One's inaccuracy for a proposition is defined as the squared difference between the truth value (1 or 0) of the proposition and the credence (or subjective probability, or degree of belief) assigned to the proposition. One should have the epistemic goal of minimizing the expected inaccuracies of one's credences. We show that the method of minimizing expected inaccuracy can be used to solve certain probability problems involving information loss and self-locating beliefs (where a self-locating belief of a temporal (...) part of an individual is a belief about where or when that temporal part is located). We analyze the Sleeping Beauty problem, the duplication version of the Sleeping Beauty problem, and various related problems. (shrink)

The problem of joint measurement of incompatible observables is investigated. Measurements are represented by positive operator-valued measures. A quantitative notion of inaccuracy is defined. It is shown that within this framework joint inaccurate measurements are possible for arbitrary maximal projection-valued measures on finite-dimensional spaces. The accuracy of such measurements is limited, as is shown by an inaccuracy inequality we derive. This new type of uncertainty relation can be unambiguously interpreted as referring to measurement precision rather than preparative quality. (...) Several recent experiments are seen to be realizations of such joint measurements. (shrink)

This article proposes a new interpretation of mutual information. We examine three extant interpretations of MI by reduction in doubt, by reduction in uncertainty, and by divergence. We argue that the first two are inconsistent with the epistemic value of information assumed in many applications of MI: the greater is the amount of information we acquire, the better is our epistemic position, other things being equal. The third interpretation is consistent with EVI, but it is faced with the problem of (...) measure sensitivity and fails to justify the use of MI in giving definitive answers to questions of information. We propose a fourth interpretation of MI by reduction in expected inaccuracy, where inaccuracy is measured by a strictly proper monotonic scoring rule. It is shown that the answers to questions of information given by MI are definitive whenever this interpretation is appropriate, and that it is appropriate in a wide range of applications with epistemic implications. _1_ Introduction _2_ Formal Analyses of the Three Interpretations _2.1_ Reduction in doubt _2.2_ Reduction in uncertainty _2.3_ Divergence _3_ Inconsistency with Epistemic Value of Information _4_ Problem of Measure Sensitivity _5_ Reduction in Expected Inaccuracy _6_ Resolution of the Problem of Measure Sensitivity _6.1_ Alternative measures of inaccuracy _6.2_ Resolution by strict propriety _6.3_ Range of applications _7_ Global Scoring Rules _8_ Conclusion. (shrink)

Yablo has argued for an alternative form of if-thenism that is more conducive with his figurative fictionalism. This commentary sets out to challenge whether the remainder, ρ, tends to be an inaccurate representation of the conditions that are supposed to complete the enthymeme from φ to Ψ. Whilst by some accounts the inaccuracies shouldn't set off any alarm bells, the truth of ρ is too inexact. The content of ρ, a partial truth, must display a sensitivity to the contextual background (...) conditions for subtraction to work properly in Yablo's view. Using a toy example, I argue that Yablo's subtraction model tends to yield partial truths as remainders that fail to rule out inaccurate expressions that may prove to be problematic for it. (shrink)

After an initial period of popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, André Malraux’s works on the theory of art, "The Voices of Silence" and "The Metamorphosis of the Gods", lapsed into relative obscurity. A major factor in this fall from grace was the frosty reception given to these works by a number of leading art historians, including E.H. Gombrich, who accused Malraux of an irresponsible approach to art history and of "reckless inaccuracies". This essay examines a representative sample of the (...) art historians' arguments and contends that they reveal serious misreadings of Malraux’s texts and a recurring tendency to confuse matters of interpretation with matters of fact. The article suggests that the charge of irresponsibility might well be levelled at the critics themselves, and that the myth of Malraux as guilty of ‘reckless inaccuracies’ needs to be debunked. (shrink)

