This entry introduces the Lockean Thesis and sketches the ways in which the lottery paradox, the preface paradox, and the problem of merely statistical evidence can be used to put pressure on the Lockean Thesis.

In a penetrating investigation of the relationship between belief and quantitative degrees of confidence (or degrees of belief) Richard Foley (1992) suggests the following thesis: ... it is epistemically rational for us to believe a proposition just in case it is epistemically rational for us to have a sufficiently high degree of confidence in it, sufficiently high to make our attitude towards it one of belief. Foley goes on to suggest that rational belief may be just rational degree of (...) confidence above some threshold level that the agent deems sufficient for belief. He finds hints of this view in Locke’s discussion of probability and degrees of assent, so he calls it the Lockean Thesis.1 The Lockean Thesis has important implications for the logic of belief. Most prominently, it implies that even a logically ideal agent whose degrees of confidence satisfy the axioms of probability theory may quite rationally believe each of a large body of propositions that are jointly inconsistent. For example, an agent may legitimately believe that on each given occasion her well-maintained car will start, but nevertheless believe that she will eventually encounter a.. (shrink)

This paper studies the Lockean thesis from the perspective of contemporary epistemic logic. The Lockean thesis states that belief can be defined as ‘sufficiently high degree of belief’. Its main problem is that it gives rise to a notion of belief which is not closed under conjunction. This problem is typical for classical epistemic logic: it is single-agent and static. I argue that from the perspective of contemporary epistemic logic, the Lockean thesis fares much (...) better. I briefly mention that it can successfully be extended from single-agent to multi-agent settings. More importantly, I show that accepting the Lockean thesis (and a more sophisticated version for conditional beliefs) leads to a significant and unexpected unification in the dynamic behavior of (conditional) belief and high (conditional) probability with respect to public announcements. This constitutes a methodological argument in favor of the Lockean thesis. Furthermore, if one accepts Baltag’s Erlangen program for epistemology, this technical observation has even stronger philosophical implications: because belief and high probability display the same dynamic behavior, it is plausible that they are indeed one and the same epistemic notion. (shrink)

What propositions are rational for one to believe? With what confidence is it rational for one to believe these propositions? Answering the first of these questions requires an epistemology of beliefs, answering the second an epistemology of degrees of belief.

Certain philosophers maintain that there is a ‘constitutive threshold for belief’: to believe that p just is to have a degree of confidence that p above a certain threshold. On the basis of this view, these philosophers defend what is known as ‘the Lockean Thesis ’, according to which it is rational to believe that p just in case it is rational to have a degree of confidence that p above the constitutive threshold for belief. While not directly (...) speaking to the controversy over the Lockean Thesis, this paper defends the general idea behind it—namely, the thesis that there is some threshold such that it is rational to believe that p if and only if it is rational to have a degree of confidence great than that threshold. This paper identifies the threshold in question—not with the alleged constitutive threshold for belief—but with what I call ‘the practical threshold for rational belief’. Roughly, the thesis defended here is that it is rational to believe that p if and only if it is rational to have a degree of confidence that p that rationalizes engaging in certain types of practical reasoning. (shrink)

The Lockean Thesis says that you must believe p iff you’re sufficiently confident of it. On some versions, the 'must' asserts a metaphysical connection; on others, it asserts a normative one. On some versions, 'sufficiently confident' refers to a fixed threshold of credence; on others, it varies with proposition and context. Claim: the Lockean Thesis follows from epistemic utility theory—the view that rational requirements are constrained by the norm to promote accuracy. Different versions of this theory (...) generate different versions of Lockeanism; moreover, a plausible version of epistemic utility theory meshes with natural language considerations, yielding a new Lockean picture that helps to model and explain the role of beliefs in inquiry and conversation. Your beliefs are your best guesses in response to the epistemic priorities of your context. Upshot: we have a new approach to the epistemology and semantics of belief. And it has teeth. It implies that the role of beliefs is fundamentally different than many have thought, and in fact supports a metaphysical reduction of belief to credence. (shrink)

