Reasons Fundamentalism and Rational Uncertainty – Comments on Lord, The Importance of Being Rational

In his new book "The Importance of Being Rational", Errol Lord aims to give a real definition of the property of rationality in terms of normative reasons. If he can do so, his work is an important step towards a defense of ‘reasons fundamentalism’ – the thesis that all complex normative properties can be analyzed in terms of normative reasons. I focus on his analysis of epistemic rationality, which says that your doxastic attitudes are rational just in case they are correct responses to the objective normative reasons you possess. For some fact to be an objective normative reason to do something that you possess, you have to be in a position to know this fact and be able to competently use it as a reason to do that thing. Lord’s view is thus a knowledge-first view about possessing normative reasons. Throughout the book, Lord conceptualizes belief in the traditional tripartite way – if you take any attitude at all towards a proposition, then you either believe it, or disbelieve it, or you suspend judgment about it. Lord doesn’t discuss cases in which we’re uncertain. Yet, those cases are ubiquitous. I explore how his view can be extended to them. I first discuss whether his strategy for vindicating coherence requirements in terms of normative reasons can be applied to credences. I then ask how Lord can conceive of the doxastic attitudes that encode uncertainty

Credences and suspended judgments as transitional attitudes

In this paper, I highlight an interesting difference between belief on the one hand, and suspended judgment and credence on the other hand. This difference is the following: credences and suspended judgments are suitable to serve as transitional as well as terminal attitudes in our reasoning, whereas beliefs are only appropriate as terminal attitudes. The notion of a transitional attitude is not an established one in the literature, but I argue that introducing it helps us better understand the different roles suspended judgments and credences can play in our reasoning. Transitional and terminal attitudes have interestingly different descriptive and normative properties. I also compare my account of transitional attitudes to other inquiry-guiding attitudes that have recently been characterized in the literature and explain why they are different

Probability without Tears

This paper is about teaching probability to students of philosophy who don’t aim to do primarily formal work in their research. These students are unlikely to seek out classes about probability or formal epistemology for various reasons, for example because they don’t realize that this knowledge would be useful for them or because they are intimidated by the material. However, most areas of philosophy now contain debates that incorporate probability, and basic knowledge of it is essential even for philosophers whose work isn’t primarily formal. In this paper, I explain how to teach probability to students who are not already enthusiastic about formal philosophy, taking into account the common phenomena of math anxiety and the lack of reading skills for formal texts. I address course design, lesson design, and assignment design. Most of my recommendations also apply to teaching formal methods other than probability theory

Transitional Attitudes and the Unmooring View of Higher-Order Evidence

This paper proposes a novel answer to the question of what attitude agents should adopt when they receive misleading higher-order evidence that avoids the drawbacks of existing views. The answer builds on the independently motivated observation that there is a difference between attitudes that agents form as conclusions of their reasoning, called terminal attitudes, and attitudes that are formed in a transitional manner in the process of reasoning, called transitional attitudes. Terminal and transitional attitudes differ both in their descriptive and in their normative properties. When an agent receives higher-order evidence that they might have reasoned incorrectly to a belief or credence towards p, then their attitude towards p is no longer justified as a terminal attitude towards p, but it can still be justified as a transitional attitude. This view, which I call the unmooring view, allows us to capture the rational impact of misleading higher-order evidence in a way that integrates smoothly with a natural picture of epistemic justification and the dynamics of deliberation

Why be (approximately) coherent?

Abstract Bayesians defend norms of ideal rationality such as probabilism, which they claim should be approximated by non-ideal thinkers. Yet, it is not often discussed exactly in what sense it is beneficial for an agent&rsquo;s credence function to approximate probabilistic coherence. Some existing research indicates that approximating coherence leads to improvements in accuracy, whereas other research suggests that it decreases Dutch book vulnerability. Yet, the existing results don&rsquo;t settle whether there is a way of approximating coherence that delivers both benefits at once. We show that there is.</p

Updating Incoherent Credences - Extending the Dutch Strategy Argument for Conditionalization

In this paper, we ask: how should an agent who has incoherent credences update when they learn new evidence? The standard Bayesian answer for coherent agents is that they should conditionalize; however, this updating rule is not defined for incoherent starting credences. We show how one of the main arguments for conditionalization, the Dutch strategy argument, can be extended to devise a target property for updating plans that can apply to them regardless of whether the agent starts out with coherent or incoherent credences. The main idea behind this extension is that the agent should avoid updating plans that increase the possible sure loss from Dutch strategies. This happens to be equivalent to avoiding updating plans that increase incoherence according to a distance-based incoherence measure

Für | For Manfred from his Students

Dieses Buch enthält Beiträge von Personen, die ihre Magister- oder Doktorarbeit unter der Betreuung von Manfred Krifka geschrieben haben. Es ist als kleines Abschiedsgeschenk für Manfred Krifka zum Ende seiner Amtszeit als Direktor des Leibniz-Zentrums für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft gedacht. Die Herausgeberin und der Herausgeber haben Beiträge zu sprachwissenschaftlichen und nicht-sprachwissenschaftlichen Themen in einer Vielzahl von Genres gesammelt. Diese Vielfalt spiegelt die Interessen und Forschungsthemen von Manfred Krifka wider. Sie spiegelt auch die Vielfalt der Menschen wider, denen Manfred Krifka geholfen hat