Pereboom (2011) is an extremely rich investigation of some of the central questions in contemporary philosophy of mind. In the foreground are the usual suspects from the current scene, but Kant and Russell loom in the background, and footnotes elaborate connections to people as apparently remote from the normal run of things as Dilthey and Derrida. With so much covered one is inevitably forced to focus on some things, setting aside others. Here I will concentrate on two ideas contained in (...) the first part of the book: Pereboom's ‘qualitative inaccuracy hypothesis’ and his criticisms of ‘the epistemic strategy’, a strategy I have defended in a number of places (e.g. Stoljar 2006, 2009). (shrink)

I ask whether and when historical inaccuracy in a work of art constitutes an aesthetic flaw. I first consider a few replies derived from others: conceptual impossibility, import-export inconsistency, failure of reference, and imaginative resistance. I argue that while there is a grain of truth to some of these proposals, none of them ultimately succeeds. I proceed to offer an alternative account on which the aesthetic demerits of historical inaccuracies stem from a violation of the conversational contract between author (...) and audience. The key question is what that contract implies. (shrink)

The accuracy principle is one of the key standards of informational privacy. It epitomises the obligation for those processing personal data to keep their records accurate and up-to-date, with the aim of protecting individuals from unfair decisions. Currently, however, different practices being put in place in order to enhance the protection of individuals appear to deliberately rely on the use of ‘inaccurate’ personal information. This article explores such practices and tries to assess their potential for privacy protection, giving particular attention (...) to their legal implications and to related ethical issues. Ultimately, it suggests that the use of ‘inaccurate’ data can potentially play a useful role to preserve the informational autonomy of the individual, and that any understandings of privacy or personal data protection that would tend to unduly limit such potential should be critically questioned. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new interpretation of mutual information (MI). We examine three extant interpretations of MI by reduction in doubt, by reduction in uncertainty, and by divergence. We argue that the first two are inconsistent with the epistemic value of information (EVI) assumed in many applications of MI: the greater is the amount of information we acquire, the better is our epistemic position, other things being equal. The third interpretation is consistent with EVI, but it is faced with the (...) problem of measure sensitivity and fails to justify the use of MI in giving definitive answers to questions of information. We propose a fourth interpretation of MI by reduction in expected inaccuracy, where inaccuracy is measured by a strictly proper monotonic scoring rule. It is shown that the answers to questions of information given by MI are definitive whenever this interpretation is appropriate, and that it is appropriate in a wide range of applications with epistemic implications. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it aims to show that within contemporary philosophy of perception, it has become far from clear what proponents of the Content View mean when they claim that experience has accuracy conditions and, therefore, accuracy evaluable content. Two very different interpretations can be discerned here, one which holds that content _has_ accuracy conditions and one which explicitly identifies content with such conditions. On the other hand, the paper wants to argue (...) that neither of these versions succeeds in showing why we should attribute either accuracy conditions or accuracy evaluable content to perceptual experience. To this end, I will present an elaborated argument (which focuses on the moon illusion) to show why we have as yet no reason to think that perceptual experience has accuracy conditions and, therefore, accuracy evaluable content. Instead, it will be argued that perceptual experience is best thought of as accuracy _maker_, not as something which can itself be representationally accurate or inaccurate. (shrink)

Proposed is a two-factor explanation for our resistance to illusionism about phenomenal consciousness. The first is that we lack, and can't easily imagine, ways of checking the accuracy of introspective phenomenal representation. The second is that illusions of phenomenal consciousness would themselves appear to be phenomenally conscious. The illusionist's defence is to apply illusionism to illusions of consciousness, but the result, even if formally coherent, resists imaginative conception.

