Results for 'reasoning about beliefs'

998 found
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  1.  93
    Uncertain reasoning about agents' beliefs and reasoning.John A. Barnden - 2001 - Artificial Intelligence and Law 9 (2-3):115-152.
    Reasoning about mental states and processes is important in various subareas of the legal domain. A trial lawyer might need to reason and the beliefs, reasoning and other mental states and processes of members of a jury; a police officer might need to reason about the conjectured beliefs and reasoning of perpetrators; a judge may need to consider a defendant's mental states and processes for the purposes of sentencing and so on. Further, the (...)
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  2. How to Reason About Religious Beliefs.Daniele Bertini - 2021 - Dialogo Journal 8 (1):179-193.
    Intractable disagreements are commonly analyzed in terms of the semantic opposition of (at least) couples of disputed beliefs (purely epistemic view, from here on PEV). While such a view seems to be a very natural starting point, my intuitions are that such an approach is misleadingly unrealistic, and that an empirical modeling towards how individuals hold beliefs in intractable opposition constitutes a strong defeater for PEV. My work addresses disagreements within the religious domain. Accordingly, I will be concerned (...)
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  3. Welfarist Pluralism: Pluralistic Reasons for Belief and the Value of Truth.Andrew Reisner - forthcoming - Philosophical Topics.
    This paper outlines a new pluralistic theory of normative reasons for belief, welfarist pluralism, which aims to explain how there can be basic alethic/epistemic reasons for belief and basic pragmatic/non-alethic reasons for belief that can combine to determine what one ought to believe. The paper shows how this non-derivative first-order pluralism arises from a purely welfarist account of the foundations of theoretical normativity, thereby combining foundational pragmatism with non-derivative pluralism about normative reasons for belief. In addition, this paper outlines (...)
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  4.  95
    The pragmatic foundations of non-derivative pluralism about reasons for belief.Andrew Reisner - manuscript
    This paper offers a sketch of welfarist pluralism, a view that is intended to resolve a difficulty for non-derivative pluralists about normative reasons for belief. Welfarist pluralism is the view that all reasons for belief are rooted in wellbeing, and that wellbeing has as one of its components being in a positive epistemic state. The paper explores how this view can explain various pluralist intuitions and why it offers a plausible basis for combinatorial pluralists who believe that alethic and (...)
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  5.  99
    Transparency and Reasons for Belief.Benjamin Wald - 2015 - Logos and Episteme 6 (4):475-494.
    Belief has a special connection to truth, a connection not shared by mental states like imagination. One way of capturing this connection is by the claim that belief aims at truth. Normativists argue that we should understand this claim as a normative claim about belief – beliefs ought to be true. A second important connection between belief and truth is revealed by the transparency of belief, i.e. the fact that, when I deliberate about what to believe, I (...)
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  6.  94
    Welfarist Pluralism: A Theory of the Foundations of a Pluralist Account of Reasons for Belief [Chapter 1 of A New Theory of Reasons for Belief: Pragmatic Foundations and Pluralistic Reasons (Under Contract with OUP).Andrew Reisner - manuscript
    This is the latest draft of chapter 1 of _A New Theory of Reasons for Belief: Pragmatic Foundations and Pluralistic Reasons_ (Under Contract with OUP). It outlines the view that is the focus of the book: Welfarist Pluralism. Welfarist pluralism is the view that all normative reasons for belief are grounded in wellbeing and that being in a positive epistemic state is one of the components of wellbeing. This chapter explains how one can develop a principled version of non-derivative pluralism (...)
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  7.  80
    Instrumental reasons for belief: elliptical talk and elusive properties.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen & Mattias Skipper - 2020 - In Sebastian Schmidt & Gerhard Ernst (eds.), The Ethics of Belief and Beyond: Understanding Mental Normativity. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. pp. 109-125.
    Epistemic instrumentalists think that epistemic normativity is just a special kind of instrumental normativity. According to them, you have epistemic reason to believe a proposition insofar as doing so is conducive to certain epistemic goals or aims—say, to believe what is true and avoid believing what is false. Perhaps the most prominent challenge for instrumentalists in recent years has been to explain, or explain away, why one’s epistemic reasons often do not seem to depend on one’s aims. This challenge can (...)
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  8. An Instrumentalist Account of How to Weigh Epistemic and Practical Reasons for Belief.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen & Mattias Skipper - 2019 - Mind 129 (516):1071-1094.
