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

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 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

Paradoxes, epistemic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan L. Kvanvig
Keyword(s):  
Lottery Paradox ◽  
Preface Paradox ◽  
Similar Reasoning ◽  
Knowability Paradox ◽  
Thursday Evening ◽  
Epistemic Paradoxes ◽  
The Preface Paradox ◽  
The Lottery Paradox

The four primary epistemic paradoxes are the lottery, preface, knowability, and surprise examination paradoxes. The lottery paradox begins by imagining a fair lottery with a thousand tickets in it. Each ticket is so unlikely to win that we are justified in believing that it will lose. So we can infer that no ticket will win. Yet we know that some ticket will win. In the preface paradox, authors are justified in believing everything in their books. Some preface their book by claiming that, given human frailty, they are sure that errors remain. But then they justifiably believe both that everything in the book is true, and that something in it is false. The knowability paradox results from accepting that some truths are not known, and that any truth is knowable. Since the first claim is a truth, it must be knowable. From these claims it follows that it is possible that there is some particular truth that is known to be true and known not to be true. The final paradox concerns an announcement of a surprise test next week. A Friday test, since it can be predicted on Thursday evening, will not be a surprise yet, if the test cannot be on Friday, it cannot be on Thursday either. For if it has not been given by Wednesday night, and it cannot be a surprise on Friday, it will not be a surprise on Thursday. Similar reasoning rules out all other days of the week as well; hence, no surprise test can occur next week. On Wednesday, the teacher gives a test, and the students are taken completely by surprise.

Prefaces, Sorites and Guides to Reasoning

2021 ◽  
pp. 212-226
Author(s):  
Rosanna Keefe
Keyword(s):  
Sorites Paradox ◽  
Degrees Of Belief ◽  
Preface Paradox ◽  
Probabilistic Structure ◽  
Vague Language ◽  
The Preface Paradox

Is there an interesting relation between the Preface paradox and the Sorites paradox that might be used to illuminate either or both of those paradoxes and the phenomena of rationality and vagueness with which they, respectively, are bound up? In particular, if we consider the analogy alongside a familiar response to the Preface Paradox that employs degrees of belief, does this give any support to the thought that we should adopt some kind of degree-theoretic treatment of vagueness and the sorites? This chapter argues that it does not; indeed exploring the disanalogies contributes to a case against such a treatment of vagueness more generally. Among other views, it considers Edgington’s account of vagueness that employs a probabilistic structure of ‘verities’. It then contends that appeal to the framework of supervaluationism yields a better guide to reasoning in vague language than the degree-theoretic treatment can sustain.

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.

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