One of the fundamental problems of epistemology is to say when the evidence in an agent’s possession justifies the beliefs she holds. In this paper and its prequel, we defend the Bayesian solution to this problem by appealing to the following fundamental norm: Accuracy An epistemic agent ought to minimize the inaccuracy of her partial beliefs. In the prequel, we made this norm mathematically precise; in this paper, we derive its consequences. We show that the two core tenets of (...) Bayesianism follow from the norm, while the characteristic claim of the Objectivist Bayesian follows from the norm along with an extra assumption. Finally, we consider Richard Jeffrey’s proposed generalization of conditionalization. We show not only that his rule cannot be derived from the norm, unless the requirement of Rigidity is imposed from the start, but further that the norm reveals it to be illegitimate. We end by deriving an alternative updating rule for those cases in which Jeffrey’s is usually supposed to apply. (shrink)

One of the fundamental problems of epistemology is to say when the evidence in an agent’s possession justifies the beliefs she holds. In this paper and its sequel, we defend the Bayesian solution to this problem by appealing to the following fundamental norm: Accuracy An epistemic agent ought to minimize the inaccuracy of her partial beliefs. In this paper, we make this norm mathematically precise in various ways. We describe three epistemic dilemmas that an agent might face if she (...) attempts to follow Accuracy, and we show that the only inaccuracy measures that do not give rise to such dilemmas are the quadratic inaccuracy measures. In the sequel, we derive the main tenets of Bayesianism from the relevant mathematical versions of Accuracy to which this characterization of the legitimate inaccuracy measures gives rise, but we also show that Jeffrey conditionalization has to be replaced by a different method of update in order for Accuracy to be satisfied. (shrink)

A challenge we face in a world that has been shaped by, and continues to be shaped by, racist attitudes and institutions is that the evidence is often stacked in favor of racist beliefs. As a result, we may find ourselves facing the following conflict: what if the evidence we have supports something we morally shouldn’t believe? For example, it is morally wrong to assume, solely on the basis of someone’s skin color, that they’re a staff member. But, what if (...) you’re in a context where, because of historical patterns of discrimination, someone’s skin color is a very good indicator that they’re a staff member? When this sort of normative conflict looms, a conflict between moral considerations on the one hand and what you epistemically ought to believe given the evidence on the other, what should we do? It might be unfair to assume that they’re a staff member, but to ignore the evidence would mean risking inaccurate beliefs. Some, notably Tamar Gendler (2011), have suggested that we simply face a tragic irresolvable dilemma. In this chapter, I consider how these cases of conflict arise and I canvass the viability of suggested resolutions of the conflict. In the end, I argue that there’s actually no conflict here. Moral considerations can change how we epistemically should respond to the evidence. (shrink)

We investigate two main sources of information inaccuracies in demand information sharing along the supply chain. Firstly, we perform a systematic literature review on inaccuracy in demand information sharing and its impact on supply chain dynamics. Secondly, we model several SC settings using system dynamics and assess the impact of such information inaccuracies on SC performance. More specifically, we study the impact of four factors using three SC dynamic performance indicators. The results suggest that demand error has a negative (...) impact on SC performance, which is exacerbated by the magnitude of the error and by low demand variability scenarios. In contrast, demand delay produces a nonlinear behavior in the supply chain response, being influenced by the supply chain configuration. (shrink)

Work by social constructionists over the past decade and a half has reenforced the epistemological pessimist's despair that our system of science could ever be a mirror of nature. Realists argue that the amazing success of modern science at precise prediction and control indicates just the contrary. In response, social constructionists often point out that these successes seldom apply to the world as it comes naturally, but only as it is reconstructed in the scientist's laboratory. But this does not explain (...) how scientific accounts, which are as wide of the mark as constructionists suppose in their general descriptions of the natural world, could be so effective in a limited environment, even if that environment is as benignly constructed as possible. This paper suggests that a more wholistic view of nature than modern science usually presupposes may provide an answer. (shrink)

Bayesians have traditionally taken a dim view of the Inference to the Best Explanation, arguing that, if IBE is at variance with Bayes ' rule, then it runs afoul of the dynamic Dutch book argument. More recently, Bayes ' rule has been claimed to be superior on grounds of conduciveness to our epistemic goal. The present paper aims to show that neither of these arguments succeeds in undermining IBE.