    When one has both epistemic and practical reasons for or against some belief, how do these reasons combine into an all-things-considered reason for or against that belief? The question might seem to presuppose the existence of practical reasons for belief. But we can rid the question of this presupposition. Once we do, a highly general ‘Combinatorial Problem’ emerges. The problem has been thought to be intractable due to certain differences in the combinatorial properties of epistemic and practical reasons. Here we (...)
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  9. Proceedings of the Workshop 'Reasoning about other minds: Logical and cognitive perspectives.J. van Eijck & R. Verbrugge (eds.) - 2011 - WEUR Proceedings.
    In recent years, the human ability to reasoning about mental states of others in order to explain and predict their behavior has come to be a highly active area of research. Researchers from a wide range of fields { from biology and psychology through linguistics to game theory and logic{ contribute new ideas and results. This interdisciplinary workshop, collocated with the Thirteenth International Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK XIII), aims to shed light on models (...)
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  10. Might Desires Be Beliefs About Normative Reasons?Alex Gregory - 2017 - In Federico Lauria & Julien Deonna (eds.), The Nature of Desire. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 201-217.
    This paper examines the view that desires are beliefs about normative reasons for action. It describes the view, and briefly sketches three arguments for it. But the focus of the paper is defending the view from objections. The paper argues that the view is consistent with the distinction between the direction of fit of beliefs and desires, that it is consistent with the existence of appetites such as hunger, that it can account for counterexamples that aim to (...)
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  11. "In Abundance of Counsellors there Is Victory": Reasoning about Public Policy from a Religious Worldview.Katherine Dormandy - 2019 - In Peter Jonkers & Oliver J. Wiertz (eds.), Religious Truth and Identity in an Age of Plurality. Routledge. pp. 162-181.
    Some religious communities argue that public policy is best decided by their own members, on the grounds that collaborating with those reasoning from secular or “worldly” perspectives will only foment error about how society should be run. But I argue that epistemology instead recommends fostering disagreement among a plurality of religious and secular worldviews. Inter-worldview disagreement over public policy can challenge our unquestioned assumptions, deliver evidence we would likely have missed, and expose us to new epistemic alternatives; when (...)
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  12.  99
    Moral Reasons for Moral Beliefs: A Puzzle for Moral Testimony Pessimism.Andrew Reisner & Joseph Van Weelden - 2015 - Logos and Episteme 6 (4):429-448.
    According to moral testimony pessimists, the testimony of moral experts does not provide non-experts with normative reasons for belief. Moral testimony optimists hold that it does. We first aim to show that moral testimony optimism is, to the extent such things may be shown, the more natural view about moral testimony. Speaking roughly, the supposed discontinuity between the norms of moral beliefs and the norms of non-moral beliefs, on careful reflection, lacks the intuitive advantage that it is (...)
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  13. People’s Beliefs About Pronouns Reflect Both the Language They Speak and Their Ideologies.April Bailey, Robin Dembroff, Daniel Wodak, Elif Ikizer & Andrei Cimpian - forthcoming - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
    Pronouns often convey information about a person’s social identity (e.g., gender). Consequently, pronouns have become a focal point in academic and public debates about whether pronouns should be changed to be more inclusive, such as for people whose identities do not fit current pronoun conventions (e.g., gender non-binary individuals). Here, we make an empirical contribution to these debates by investigating which social identities lay speakers think that pronouns should encode and why. Across four studies, participants were asked to (...)
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  14. Reasons for (prior) belief in Bayesian epistemology.Franz Dietrich & Christian List - 2013 - Synthese 190 (5):781-786.
    Bayesian epistemology tells us with great precision how we should move from prior to posterior beliefs in light of new evidence or information, but says little about where our prior beliefs come from. It offers few resources to describe some prior beliefs as rational or well-justified, and others as irrational or unreasonable. A different strand of epistemology takes the central epistemological question to be not how to change one’s beliefs in light of new evidence, but (...)
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  15.  53
    Knowledge Is Belief For Sufficient (Objective and Subjective) Reason.Mark Schroeder - 2015 - Oxford Studies in Epistemology 5.
    This chapter lays out a case that with the proper perspective on the place of epistemology within normative inquiry more generally, it is possible to appreciate what was on the right track about some of the early approaches to the analysis of knowledge, and to improve on the obvious failures which led them to be rejected. Drawing on more general principles about reasons, their weight, and their relationship to justification, it offers answers to problems about defeat and (...)
