scholarly journals How to Believe Long Conjunctions of Beliefs: Probability, Quasi-Dogmatism and Contextualism

Erkenntnis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Bonzio ◽  
Gustavo Cevolani ◽  
Tommaso Flaminio
Keyword(s):  
High Probability ◽  
Rational Belief ◽  
Rational Agent ◽  
Preface Paradox ◽  
Rational Agents ◽  
Lockean Thesis ◽  
Fixed Threshold ◽  
The Preface Paradox

AbstractAccording to the so-called Lockean thesis, a rational agent believes a proposition just in case its probability is sufficiently high, i.e., greater than some suitably fixed threshold. The Preface paradox is usually taken to show that the Lockean thesis is untenable, if one also assumes that rational agents should believe the conjunction of their own beliefs: high probability and rational belief are in a sense incompatible. In this paper, we show that this is not the case in general. More precisely, we consider two methods of computing how probable must each of a series of propositions be in order to rationally believe their conjunction under the Lockean thesis. The price one has to pay for the proposed solutions to the paradox is what we call “quasi-dogmatism”: the view that a rational agent should believe only those propositions which are “nearly certain” in a suitably defined sense.

Attributing Knowledge

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jody Azzouni
Keyword(s):  
Rational Belief ◽  
Cognitive Ethology ◽  
Lottery Paradox ◽  
Preface Paradox ◽  
Rational Agents ◽  
Correct Application ◽  
Mechanical Devices ◽  
The Preface Paradox ◽  
The Lottery Paradox ◽  
Knowledge Closure

The word “know” is revealed as vague, applicable to fallible agents, factive, and criterion-transcendent. It is invariant in its meaning across contexts and invariant relative to different agents. Only purely epistemic properties affect its correct application—not the interests of agents or those who attribute the word to agents. These properties enable “know” to be applied correctly—as it routinely is—to cognitive agents ranging from sophisticated human knowers, who engage in substantial metacognition, to various animals, who know much less and do much less, if any, metacognition, to nonconscious mechanical devices such as drones, robots, and the like. These properties of the word “know” suffice to explain the usage phenomena that contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists invoke to place pressure on an understanding of the word that treats its application as involving no interests of agents, or others. It is also shown that the factivity and the fallibilist-compatibility of the word “know” explain Moorean paradoxes, the preface paradox, and the lottery paradox. A fallibility-sensitive failure of knowledge closure is given along with a similar failure of rational-belief closure. The latter explains why rational agents can nevertheless believe A and B, where A and B contradict each other. A substantial discussion of various kinds of metacognition is given—as well as a discussion of the metacognition literature in cognitive ethology. An appendix offers a new resolution of the hangman paradox, one that turns neither on a failure of knowledge closure nor on a failure of KK.

Full Belief and Loose Speech

2019 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Moss
Keyword(s):  
Rational Beliefs ◽  
Preface Paradox ◽  
Rational Agents ◽  
Full Belief ◽  
The Preface Paradox ◽  
Probabilistic Theories ◽  
The Way

This paper defends an account of full belief, including an account of its relationship to credence. Along the way, I address several familiar and difficult questions about belief. Does fully believing a proposition require having maximal confidence in it? Are rational beliefs closed under entailment, or does the preface paradox show that rational agents can believe inconsistent propositions? Does whether you believe a proposition depend partly on your practical interests? My account of belief resolves the tension between conflicting answers to these questions that have been defended in the literature. In addition, my account complements fruitful probabilistic theories of assertion and knowledge.

scholarly journals Context-sensitivity and the Preface Paradox for credence

Synthese ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominik Kauss
Keyword(s):  
Context Sensitivity ◽  
Rational Belief ◽  
The Other ◽  
Preface Paradox ◽  
Contextualist Approach ◽  
The Preface Paradox

AbstractIt’s intuitively plausible to suppose that there are many things that we can be rationally certain of, at least in many contexts. The present paper argues that, given this principle of Abundancy, there is a Preface Paradox for (rational) credence. Section 1 gives a statement of the paradox, discusses its relation to its familiar counterpart for (rational) belief, and points out the congeniality between Abundancy and broadly contextualist trends in epistemology. This leads to the question whether considerations of context-sensitivity might lend themselves to solving the Preface for credence. Sections 2 and 3 scrutinize two approaches in this spirit—one mimicking Hawthorne’s (2002) Semantic Contextualist approach to an epistemic version of the Preface, the other one analogous to Clarke’s (2015) Sensitivist approach to the doxastic version—arguing that neither approach succeeds as it stands.

Reasoning Without the Conjunction Closure

Episteme ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Alicja Kowalewska
Keyword(s):  
Computational Complexity ◽  
Error Rate ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Rational Belief ◽  
Rational Agents ◽  
Confidence Levels

Abstract Some theories of rational belief assume that beliefs should be closed under conjunction. I motivate the rejection of the conjunction closure, and point out that the consequences of this rejection are not as severe as it is usually thought. An often raised objection is that without the conjunction closure people are unable to reason. I outline an approach in which we can – in usual cases – reason using conjunctions without accepting the closure in its whole generality. This solution is based on the notion of confidence levels, which can be defined using probabilities. Moreover, on this approach, reasoning has a scalable computational complexity adaptable to cognitive abilities of both rationally bounded and perfectly rational agents. I perform a simulation to assess its error rate, and compare it to reasoning with conjunction closure.

scholarly journals Multi-Peer Disagreement and the Preface Paradox

Ratio ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Boyce ◽  
Allan Hazlett
Keyword(s):  
Peer Disagreement ◽  
Preface Paradox ◽  
The Preface Paradox

scholarly journals DISAGREEMENT AND EASY BOOTSTRAPPING

Episteme ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Eyal Tal
Keyword(s):  
Irrational Belief ◽  
Rational Belief ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Rational Beliefs ◽  
Rational Agents ◽  
Epistemic Akrasia ◽  
First Response ◽  
The One

ABSTRACTShould conciliating with disagreeing peers be considered sufficient for reaching rational beliefs? Thomas Kelly argues that when taken this way, Conciliationism lets those who enter into a disagreement with an irrational belief reach a rational belief all too easily. Three kinds of responses defending Conciliationism are found in the literature. One response has it that conciliation is required only of agents who have a rational belief as they enter into a disagreement. This response yields a requirement that no one should follow. If the need to conciliate applies only to already rational agents, then an agent must conciliate only when her peer is the one irrational. A second response views conciliation as merely necessary for having a rational belief. This alone does little to address the central question of what is rational to believe when facing a disagreeing peer. Attempts to develop the response either reduce to the first response, or deem necessary an unnecessary doxastic revision, or imply that rational dilemmas obtain in cases where intuitively there are none. A third response tells us to weigh what our pre-disagreement evidence supports against the evidence from the disagreement itself. This invites epistemic akrasia.

scholarly journals The preface paradox dissolved

Theoria ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 53 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 121-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN N. WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Preface Paradox ◽  
The Preface Paradox
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