Levinstein recently presented a challenge to accuracy-first epistemology. He claims that there is no strictly proper, truth-directed, additive, and differentiable scoring rule that recognises the contingency of varying importance, i.e., the fact that an agent might value the inaccuracy of her credences differently at different possible worlds. In my response, I will argue that accuracy-first epistemology can capture the contingency of varying importance while maintaining its commitment to additivity, propriety, truth-directedness, and differentiability. I will construct a scoring rule — (...) a weighted scoring rule — and a global inaccuracy measure that has all four required properties and recognises the contingency of varying importance. I will show that Levinstein’s and my results coexist without contradicting each other. (shrink)

Pereboom and Caruso propose the quarantine model as an alternative to existing models of criminal justice. They appeal to the established public health practice of quarantining people, which is believed to be effective and morally justified, to explain why -in criminal justice- it is also morally acceptable to detain wrongdoers, without assuming the existence of a retrospective moral responsibility. Wrongdoers in their model are treated as carriers of dangerous diseases and as such should be preventively detained (or rehabilitated) until they (...) no longer pose a threat to society. Our main concern in this paper is that Pereboom and Caruso adopt an idiosyncratic meaning of quarantine regulations. We highlight a set of important disanalogies between their quarantine model and the quarantine regulations currently adopted in public health policies. More specifically, we argue that the similarities that Pereboom and Caruso propose to substantiate their analogy are not consistent—despite what they claim—with the regulations underlying quarantine as an epidemiological process. We also notice that certain quarantine procedures adopted in public health systems are inadequate to deal with criminal behaviors. On these grounds, we conclude that Pereboom and Caruso should not appeal to the quarantine analogy to substantiate their view, unless they address the issues and criticism we raise in this paper. (shrink)

This paper investigates the relationship between two evaluative claims about agents’ de- grees of belief: (i) that it is better to have more, rather than less accurate degrees of belief, and (ii) that it is better to have less, rather than more probabilistically incoherent degrees of belief. We show that, for suitable combinations of inaccuracy measures and incoherence measures, both claims are compatible, although not equivalent; moreover, certain ways of becoming less incoherent always guarantee improvements in accuracy. Incompatibilities between (...) particular incoherence and inaccuracy measures can be exploited to argue against particular ways of measuring either inaccuracy or incoherence. (shrink)

The goal of a partial belief is to be accurate, or close to the truth. By appealing to this norm, I seek norms for partial beliefs in self-locating and non-self-locating propositions. My aim is to find norms that are analogous to the Bayesian norms, which, I argue, only apply unproblematically to partial beliefs in non-self-locating propositions. I argue that the goal of a set of partial beliefs is to minimize the expected inaccuracy of those beliefs. However, in the self-locating (...) framework, there are two equally legitimate definitions of expected inaccuracy. And, while each gives rise to the same synchronic norm for partial beliefs, they give rise to different, inconsistent diachronic norms. I conclude that both norms are rationally permissible. En passant, I note that this entails that both Halfer and Thirder solutions to the well-known Sleeping Beauty puzzle are rationally permissible. (shrink)

Works of fiction are often criticized for their historical inaccuracies. But this practice poses a problem: why would we criticize a work of fiction for its historical inaccuracy given that it is a work of fiction? There is an intuition that historical inaccuracies in works of fiction diminish their value as works of fiction; and yet, given that they are works of fiction, there is also an intuition that such works should be free from the constraints of historical truth. (...) The puzzle of historical criticism is that these intuitions are obviously in conflict, and yet we wish to give up neither. In this essay, I address the shortcomings of two seemingly intuitive strategies for solving the puzzle: the puzzle cannot be solved by appealing to historical constraints of a work’s genre, nor can it be explained as an instance of imaginative resistance. Given the failure of these two strategies, I suggest that there is no easy way to account for our conflicting intuitions and that the puzzle is deserving of greater attention. (shrink)