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  16. Good reasons are apparent to the knowing subject.Spencer Paulson - 2023 - Synthese 202 (1):1-18.
    Reasons rationalize beliefs. Reasons, when all goes well, turn true beliefs into knowledge. I am interested in the relationship between these aspects of reasons. Without a proper understanding of their relationship, the theory of knowledge will be less illuminating than it ought to be. I hope to show that previous accounts have failed to account for this relationship. This has resulted in a tendency to focus on justification rather than knowledge. It has also resulted in many becoming skeptical (...)
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  17. A Puzzle About Weak Belief.Joshua Edward Pearson - forthcoming - Analysis.
    I present an intractable puzzle for the currently popular view that belief is weak—the view that expressions like ‘S believes p’ ascribe to S a doxastic attitude towards p that is rationally compatible with low credence that p. The puzzle concerns issues that arise on considering beliefs in conditionals. I show that proponents of weak belief either cannot consistently apply their preferred methodology when accommodating beliefs in conditionals, or they must deny that beliefs in conditionals can be (...)
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  18. Are Desires Beliefs about Normative Reasons?Avery Archer - 2019 - Analytic Philosophy 61 (3):236-251.
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  19. Voluntary Belief on a Reasonable Basis.Philip J. Nickel - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (2):312-334.
    A person presented with adequate but not conclusive evidence for a proposition is in a position voluntarily to acquire a belief in that proposition, or to suspend judgment about it. The availability of doxastic options in such cases grounds a moderate form of doxastic voluntarism not based on practical motives, and therefore distinct from pragmatism. In such cases, belief-acquisition or suspension of judgment meets standard conditions on willing: it can express stable character traits of the agent, it can be (...)
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  20. Trust and belief: a preemptive reasons account.Arnon Keren - 2014 - Synthese 191 (12):2593-2615.
    According to doxastic accounts of trust, trusting a person to \(\varPhi \) involves, among other things, holding a belief about the trusted person: either the belief that the trusted person is trustworthy or the belief that she actually will \(\varPhi \) . In recent years, several philosophers have argued against doxastic accounts of trust. They have claimed that the phenomenology of trust suggests that rather than such a belief, trust involves some kind of non-doxastic mental attitude towards the trusted (...)
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  21.  99
    Belief, information and reasoning.Bruno Whittle - 2012 - Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1):431-446.
    Here are two plausible ideas about belief. First: beliefs are our means of storing information. Second: if we believe something, then we are willing to use it in reasoning. But in this paper I introduce a puzzle that seems to show that these cannot both be right. The solution, I argue, is a new picture, on which there is a kind of belief for each idea. An account of these two kinds of belief is offered in terms (...)
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  22. Beliefs About the True Self Explain Asymmetries Based on Moral Judgment.George E. Newman, Julian De Freitas & Joshua Knobe - 2015 - Cognitive Science 39 (1):96-125.
    Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about what a person values, whether a person is happy, whether a person has shown weakness of will, and whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend critically on whether participants themselves find the agent's behavior to be morally good or bad. To date, however, the origins of these asymmetries remain unknown. The present studies examine whether beliefs about an agent's “true (...)
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  23.  73
    Skepticism about Reasoning.Sherrilyn Roush, Kelty Allen & Ian Herbert - 2009 - In P. D. Magnus & Jacob Busch (eds.), New waves in philosophy of science. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 112-141.
    Less discussed than Hume’s skepticism about what grounds there could be for projecting empirical hypotheses is his concern with a skeptical regress that he thought threatened to extinguish any belief when we reflect that our reasoning is not perfect. The root of the problem is the fact that a reflection about our reasoning is itself a piece of reasoning. If each reflection is negative and undermining, does that not give us a diminution of our original (...)
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  24.  90
    Simulative reasoning, common-sense psychology and artificial intelligence.John A. Barnden - 1995 - In Martin Davies & Tony Stone (eds.), Mental Simulation: Evaluations and Applications. Blackwell. pp. 247--273.
    The notion of Simulative Reasoning in the study of propositional attitudes within Artificial Intelligence (AI) is strongly related to the Simulation Theory of mental ascription in Philosophy. Roughly speaking, when an AI system engages in Simulative Reasoning about a target agent, it reasons with that agent’s beliefs as temporary hypotheses of its own, thereby coming to conclusions about what the agent might conclude or might have concluded. The contrast is with non-simulative meta-reasoning, where the (...)
