scoring their reactions. Our results indicate that children did not manifest different reactions when the motive behind their partner leaving was moral than when the motive was selfish. However, our data showed a stable pattern: regardless of the partner’s motives, some 3-year-olds take initiatives to release their partners from joint activity, suggesting that measuring release is a valuable tool for investigating joint action. -/- . (shrink)

A letter protesting the publication of a homophobic rant in the Proceedings of the APA.

In this paper, I argue that Amie Thomasson’s Easy Ontology rests on a vicious circularity that is highly damaging. Easy Ontology invokes the idea of application conditions that give rise to analytic entailments. Such entailments can be used to answer ontological questions easily. I argue that the application conditions for basic terms are only circularly specifiable showing that Thomasson misses her self-set goal of preventing such a circularity. Using this circularity, I go on to show that Easy Ontology as a (...) whole collapses. (shrink)

How much should your confidence in your beliefs be shaken when you learn that others – perhaps 'epistemic peers' who seem as well-qualified as you are – hold beliefs contrary to yours? This article describes motivations that push different philosophers towards opposite answers to this question. It identifies a key theoretical principle that divides current writers on the epistemology of disagreement. It then examines arguments bearing on that principle, and on the wider issue. It ends by describing some outstanding questions (...) that thinking about this issue raises. (shrink)

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.

Sören Halldén’s logic of nonsense is one of the most well-known many-valued logics available in the literature. In this paper, we discuss Peter Woodruff’s as yet rather unexplored attempt to advance a version of such a logic built on the top of a constructive logical basis. We start by recalling the basics of Woodruff’s system and by bringing to light some of its notable features. We then go on to elaborate on some of the difficulties attached to it; on our (...) way to offer a possible solution to such difficulties, we discuss the relation between Woodruff’s system and two-dimensional semantics for many-valued logics, as developed by Hans Herzberger. (shrink)

Conciliationism holds that disagreement of apparent epistemic peers often substantially undermines rational confidence in our opinions. Uniqueness principles say that there is at most one maximally rational doxastic response to any given batch of total evidence. The two views are often thought to be tightly connected. This paper distinguishes two ways of motivating conciliationism, and two ways that conciliationism may be undermined by permissive accounts of rationality. It shows how conciliationism can flourish under certain strongly permissive accounts of rationality. This (...) occurs when the motivation for conciliationism does not come from taking disagreement as evidence of one's own rational failings. However, divorcing the motive for conciliating from worries about rationality does not remove a feature of conciliationism that some find troubling: that conciliationism can lead to cases of “rational toxicity,” in which the most rational response to one's evidence involves violating some rational ideal. (shrink)

What is it that makes a mental state conscious? Recent commentators have proposed that for Kant, consciousness results from differentiation: A mental state is conscious insofar as it is distinguished, by means of our conceptual capacities, from other states and/or things. I argue instead that Kant’s conception of state consciousness is sensory: A mental state is conscious insofar as it is accompanied by an inner sensation. Interpreting state consciousness as inner sensation reveals an underappreciated influence of Crusius on Kant’s view, (...) solves some long-standing puzzles concerning Kant’s difficult doctrine of self-affection, and sheds light on his theory of inner experience. (shrink)

A critical examination of the Reflection principle in Bayesian epistemology, and of the diachronic Dutch-book-style arguments that have been invoked to support Reflection and Conditionalization.

We often get evidence concerning the reliability of our own thinking about some particular matter. This “higher-order evidence” can come from the disagreement of others, or from information about our being subject to the effects of drugs, fatigue, emotional ties, implicit biases, etc. This paper examines some pros and cons of two fairly general models for accommodating higher-order evidence. The one that currently seems most promising also turns out to have the consequence that epistemic akrasia should occur more frequently than (...) is sometimes supposed. But it also helps us see why this might not be a bad thing. (shrink)

This paper explores an initially attractive principle connecting beliefs in general with beliefs about what beliefs are rational. The principle turns out to be violated by intuitively rational beliefs in some situations. The paper lays out some options for reacting to this fact.