This paper examined the integrity, impact and good governance value of election prophecies (EPs) in the last 20 years in selected African countries juxtaposed with President Donald Trump’s EPs in America. As a primary source, empirical research was conducted alongside a historical survey. The data collected from 519 respondents revealed that a majority believe in prophecies, but they queried the integrity, impact and value of EPs due to the inconsistency, inaccuracy, confusion and unhealthy public panics engendered. Despite the adverse (...) effects, many adherents still subscribe to the phenomenon due to the psychological and emotional influence. Subsequently, this article critiqued the research outcome through Biblical Theology. It held that EPs remain vital in the public life of nations, but the current approach in Africa needs some review. These include: (1) the need to revisit the tasks of prophets as Hope givers, Reformers and those who speak truth to power in pre- and post-election seasons; (2) the scrutiny of EPs by the plurality of Prophets, ecumenical leaders and the public, with the four suggested evaluation indices; and (3) the need to curb the negative effect of EPs on healthy electoral processes using enacted public account policies. Contribution: This article contributes to an interdisciplinary religious aspect of research covering Biblical theology, psephology and politics. (shrink)

How does thinking affect doing? There is a widely held view that thinking about what you are doing, as you are doing it, hinders performance. Once you have acquired the ability to putt a golf ball, play an arpeggio on the piano, or parallel-park, reflecting on your actions leads to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis--that's what is widely believed. But is it true? After exploring some of the contemporary and historical manifestations of the idea, Barbara Gail Montero develops (...) a theory of expertise which emphasizes the role of the conscious mind in expert action. She aims to dispel various myths about experts who proceed without any understanding of what guides their action, and she analyzes research in both philosophy and psychology that is taken to show that conscious control and explicit monitoring of one's movements impedes well practiced skills. Montero explores a wide range of real-life examples of optimal performance, in sports, the performing arts, healthcare, the military, and other fields, and draws from psychology, neuroscience, and literature to offer a refreshing and persuasive view of expertise, according to which expert action generally is and ought to be thoughtful, effortful, and reflective. (shrink)

Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. We (...) distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bullshitters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems. (shrink)

After correcting some inaccuracies in the exposition of James’s ethics by Talisse and Aikin, an attempt will be made to find responses to their three objections to his ethics.

Accuracy arguments for the core tenets of Bayesian epistemology differ mainly in the conditions they place on the legitimate ways of measuring the inaccuracy of our credences. The best existing arguments rely on three conditions: Continuity, Additivity, and Strict Propriety. In this paper, I show how to strengthen the arguments based on these conditions by showing that the central mathematical theorem on which each depends goes through without assuming Additivity.

Jim Joyce argues for two amendments to probabilism. The first is the doctrine that credences are rational, or not, in virtue of their accuracy or “closeness to the truth” (1998). The second is a shift from a numerically precise model of belief to an imprecise model represented by a set of probability functions (2010). We argue that both amendments cannot be satisfied simultaneously. To do so, we employ a (slightly-generalized) impossibility theorem of Seidenfeld, Schervish, and Kadane (2012), who show that (...) there is no strictly proper scoring rule for imprecise probabilities. -/- The question then is what should give way. Joyce, who is well aware of this no-go result, thinks that a quantifiability constraint on epistemic accuracy should be relaxed to accommodate imprecision. We argue instead that another Joycean assumption — called strict immodesty— should be rejected, and we prove a representation theorem that characterizes all “mildly” immodest measures of inaccuracy. (shrink)

For the first time in print, this article reports passages from John Rawls’s graduate papers and annotations on books and manuscripts from his personal library. The analysis of this material shows the historical inaccuracy of the widespread assumption that Rawls’s philosophy owes very little to American pragmatism. Peirce’s notion of truth, as well as the holistic critique of pragmatism thatMortonWhite began in the late 1940s, prove significant at the very beginning of Rawls’s philosophical enterprise. In the light of this (...) material, it might be argued that Rawls’s elaboration of ‘reflective equilibrium’ started at least in part as an attempt to overcome the pending problems of pragmatism. (shrink)