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  25.  85
    A Note on Kripke's Puzzle about Belief.Cristian Constantinescu - 2007 - The Reasoner 1 (4):8-9.
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  26. The Formulation of Disjunctivism About φ-ing for a Reason.J. J. Cunningham - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 69 (275):235-257.
    We can contrast rationalising explanations of the form S φs because p with those of the form S φs because S believes that p. According the Common Kind View, the two sorts of explanation are the same. The Disjunctive View denies this. This paper sets out to elucidate the sense in which the Common Kind Theorist asserts, but the Disjunctivist denies, that the two explanations are the same. I suggest that, in the light of the distinction between kinds of explanation (...)
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  27. Are epistemic reasons normative?Benjamin Kiesewetter - 2021 - Noûs 56 (3):670-695.
    According to a widely held view, epistemic reasons are normative reasons for belief – much like prudential or moral reasons are normative reasons for action. In recent years, however, an increasing number of authors have questioned the assumption that epistemic reasons are normative. In this article, I discuss an important challenge for anti-normativism about epistemic reasons and present a number of arguments in support of normativism. The challenge for anti-normativism is to say what kind of reasons epistemic reasons are (...)
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  28. Believing for Practical Reasons.Susanna Rinard - 2018 - Noûs (4):763-784.
    Some prominent evidentialists argue that practical considerations cannot be normative reasons for belief because they can’t be motivating reasons for belief. Existing pragmatist responses turn out to depend on the assumption that it’s possible to believe in the absence of evidence. The evidentialist may deny this, at which point the debate ends in an impasse. I propose a new strategy for the pragmatist. This involves conceding that belief in the absence of evidence is impossible. We then argue that evidence can (...)
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  29.  99
    The Moral Clout of Reasonable Beliefs.Holly M. Smith - 2010 - In Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume I. Oxford University Press.
    Because we must often make decisions in light of imperfect information about our prospective actions, the standard principles of objective obligation must be supplemented with principles of subjective obligation (which evaluate actions in light of what the agent believes about their circumstances and consequences). The point of principles of subjective obligation is to guide agents in making decisions. But should these principles be stated in terms of what the agent actually believes or what it would be reasonable for (...)
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  30.  32
    Knowledge is belief for sufficient (objective and subjective) reason.Mark Schroeder - manuscript
    This paper defends a simple thesis: that knowledge is belief for reasons that are both objectively and subjectively sufficient. I take a dogmatic approach, devoting the bulk of the paper to an explanation of what this means, and of why it explains both what knowledge is like, and why it is important; the theory is justified by its fruits. I go on to illustrate, by appeal to my main thesis, how knowledge comes to play some of the key roles that (...)
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  31. Reasoning with knowledge of things.Matt Duncan - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (2):270-291.
    When we experience the world – see, hear, feel, taste, or smell things – we gain all sorts of knowledge about the things around us. And this knowledge figures heavily in our reasoning about the world – about what to think and do in response to it. But what is the nature of this knowledge? On one commonly held view, all knowledge is constituted by beliefs in propositions. But in this paper I argue against this (...)
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  32. Ownership reasoning in children across cultures.Philippe Rochat, Erin Robbins, Claudia Passos-Ferreira, Angela Donato Oliva, Maria D. G. Dias & Liping Guo - 2014 - Cognition 132 (3):471-484.
    To what extent do early intuitions about ownership depend on cultural and socio-economic circumstances? We investigated the question by testing reasoning about third party ownership conflicts in various groups of three- and five-year-old children (N = 176), growing up in seven highly contrasted social, economic, and cultural circumstances (urban rich, poor, very poor, rural poor, and traditional) spanning three continents. Each child was presented with a series of scripts involving two identical dolls fighting over an object of (...)
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  33. What to believe about your belief that you're in the good case.Alex Worsnip - 2019 - Oxford Studies in Epistemology 6:206-233.
    Going about our daily lives in an orderly manner requires us, once we are aware of them, to dismiss many metaphysical possibilities. We take it for granted that we are not brains in vats, or living in the Matrix, or in an extended dream. Call these things that we take for granted “anti-skeptical assumptions”. What should a reflective agent who believes these things think of these beliefs? For various reasons, it can seem that we do not have evidence (...)
