Beliefs, Degrees of Belief, and the Lockean Thesis

Foley, Richard

doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-9198-8_2

Cited by 116 publications

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“…2 See D. Velleman (2000) and A. Steglich-Petersen (2006, 2009 for this interpretation. 3 I shall accept this point for the purposes of this paper, although I think that it is often exaggerated, for example as presented by K. Glüer and Å. Wikforss (2009).…”

Section: The Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Truth as the Aim of Epistemic Justification

Steglich‐Petersen¹

2013

The Aim of Belief

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A popular account of epistemic justification holds that justification, in essence, aims at truth. An influential objection against this account points out that it is committed to holding that only true beliefs could be justified, which most epistemologists regard as sufficient reason to reject the account. In this paper I defend the view that epistemic justification aims at truth, not by denying that it is committed to epistemic justification being factive, but by showing that, when we focus on the relevant sense of 'justification', it isn't in fact possible for a belief to be at once justified and false. To this end, I consider and reject three popular intuitions speaking in favor of the possibility of justified false beliefs, and show that a factive account of epistemic justification is less detrimental to our normal belief forming practices than often supposed.

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Section: The Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Truth as the Aim of Epistemic Justification

Steglich‐Petersen¹

2013

The Aim of Belief

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“…That is, belief in a proposition will be 'switched on' when one's degree of belief exceeds some threshold and 'switched off' when one's degree of belief dips below that threshold. This is sometimes termed the threshold view or Lockean thesis (see, for instance, Foley, 1992Foley, , 2009). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Outright Belief and Degrees of Belief

Ebert

Smith

2012

Dialectica

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First paragraph: We sometimes think of belief as an on-off attitude that we either bear to a proposition or do not. Other times, it seems natural to think of belief as something graded. I believe that I have two hands more strongly than I believe that the average US CEO earns over 200 times as much as the average US worker and, in turn, I believe that the average US CEO earns over 200 times as much as the average US worker more strongly than I believe that Mallory reached the summit of Chomolungma (Mount Everest) in 1924. What considerations like this suggest is that propositions can at least be partially ordered according to the strength of belief that I invest in them. Bayesian epistemologists tend to go further than this, claiming that the strength of belief that I invest in these and other propositions can be associated with real numerical degrees between 0 and 1, with 1 representing certainty of truth, 0 representing certainty of falsehood and 0.5 representing perfect agnosticism. Degrees of belief, so understood, become the basic target of epistemic evaluation for Bayesians, who go on to provide a detailed story as to how they ought to be rationally policed

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“…Leitgeb (2014) defends the claim that an agent's rational credence in P and the partitioning of possibilities he or she entertains determine the sufficient threshold for believing P. In a lottery case where an agent has rational attitudes concerning every ticket, this solution amounts to fixing the sufficient threshold for believing that "ticket n will lose" at 1. 21 Demey (2013), Foley (2009) and Sturgeon (2008) reject closure under conjunction and argue that while agents can rationally believe P and rationally believe Q, it can be rational for them to withhold judgment or disbelieve (P^Q). Kroedel (2011) argues that epistemic justification has to do with permissibility, and that since permissions do not agglomerate (being permitted to drink and being permitted to drive does not imply that one is permitted to drink and drive simultaneously), rationally believing P and rationally believing Q do not agglomerate and warrant the rational conclusion that (P^Q).…”

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Epistemic Akrasia and Epistemic Reasons

Daoust¹

2018

Episteme

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It seems that epistemically rational agents should avoid incoherent combinations of beliefs and should respond correctly to their epistemic reasons. However, some situations seem to indicate that such requirements cannot be simultaneously satisfied. In such contexts, assuming that there is no unsolvable dilemma of epistemic rationality, either (i) it could be rational that one's higher-order attitudes do not align with one's first-order attitudes or (ii) requirements such as responding correctly to epistemic reasons that agents have are not genuine rationality requirements. This result doesn't square well with plausible theoretical assumptions concerning epistemic rationality. So, how do we solve this puzzle? In this paper, I will suggest that an agent can always reason from infallible higher-order reasons. This provides a partial solution to the above puzzle.

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Beliefs, Degrees of Belief, and the Lockean Thesis

Cited by 116 publications

References 0 publications

Truth as the Aim of Epistemic Justification

Truth as the Aim of Epistemic Justification

Introduction: Outright Belief and Degrees of Belief

Epistemic Akrasia and Epistemic Reasons

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