It is widely thought that focusing on highly skilled movements while performing them hinders their execution. Once you have developed the ability to tee off in golf, play an arpeggio on the piano, or perform a pirouette in ballet, attention to what your body is doing is thought to lead to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis. Here I re-examine this view and argue that it lacks support when taken as a general thesis. Although bodily awareness may often interfere (...) with well-developed rote skills, like climbing stairs, I suggest that it is typically not detrimental to the skills of expert athletes, performing artists, and other individuals who endeavor to achieve excellence. Along the way, I present a critical analysis of some philosophical theories and behavioral studies on the relationship between attention and bodily movement, an explanation of why attention may be beneficial at the highest level of performance and an error theory that explains why many have thought the contrary. Though tentative, I present my view as a challenge to the widespread starting assumption in research on highly skilled movement that at the pinnacle of skill attention to one's movement is detrimental. (shrink)

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is usually taken to express a limitation of operational possibilities imposed by quantum mechanics. Here we demonstrate that the full content of this principle also includes its positive role as a condition ensuring that mutually exclusive experimental options can be reconciled if an appropriate trade-off is accepted. The uncertainty principle is shown to appear in three manifestations, in the form of uncertainty relations: for the widths of the position and momentum distributions in any quantum state; for the (...) inaccuracies of any joint measurement of these quantities; and for the inaccuracy of a measurement of one of the quantities and the ensuing disturbance in the distribution of the other quantity. Whilst conceptually distinct, these three kinds of uncertainty relations are shown to be closely related formally. Finally, we survey models and experimental implementations of joint measurements of position and momentum and comment briefly on the status of experimental tests of the uncertainty principle. (shrink)

The present article is the first of a trilogy of papers, devoted to analysing the influence of semantic Platonism on contemporary philosophy of language. In the present article, I lay out the discussion by contrasting semantic Platonism with two other views of linguistic meaning: the socio-environmental conception of meaning and semantic anti-representationalism. Then, I identify six points in which the impregnation of semantic theory with Platonism can be particularly felt, resulting in shortcomings and inaccuracies of various kinds. These points are (...) the following: the limitations of regarding logico-philosophical analysis as the only working methodology; the tendency to avoid investigating a number of aspects of linguistic meaning; the recurring confusion between sentences, statements, and propositions; the weakness of transcendent assumptions about meaning; the weakness of meaning assumptions adopted on the basis of pure intuition; and inconsistencies caused by some over-eager attempts to escape semantic Platonism. (shrink)

There is some consensus on the claim that imagination as suppositional thinking can have epistemic value insofar as it’s constrained by a principle of minimal alteration of how we know or believe reality to be – compatibly with the need to accommodate the supposition initiating the imaginative exercise. But in the philosophy of imagination there is no formally precise account of how exactly such minimal alteration is to work. I propose one. I focus on counterfactual imagination, arguing that this can (...) be modeled as simulated belief revision governed by Laplacian imaging. So understood, it can be rationally justified by accuracy considerations: it minimizes expected belief inaccuracy, as measured by the Brier score. (shrink)

We use a theorem from M. J. Schervish to explore the relationship between accuracy and practical success. If an agent is pragmatically rational, she will quantify the expected loss of her credence with a strictly proper scoring rule. Which scoring rule is right for her will depend on the sorts of decisions she expects to face. We relate this pragmatic conception of inaccuracy to the purely epistemic one popular among epistemic utility theorists.