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  34. Belief, Credence, and Pragmatic Encroachment.Jacob Ross & Mark Schroeder - 2014 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (2):259-288.
    This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors). After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. On this view, what it is for an agent to believe a proposition is (...)
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  35. Reasons as Premises of Good Reasoning.Jonathan Way - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (2).
    Many philosophers have been attracted to the view that reasons are premises of good reasoning – that reasons to φ are premises of good reasoning towards φ-ing. However, while this reasoning view is indeed attractive, it faces a problem accommodating outweighed reasons. In this article, I argue that the standard solution to this problem is unsuccessful and propose an alternative, which draws on the idea that good patterns of reasoning can be defeasible. I conclude by drawing (...)
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  36. In Defense of Constitutivism About Epistemic Normativity.David Horst - 2022 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (2):232-258.
    Epistemic constitutivism (EC) holds that the nature of believing is such that it gives rise to a standard of correctness and that other epistemic normative notions (e.g., reasons for belief) can be explained in terms of this standard. If defensible, this view promises an attractive and unifying account of epistemic normativity. However, EC faces a forceful objection: that constitutive standards of correctness are never enough for generating normative reasons. This paper aims to defend EC in the face of this objection. (...)
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  37. Reasons as Evidence.Stephen Kearns & Daniel Star - 2009 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 4:215-42.
    In this paper, we argue for a particular informative and unified analysis of normative reasons. According to this analysis, a fact F is a reason to act in a certain way just in case it is evidence that one ought to act in that way. Similarly, F is a reason to believe a certain proposition just in case it is evidence for the truth of this proposition. Putting the relatively uncontroversial claim about reasons for belief to one side, we (...)
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  38. Reasoning in attitudes.Franz Dietrich & Antonios Staras - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1–31.
    People reason not only in beliefs, but also in intentions, preferences, and other attitudes. They form preferences from existing preferences, or intentions from existing beliefs and intentions, and so on. This often involves choosing between rival conclusions. Building on Broome (Rationality through reasoning, Hoboken, Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118609088, 2013) and Dietrich et al. (J Philos 116:585–614. https://doi.org/10.5840/jphil20191161138, 2019), we present a philosophical and formal analysis of reasoning in attitudes, with or without facing choices in reasoning. We give (...)
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  39.  71
    Practical Reasons for Pragmatism.Paul Forrester - manuscript
    The existing philosophical debate about the nature of reasons for belief between pragmatists and evidentialists has been substantially biased in favor of evidentialists. The literature has been focused on gathering and evaluating evidence pertaining to evidentialism and pragmatism, in the form of philosophical arguments for and against these two theses. But this way of proceeding simply presumes the truth of evidentialism, since it assumes that what we should be doing when evaluating pragmatism and evidentialism is collecting relevant evidence in (...)
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  40. The Game of Belief.Barry Maguire & Jack Woods - 2020 - Philosophical Review 129 (2):211-249.
    It is plausible that there are epistemic reasons bearing on a distinctively epistemic standard of correctness for belief. It is also plausible that there are a range of practical reasons bearing on what to believe. These theses are often thought to be in tension with each other. Most significantly for our purposes, it is obscure how epistemic reasons and practical reasons might interact in the explanation of what one ought to believe. We draw an analogy with a similar distinction between (...)
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  41. Belief revision in psychotherapy.J. P. Grodniewicz - 2024 - Synthese 203 (4):1-22.
    According to the cognitive model of psychopathology, maladaptive beliefs about oneself, others, and the world are the main factors contributing to the development and persistence of various forms of mental suffering. Therefore, the key therapeutic process of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—a therapeutic approach rooted in the cognitive model—is cognitive restructuring, i.e., a process of revision of such maladaptive beliefs. In this paper, I examine the philosophical assumptions underlying CBT and offer theoretical reasons to think that the effectiveness (...)
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  42. Well-Founded Belief and the Contingencies of Epistemic Location.Guy Axtell - 2019 - In Joseph Adam Carter & Patrick Bondy (eds.), Well Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation. New York: Routledge. pp. 275-304.
    A growing number of philosophers are concerned with the epistemic status of culturally nurtured beliefs, beliefs found especially in domains of morals, politics, philosophy, and religion. Plausibly, worries about the deep impact of cultural contingencies on beliefs in these domains of controversial views is a question about well-foundedness: Does it defeat well-foundedness if the agent is rationally convinced that she would take her own reasons for belief as insufficiently well-founded, or would take her own belief (...)
