3,099 research outputs found
How Belief-Credence Dualism Explains Away Pragmatic Encroachment
Belief-credence dualism is the view that we have both beliefs and credences and neither attitude is reducible to the other. Pragmatic encroachment is the view that practical stakes can affect the epistemic rationality of states like knowledge or justified belief. In this paper, I argue that dualism offers a unique explanation of pragmatic encroachment cases. First, I explain pragmatic encroachment and what motivates it. Then, I explain dualism and outline a particular argument for dualism. Finally, I show how dualism can explain the intuitions that underlie pragmatic encroachment. My basic proposal is that in high-stakes cases, it is not that one cannot rationally believe that p; instead, one ought not to rely on one's belief that p. One should rather rely on one's credence in p. I conclude that we need not commit ourselves to pragmatic encroachment in order to explain the intuitiveness of the cases that motivate it
Belief and Credence: Why the Attitude-Type Matters
In this paper, I argue that the relationship between belief and credence is a central question in epistemology. This is because the belief-credence relationship has significant implications for a number of current epistemological issues. I focus on five controversies: permissivism, disagreement, pragmatic encroachment, doxastic voluntarism, and the relationship between doxastic attitudes and prudential rationality. I argue that each debate is constrained in particular ways, depending on whether the relevant attitude is belief or credence. This means that epistemologists should pay attention to whether they are framing questions in terms of belief or in terms of credence and the success or failure of a reductionist project in the belief-credence realm has significant implications for epistemology generally
Set-Theoretic Completeness for Epistemic and Conditional Logic
The standard approach to logic in the literature in philosophy and
mathematics, which has also been adopted in computer science, is to define a
language (the syntax), an appropriate class of models together with an
interpretation of formulas in the language (the semantics), a collection of
axioms and rules of inference characterizing reasoning (the proof theory), and
then relate the proof theory to the semantics via soundness and completeness
results. Here we consider an approach that is more common in the economics
literature, which works purely at the semantic, set-theoretic level. We provide
set-theoretic completeness results for a number of epistemic and conditional
logics, and contrast the expressive power of the syntactic and set-theoretic
approachesComment: This is an expanded version of a paper that appeared in AI and
Mathematics, 199
Being More Realistic About Reasons: On Rationality and Reasons Perspectivism
This paper looks at whether it is possible to unify the
requirements of rationality with the demands of normative
reasons. It might seem impossible to do because one depends
upon the agent’s perspective and the other upon features of
the situation. Enter Reasons Perspectivism. Reasons
perspectivists think they can show that rationality does consist
in responding correctly to reasons by placing epistemic
constraints on these reasons. They think that if normative
reasons are subject to the right epistemic constraints, rational
requirements will correspond to the demands generated by
normative reasons. While this proposal is prima facie plausible,
it cannot ultimately unify reasons and rationality. There is no
epistemic constraint that can do what reasons perspectivists
would need it to do. Some constraints are too strict. The rest
are too slack. This points to a general problem with the
reasons-first program. Once we recognize that the agent’s
epistemic position helps determine what she should do, we
have to reject the idea that the features of the agent’s situation
can help determine what we should do. Either rationality
crowds out reasons and their demands or the reasons will make
unreasonable demands
Reasoning by Cases in Structured Argumentation
We extend the framework for structured argumentation so as to allow
applications of the reasoning by cases inference scheme for defeasible
arguments. Given an argument with conclusion ` or ', an argument based on
with conclusion , and an argument based on with conclusion , we
allow the construction of an argument with conclusion . We show how our
framework leads to different results than other approaches in non-monotonic
logic for dealing with disjunctive information, such as disjunctive default
theory or approaches based on the OR-rule (which allows to derive a defeasible
rule `If ( or ) then ', given two defeasible rules `If then '
and `If then '). We raise new questions regarding the subtleties of
reasoning defeasibly with disjunctive information, and show that its
formalization is more intricate than one would presume.Comment: Proceedings of SAC/KRR 201
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