This article argues that non-ideal theory fails to deliver on its promise of providing a more accurate account of the real world by which philosophers can address problems of racism, sexual violence, and poverty. Because non-ideal theory relies on abstractions of groups which are idealized as causes for social phenomena, non-idealists imagine that categories like race or gender predict how groups behave in the real world. This article maintains that non-idealist abstractions often result in inaccuracy and makes the case (...) that empirically informed theories and group-based analyses are needed to correct the course of race-gender theory. (shrink)

Recent literature features an increased interest in the sufficiency claim involved in the knowledge norm of assertion. This paper looks at two prominent objections to KNA-Suff, due to Jessica Brown and Jennifer Lackey, and argues that they miss their target due to value-theoretic inaccuracies. It is argued that the intuitive need for more than knowledge in Brown’s high-stakes contexts does not come from the epistemic norm governing assertion, but from further norms stepping in and raising the bar, and Lackey’s purported (...) quality-driven case against KNA-Suff boils down to a quantitative objection. If that is the case, Lackey’s argument will be vulnerable to the same objections as Brown’s. (shrink)

Shuford, Albert and Massengill proved, a half century ago, that the logarithmic scoring rule is the only proper measure of inaccuracy determined by a differentiable function of probability assigned the actual cell of a scored partition. In spite of this, the log rule has gained less traction in applied disciplines and among formal epistemologists that one might expect. In this paper we show that the differentiability criterion in the Shuford et. al. result is unnecessary and use the resulting simplified (...) characterization of the logarithmic rule to give novel arguments in favor of it. (shrink)

It's standard in epistemology to approach questions about knowledge and rational belief using idealized, simplified models. But while the practice of constructing idealized models in epistemology is old, metaepistemological reflection on that practice is not. Greco argues that the fact that epistemologists build idealized models isn't merely a metaepistemological observation that can leave first-order epistemological debates untouched. Rather, once we view epistemology through the lens of idealization and model-building, the landscape looks quite different. Constructing idealized models is likely the best (...) epistemologists can do. Once one starts using epistemological categories like belief, knowledge, and confidence, the realm of idealization and model-building is entered. We can object to a model of knowledge by pointing to a better model, but in the absence of a better model, the fact that a framework for epistemologizing theorizing involves simplifications, approximations, and other inaccuracies-the fact of its status as an idealized model-is not in itself objectionable. Once we accept that theorizing in epistemological terms is inescapably idealized, a number of intriguing possibilities open up. Greco defends a package of epistemological views that might otherwise have looked indefensibly dismissive of our cognitive limitations-a package according to which we know a wide variety of facts with certainty, including what our evidence is, what we know and don't know, and what follows from our knowledge. (shrink)

Anticipating the fifth centennial of Vives’ birth in 1992, this is the first comprehensive study of two of Vives’ main works, De Anima et Vita, Book 3 and De Prima Philosophia, accompanied by the first general biography based on recent research. Juan Luis Vives was a Spanish sixteenth-century humanist who spent most of his life as an exile in England and the Low Countries. De Anima et Vita, the third book of which makes up the tract on emotions, represents the (...) culmination of Vives’ effort to understand human nature. Noreña has organized Vives and the Emotions into three parts. Part one incorporates recent research on Vives and corrects some of the inaccuracies of Noreña’s 1970 Luis Vives. He provides expanded accounts of Vives’ attitude toward Erasmus and religion, his reaction to terminist logic, his social and legal views, and his contributions to Renaissance pedagogy. The second part of the book examines in detail one of Vives’ most philosophical and forgotten tracts, a lengthy summary of his metaphysical views published in 1531 under the title De Prima Philosophia seu de Intimo Naturae Opificio, which is probably the most speculative of Vives’ works. Part three compares Vives’ thoughts on emotion to those of Aristotle, some ancient Stoic sources, Saint Thomas, Descartes, and Spinoza, while dividing the entire material under such headings as the nature, the classification, the interaction, and the therapeutic control of emotion. (shrink)

Leitgeb and Pettigrew argue that (1) agents should minimize the expected inaccuracy of their beliefs and (2) inaccuracy should be measured via the Brier score. They show that in certain diachronic cases, these claims require an alternative to Jeffrey Conditionalization. I claim that this alternative is an irrational updating procedure and that the Brier score, and quadratic scoring rules generally, should be rejected as legitimate measures of inaccuracy.