Abstract: Theories of epistemic rationality that take disagreement (or other higher-order evidence) seriously tend to be “modest” in a certain sense: they say that there are circumstances in which it is rational to doubt their correctness. Modest views have been criticized on the grounds that they undermine themselves—they’re self-defeating. The standard Self-Defeat Objections depend on principles forbidding epistemically akratic beliefs; but there are good reasons to doubt these principles—even New Rational Reflection, which was designed to allow for certain special cases (...) that are intuitively akratic. On the other hand, if we construct a Self-Defeat Objection without relying on anti-akratic principles, modest principles turn out not to undermine themselves. In the end, modesty should not be seen as a defect in a theory of rational belief. (shrink)

Responding rationally to the information that others disagree with one’s beliefs requires assessing the epistemic credentials of the opposing beliefs. Conciliatory accounts of disagreement flow in part from holding that these assessments must be independent from one’s own initial reasoning on the disputed matter. I argue that this claim, properly understood, does not have the untoward consequences some have worried about. Moreover, some of the difficulties it does engender must be faced by many less conciliatory accounts of disagreement.

This is a collective study of the epistemic significance of disagreement: twelve contributors explore rival responses to the problems that it raises for philosophy. They develop our understanding of epistemic phenomena that are central to any thoughtful engagement with others' beliefs.

The goal of this paper is to present a new reconstruction of Aristotle's assertoric logic as he develops it in Prior Analytics, A1-7. This reconstruction will be much closer to Aristotle's original...

According to extension-shifting theories of vagueness, the extensions of vague predicates have sharp boundaries, which shift as a function of certain psychological factors. Such theories have been claimed to provide an attractive explanation of the appeal of soritical reasoning. I challenge this claim: the demand for such an explanation need not constrain the semantics of vague predicates at all.

It has often been noticed that conciliatory views of disagreement are "self-undermining" in a certain way: advocates of such views cannot consistently maintain them when other philosophers disagree. This leads to apparent problems of instability and even inconsistency. Does self-undermining, then, show conciliationism untenable? If so, the untenablity would extend not only to almost all views of disagreement, but to a wide range of other views supporting what one might call epistemic modesty: roughly, the idea that getting evidence that one (...) has made an epistemic error in arriving at one’s opinion may require adjusting that opinion. This paper argues that the phenomenon of self-undermining does not disclose any defect in views mandating epistemic modesty. Instead, it highlights an uncomfortable but natural consequence of reflecting on one's own possible epistemic imperfections, a sort of reflection that tends to cause epistemic ideals to conflict. (shrink)

Does Kant hold that we can have intuitions independently of concepts? A striking passage from § 13 of the Critique of Pure Reason appears to say so explicitly. However, it also conjures up a scenario where the categories are inapplicable to objects of intuition, a scenario presumably shown impossible by the following Transcendental Deduction. The seemingly non-conceptualist claim concerning intuition have therefore been read, by conceptualist interpreters of Kant, as similarly counterpossible. I argue that the passage in question best supports (...) an underappreciated middle position where intuition requires a pre-conceptual use of the understanding. Such pre-conceptual use of the understanding faces both textual and systematic objections. I show that these objections can be rebutted. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to work out Quine's account of explication. Quine does not provide a general account, but considers a paradigmatic example which does not fit other examples he claims to be explications. Besides working out Quine's account of explication and explaining this tension, I show how it connects to other notions such as paraphrase and ontological commitment. Furthermore, I relate Quinean explication to Carnap's conception and argue that Quinean explication is much narrower because its main (...) purpose is to be a criterion of theory choice. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to introduce, elucidate and defend the usefulness of a variant of grounding, or metaphysical explanation, that has the feature that the grounds explain of some states of affairs that one of them obtains without explaining which one obtains. I will dub this variant arbitrary grounding. After informally elucidating the basic idea in the first section, I will provide three metaphysical hypotheses that are best formulated in terms of arbitrary grounding in the second section. The (...) third section will be concerned with the relation between arbitrary grounding and non-arbitrary grounding. The fourth section will compare arbitrary grounding to two extant proposals in the literature. (shrink)

