Inquiry and Belief

Friedman, Jane

doi:10.1111/nous.12222

Cited by 160 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…See, for example,Harman (1976),Bratman (1987),Velleman (1989),Mele (1992). As for the settledness involved in belief, seeFriedman (2019). SeeHieronymi (2005Hieronymi ( , 2006 for a unifying account of belief and intention as question-settling attitudes.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Real Myth of Coherence

Lee

2020

Erkenn

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this paper, I offer a novel view of the coherence (or structural) requirements on belief and intention, according to which they are not norms, but rather principles describing how your belief and intention operate. I first argue, on the basis of the unintelligibility of some relevant attitudes-reports, that there are conditions under which you simply do not count as believing or intending unless your beliefs and intentions satisfy the requirements: the conditions under which all of your relevant attitudes are occurrent or activated. I then argue that you are subject to a coherence requirement only if your relevant attitudes are all activated, for you are not necessarily subject to the charge of irrationality in violating a coherence requirement when your attitudes are not all activated. If so, however, you satisfy the coherence requirements whenever you are subject to them, which makes it plausible that the "requirements" should be seen as descriptive principles about belief and intention. This essay develops a novel view of the nature of so-called coherence (or structural) requirements on belief and intention, such as the requirement not to hold contradictory beliefs or intentions, the requirement to believe what follows by modus ponens from what you believe, the requirement to intend what you believe to be a necessary means to the end you intend. I argue that the idea that there are normative requirements of coherence is a myth. In saying this, I mean to contrast 'normative' with 'descriptive'. My view is that the requirements turn out inviolable, once we articulate the conditions under which you are subject to them and reflect on what is involved in believing and intending. They should rather be seen as constitutive principles which describe the ways in which your beliefs and intentions operate under certain conditions, or the conditions under which beliefs and intentions are intelligibly attributed to you. The view consists of two theses. The first is a thesis about what is distinctive to belief and intention: your beliefs and intentions always satisfy the coherence

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Real Myth of Coherence

Lee

2020

Erkenn

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Staffel (2019a) argues that beliefs play a crucial simplifying role, enabling agents with finite capacities to rule out small error possibilities in reasoning (see also Jackson, 2019b; Tang, 2015; Weisberg, Forthcoming). Buchak (2014) argues that belief, but not high credence, is crucial to our practices of praise and blame, and Friedman (2019) argues that belief and credence play different roles in inquiry (see also Staffel, 2019c).…”

Section: Belief and Credence: Descriptive Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The relationship between belief and credence

Jackson

2020

Philosophy Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Sometimes epistemologists theorize about belief, a tripartite attitude on which one can believe, withhold belief, or disbelieve a proposition. In other cases, epistemologists theorize about credence, a fine‐grained attitude that represents one's subjective probability or confidence level toward a proposition. How do these two attitudes relate to each other? This article explores the relationship between belief and credence in two categories: descriptive and normative. It then explains the broader significance of the belief‐credence connection and concludes with general lessons from the debate thus far. Video Abstract link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eOSlPVYxI8&feature=youtu.be

show abstract

“…This way of putting the matter is taken from (Friedman 2019). There, she argues that when one inquires one holds an "interrogative attitude" toward a question (e.g.…”

Section: The Distinct Attitude Thesis and The Negated Content Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disbelief is a distinct doxastic attitude

Smart

2020

Synthese

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

While epistemologists routinely employ disbelief talk, it is not clear that they really mean it, given that they often equate disbelieving p with believing ¬p. I argue that this is a mistake-disbelief is a doxastic attitude of rejection and is distinct from belief (and withholding). I first clarify this claim and its opposition, then show that we must distinguish disbelieving p from believing ¬p in order to account for the fact that we continue to hold doxastic attitudes toward propositions that we reject. After defending this argument against some possible objections, I examine several cases that reveal disbelieving p to be not only non-identical to believing ¬p, but independent of that attitude as well. Finally, I sketch some immediate and potential consequences of recognizing disbelief as a distinct doxastic attitude, particularly for work on epistemic rationality.

show abstract

Inquiry and Belief

Cited by 160 publications

References 22 publications

The Real Myth of Coherence

The Real Myth of Coherence

The relationship between belief and credence

Disbelief is a distinct doxastic attitude

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About