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  43. Desire-As-Belief and Evidence Sensitivity.Kael McCormack - 2023 - Theoria. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science 38 (2):155-172.
    Alex Gregory (2017a; 2017b; 2018; 2021) provides an ingenious, systematic defence of the view that desires are a species of belief about normative reasons. This view explains how desires make actions rationally intelligible. Its main rival, which is attractive for the same reason, says that desires involve a quasi-perceptual appearance of value. Gregory (2017a; 2018; 2021) has argued that his view provides the superior explanation of how desires are sensitive to evidence. Here, I show that the quasi-perceptual view fairs (...)
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  44. Belief and Credence: A Defense of Dualism.Elizabeth Jackson - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Notre Dame
    Belief is a familiar attitude: taking something to be the case or regarding it as true. But we are more confident in some of our beliefs than in others. For this reason, many epistemologists appeal to a second attitude, called credence, similar to a degree of confidence. This raises the question: how do belief and credence relate to each other? On a belief-first view, beliefs are more fundamental and credences are a species of beliefs, e.g. beliefs (...)
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  45.  78
    How Do Reasons Accrue?Shyam Nair - 2016 - In Errol Lord & Barry Maguire (eds.), Weighing Reasons. New York, NY: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 56–73.
    Reasons can interact in a variety of ways to determine what we ought to do or believe. And there can be cases where two reasons to do an act or have a belief are individually worse than a reason to not do that act or have that belief, but the reasons together are better than the reason to not do that act or have that belief. So the reasons together―which we can call the accrual of those reasons—can have a strength (...)
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  46. Reasons and Perception.Declan Smithies - 2018 - In Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press. pp. 631-661.
    This chapter is organized around four central questions about the role of reasons in the epistemology of perception. The 'whether?' question: does perception provide us with reasons for belief about the external world? The 'how?' question: how does perception provide us with reasons for belief about the external world? The 'when?' question: when does perception provide us with reasons for belief about the external world? The 'what?' question: what are the reasons that perception provides us with (...)
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  47.  72
    Genetic explanations of religious belief.James H. Lesher - 1975 - Philosophical Studies 27 (5):317 - 328.
    Genetic explanations of religious belief, such as Freud’s analysis of theism as ‘a neurotic relic’, pose a problem for theists: how far do such explanations establish the irrationality of religious belief? I argue that genetic analyses of belief suffer from a number of limitations. Showing that some reason-irrelevant factor or factors were sufficient to produce conviction on some occasion would not establish that they were necessary in every case of religious conviction. Showing that reason-irrelevant factors were both necessary and sufficient (...)
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  48. Global Evolutionary Arguments: Self-Defeat, Circularity, and Skepticism about Reason.Diego E. Machuca - 2023 - In Evolutionary Debunking Arguments: Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Mathematics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology. New York: Routledge. pp. 333–359.
    In this essay, I consider an evolutionary debunking argument (EDA) that purports to undermine the epistemic justification of the belief in the reliability of our belief-forming processes, and an evolutionary vindicating argument (EVA) that seeks to establish that such a belief is epistemically justified. Whereas the EDA in question seems to fall prey to crippling self-defeat, the EVA under consideration seems to fall prey to vicious circularity. My interest in those arguments and the problems they face lies in what they (...)
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  49. Logical foundations for belief representation.William J. Rapaport - 1986 - Cognitive Science 10 (4):371-422.
    This essay presents a philosophical and computational theory of the representation of de re, de dicto, nested, and quasi-indexical belief reports expressed in natural language. The propositional Semantic Network Processing System (SNePS) is used for representing and reasoning about these reports. In particular, quasi-indicators (indexical expressions occurring in intentional contexts and representing uses of indicators by another speaker) pose problems for natural-language representation and reasoning systems, because--unlike pure indicators--they cannot be replaced by coreferential NPs without changing the (...)
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  50. Publishing, Belief, and Self-Trust.Alexandra Plakias - 2023 - Episteme 20 (3):632-646.
    This paper offers a defense of ‘publishing without belief’ (PWB) – the view that authors are not required to believe what they publish. I address objections to the view ranging from outright denial and advocacy of a belief norm for publication, to a modified version that allows for some cases of PWB but not others. I reject these modifications. In doing so, I offer both an alternative story about the motivations for PWB and a diagnosis of the disagreement over (...)
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