One important challenge for contingentists is that they seem to be unable to account for the meaning of some apparently meaningful modal discourse that is perfectly intelligible for necessitists. This worry is particularly pressing for higher-order contingentists, contingentists who hold that it is not only contingent which objects there are, but also contingent which semantic values there are for higher-order variables to quantify over. Objections against higher-order contingentism along these lines have been presented in Williamson (Mind 119(475):657–748, 2010; Modal logic (...) as metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2013, ch. 7), and Fritz and Goodman (Mind 126(504):1063–1108, 2017). This paper presents a way for contingentists to respond to these challenges. The upshot is that the contingentist can account for the meaningfulness of the problematic modal claims by pretending necessitism to be true, but in some cases it turns out to be indeterminate whether they are true. I defend this strategy against the objections against pretence-strategies presented in Fritz and Goodman (Mind 126(504):1063–1108, 2017, §4). Furthermore, I defend the plausibility of the resulting indeterminacy from the contingentist’s perspective. (shrink)

According to the person-affecting view, the ethics of welfare should be cashed out in terms of how the individuals are affected. While the narrow version fails to solve the non-identity problem, the wide version is subject to the repugnant conclusion. A middle view promises to do better – the Interpersonal Comparative View of Welfare (ICV). It modifies the narrow view by abstracting away from individuals’ identities to account for interpersonal gains and losses. The paper assesses ICV’s merits and flaws. ICV (...) solves the non-identity problem, avoids the repugnant conclusion, and seems to accommodate the person-affecting intuition. But it cuts too many things along the way: ICV obstructs the advantage of the wide view to account for all future individuals’ welfare, abandons the intuitions that underlie the narrow view, and even violates its own presuppositions by turning out to be merely pseudo person-affecting. (shrink)

Many writers have recently urged that the epistemic rationality of beliefs can depend on broadly pragmatic (as opposed to truth-directed) factors. Taken to an extreme, this line of thought leads to a view on which there is no such thing as a distinctive epistemic form of rationality. A series of papers by Susanna Rinard develops the view that something like our traditional notion of pragmatic rationality is all that is needed to account for the rationality of beliefs. This approach has (...) undeniable attractions. But examining different versions of the approach uncovers problems. The problems help reveal why epistemic rationality is an indispensable part of understanding rationality—not only of beliefs, but of actions. We may or may not end up wanting to make a place, in our theories of epistemic rationality, for factors such as the practical or moral consequences of having beliefs. But a purely pragmatic notion of rationality—one that’s stripped of any component of distinctively epistemic evaluation—cannot do all the work that we need done. (shrink)

A wide range of prominent epistemological theories include a principle of conservatism. Such principles take the fact that an agent currently holds a certain belief to constitute at least some measure of epistemic justification for her to maintain that belief. I examine the main arguments that have been made in conservatism's behalf, and find them unsound. Most interestingly, conservatism does not fall out of confirmational holism (the view that the justification of each of our beliefs is in part determined by (...) our other beliefs). I argue that conservatism is a mild form of dogmatism, and should be abandoned. (shrink)

Modal dispositionalists hold that dispositions provide the foundation of metaphysical necessity and possibility. According to the kind of modal dispositionalism that can be found in the present literature, a proposition p is possible just in case some things are disposed to be such that p. In the first part of this paper I show that combining this classic form of dispositionalism with the assumptions that the laws of nature are necessary and deterministic and that all dispositions are forward-looking in time (...) leads to the unattractive conclusion that every truth is necessary. I argue that the classic dispositionalist should be troubled by this result and in the second part of the paper I suggest a novel variant of dispositionalism that avoids it. This extended form of dispositionalism allows that some propositions are only indirectly underwritten by dispositions. (shrink)

Formally-inclined epistemologists often theorize about ideally rational agents--agents who exemplify rational ideals, such as probabilistic coherence, that human beings could never fully realize. This approach can be defended against the well-know worry that abstracting from human cognitive imperfections deprives the approach of interest. But a different worry arises when we ask what an ideal agent should believe about her own cognitive perfection (even an agent who is in fact cognitively perfect might, it would seem, be uncertain of this fact). Consideration (...) of this question reveals an interesting feature of the structure of our epistemic ideals: for agents with limited information, our epistemic ideals turn out to conflict with one another. (shrink)

The old evidence problem affects any probabilistic confirmation measure based on comparing pr(H/E) and pr(H). The article argues for the following points: (1) measures based on likelihood ratios also suffer old evidence difficulties; (2) the less-discussed synchronic old evidence problem is, in an important sense, the most acute; (3) prominent attempts to solve or dissolve the synchronic problem fail; (4) a little-discussed variant of the standard measure avoids the problem, in an appealing way; and (5) this measure nevertheless reveals a (...) different problem for probabilistic confirmation measures, a problem that is unlikely to lend itself to formal solution. (shrink)

Much contemporary epistemology is informed by a kind of confirmational holism, and a consequent rejection of the assumption that all confirmation rests on experiential certainties. Another prominent theme is that belief comes in degrees, and that rationality requires apportioning one's degrees of belief reasonably. Bayesian confirmation models based on Jeffrey Conditionalization attempt to bring together these two appealing strands. I argue, however, that these models cannot account for a certain aspect of confirmation that would be accounted for in any adequate (...) holistic confirmation theory. I then survey the prospects for constructing a formal epistemology that better accommodates holistic insights. (shrink)

Certain situations seem to call for acknowledging the possibility that one’s own beliefs are biased or distorted. On the other hand, certain sorts of epistemic self-doubts (such as ‘I believe it’s raining, but it’s not’) seem paradoxical. And some have put forth epistemic principles requiring rational agents to regard their own credences as so-called ‘expert functions’. This paper examines the question of whether rationality requires agents to respect their own credences in a way in which they need not respect the (...) credences of others. (shrink)

A number of philosophers, from Thomas Reid1 through C. A. J. Coady2, have argued that one is justified in relying on the testimony of others, and furthermore, that this should be taken as a basic epistemic presumption. If such a general presumption were not ultimately dependent on evidence for the reliability of other people, the ground for this presumption would be a priori. Such a presumption would then have a status like that which Roderick Chisholm claims for the epistemic principle (...) that we are justified in believing what our senses tell us. (shrink)

We often get evidence that bears on the reliability of some of our own first-order reasoning. The rational response to such “higher-order” evidence would seem to depend on a rational assessment of how reliable we can expect that reasoning to be, in light of the higher-order evidence. “Independence” principles are intended to constrain this reliability-assessment, so as to prevent question-begging reliance on the very reasoning being assessed. However, extant formulations of Independence principles tend to be vague or ambiguous, and coming (...) up with a tolerably precise formulation turns out to be tricky. This paper aims to make some progress toward developing a more precise Independence principle, and also to highlight some of the difficulties the project entails. The hope is to take a step toward understanding how rational belief is informed by evidence bearing on agents’ cognitive reliability. (shrink)

We articulate a distinction between ontology, understood as involving existence questions, and metaphysics, understood as either providing for metaphysical profiles of entities or else as dealing with fundamentality and/or grounding and dependence questions. The distinction, we argue, allows a better understanding of the roles of metaontology and metametaphysics when it comes to discussing the relations between ontology and science on the one hand, and metaphysics and science on the other. We argue that while ontology, as understood in this paper, may (...) have reasonable perspectives for naturalization, given its relation to science, the same cannot be said for metaphysics, given that it is typically understood as an additional theoretical layer over science, not participating in the scientific investigation. That may result either in skepticism over metaphysics, or else on accepting that metaphysics is an autonomous branch of investigation, depending on one’s concern for metaphysics. (shrink)

Habermas’ ‘ethics of citizenship’ raises a number of relevant concerns about the dangers of a secularistic exclusion of religious contributions to public deliberation, on the one hand, and the dangers of religious conflict and sectarianism in politics, on the other. Agreeing largely with these concerns, the paper identities four problems with Habermas’ approach, and attempts to overcome them: the full exclusion of religious reasons from parliamentary debate; the full inclusion of religious reasons in the informal public sphere; the philosophical distinction (...) between secular and religious reasons; and the sociological distinction between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ religions. The result is a revised version of the ethics of citizenship, which I call moderate inclusivism. Most notably, moderate inclusivism implies a replacement of Habermas’ ‘institutional translation proviso’ with a more flexible ‘conversational translation proviso’. (shrink)

This is a critical study of Robert Nozick's The Nature of Rationality.

This paper contributes to answering the question how physicalism can be defined for a world without fundamental physical phenomena. In a recent paper in this journal, Torin Alter, Sam Coleman, and Robert J. Howell propose a necessary condition on physicalism. They argue that physicalism is true only if there is no infinitely descending chain of mentally constituted phenomena. I argue that this alleged necessary condition faces counterexamples. An infinitely descending chain of mentally constituted phenomena is compatible with physicalism. Afterwards I (...) propose a simpler definition of physicalism that does not fall prey to my counterexample. (shrink)

Particular persons have claims against being made worse off than they could have been. The literature, however, has focused primarily on only two-option cases; yet, these cases fail to capture all of the morally relevant factors, especially when a person’s existence is in question. This paper explores how to assess claims in multiple-option choice sets. We scrutinize the only extant proposal, offered by Michael Otsuka, which we call the Weakening View. In light of its problems, we develop an alternative: the (...) Combining View. The Weakening View holds that a person’s claim against a loss of well-being relative to one distribution is weakened by the availability of further alternatives relative to which the person gains well-being. By contrast, our view holds that a person has an overall claim for or against a certain distribution relative to the whole option set, where overall claims are second-order functions of the different pairwise claims. Finally, we defend the Combining View by exploring its implications for the impact of a person’s possible non-existence on their overall claims, and we develop a proposal for how the number of distributions relative to which a person gains or loses welfare influences the strength of their overall claims. (shrink)

The nature of the cognition-motor interface has been brought to prominence by Butterfill & Sinigaglia, who argue that the representations employed by the cognitive and motor systems should not be able to interact with each other. Here I argue that recent empirical evidence concerning the interface contradicts several of the assumptions incorporated in Butterfill & Sinigaglia’s account, and I seek to develop a theoretical picture that will allow us to explain the structure of the interface presented by this evidence. The (...) central idea is that neural plasticity incorporates metarepresentational rules for constructing representational systems and linking them. The structure of the cognition-motor interface is constructed flexibly during development and skill learning based on information processing demands. (shrink)

It is obvious that we would not want to demand that an agent' s beliefs at different times exhibit the same sort of consistency that we demand from an agent' s simultaneous beliefs; there' s nothing irrational about believing P at one time and not-P at another. Nevertheless, many have thought that some sort of coherence or stability of beliefs over time is an important component of epistemic rationality.

The most immediately appealing model for formal constraints on degrees of belief is provided by probability theory, which tells us, for instance, that the probability of P can never be greater than that of (P v Q). But while this model has much intuitive appeal, many have been concerned to provide arguments showing that ideally rational degrees of belief would conform to the calculus of probabilities. The arguments most frequently used to make this claim plausible are the so-called "Dutch Book" (...) arguments. (shrink)

Both Representation Theorem Arguments and Dutch Book Arguments support taking probabilistic coherence as an epistemic norm. Both depend on connecting beliefs to preferences, which are not clearly within the epistemic domain. Moreover, these connections are standardly grounded in questionable definitional/metaphysical claims. The paper argues that these definitional/metaphysical claims are insupportable. It offers a way of reconceiving Representation Theorem arguments which avoids the untenable premises. It then develops a parallel approach to Dutch Book Arguments, and compares the results. In each case (...) preferencedefects serve as a diagnostic tool, indicating purely epistemic defects. (shrink)

Glymour's "bootstrap" account of confirmation is designed to provide an analysis of evidential relevance, which has been a serious problem for hypothetico-deductivism. As set out in Theory and Evidence, however, the "bootstrap" condition allows confirmation in clear cases of evidential irrelevance. The difficulties with Glymour's account seem to be due to a basic feature which it shares with hypothetico-deductive accounts, and which may explain why neither can give a satisfactory analysis of evidential relevance.