This paper suggests a bridge principle for all-or-nothing belief and degrees of belief to the effect that belief corresponds to stably high degree of belief. Different ways of making this Humean thesis on belief precise are discussed, and one of them is shown to stand out by unifying the others. The resulting version of the thesis proves to be fruitful in entailing the logical closure of belief, the Lockean thesis on belief, and coherence between decision-making based (...) on all-or-nothing beliefs and on degrees of belief. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How Old Are Modern Rights? On the Lockean Roots of Contemporary Human Rights DiscourseS. Adam SeagraveArguing for the proper placement of John Locke’s natural rights theory within intellectual history is a particularly high-stakes enterprise for historians of political thought and political theorists alike. This is due in large part to the fact that, as Brian Tierney notes in his recent study, it is “widely agreed that Locke’s work (...) was an important influence in the formation of modern liberal ideas, including ideas concerning rights.”1 Our understanding of Locke thus contributes to our reflective self-understanding as “modern liberals” (of one stripe or another) to an extent perhaps unequaled by any other thinker so far removed from our own time.As a result of the rare promise of studying Locke’s natural rights theory, there has been no shortage of scholarly attempts to determine its place in intellectual history on the basis of Locke’s own writings and their relation both to preceding and subsequent traditions and modes of thought. Although John Dunn had argued in his influential study that Locke’s political thought was too thoroughly steeped in theology to remain relevant in the contemporary context, this thesis has since been persuasively challenged (albeit in very different ways) by Simmons, Zuckert and Waldron, among others.2 Each of these scholars has contributed to an emerging agreement [End Page 305] that the thread of Locke’s natural rights theory may indeed be carried all the way up to current political and moral debates in some form or another. The precise length of this thread as it extends in the other historical direction has, however, remained a point of heated controversy. The scholarly literature on this issue may be broadly described in terms of a spectrum determined by two opposing emphases in understanding the relation of Locke’s natural rights theory to its medieval predecessors: a continuity emphasis and a discontinuity emphasis.On the discontinuity end of the spectrum stand those such as Michel Villey, Leo Strauss, C. B. Macpherson and, more recently, Michael Zuckert who argue for the existence of some sort of “Copernican moment” separating medieval natural rights theories from their modern counterparts.3 Whether this moment is identified with William of Ockham in the fourteenth century or Hobbes in the seventeenth century, these scholars tend to emphasize the distinctively “modern” character of Lockean natural rights theory and its significant departures from medieval modes of thought. According to many of the advocates of discontinuity, Lockean natural rights are not only “modern” in their political applications but also in their more profound meaning as foundations for morality, and particularly in their newly conceived relation to the concept of natural law.4The continuity end of the spectrum is, perhaps, more variegated, including scholars such as Tuck, Tierney, Tully, Oakley, Nederman, Coleman, and Swanson, among others.5 Despite their many important differences, [End Page 306] these scholars each focus upon the similarities between various elements or strains of medieval thought and modern natural rights theories rather than the differences between them. Insofar as the scholars on this end of the spectrum explicitly consider Locke’s natural rights theory, they tend to emphasize Locke’s intellectual debt to various preceding traditions and thinkers rather than his innovations upon them. Building explicitly upon the work of Tuck, Tierney and Tully, Janet Coleman finds “some extraordinarily Lockean moments” in the medieval thinkers John of Paris and Godefroid of Fontaines, and argues that Locke ought to be understood as contributing to this medieval tradition of thought rather than departing from it.6 Scott Swanson, in turn, builds upon Coleman’s scholarship in carefully connecting medieval understandings of the rights of subsistence and the principle of extreme necessity to Locke’s natural rights theory. Swanson initially goes even further than Coleman in asserting that “all of Locke’s celebrated doctrine is here [in John of Paris’s writings] offered in a nutshell” before concluding on the more moderate note, echoed by Cary Nederman, that Locke’s “application of natural rights of subsistence to politics” may indeed have been something “new under the sun.”7Brian Tierney, who has long been a prominent... (shrink)

This dissertation examines Locke's influence on moralists of the eighteenth century. I will show how Locke's moral theory and the problems it raises set the tenor of moral discussion for subsequent theorists. My analysis does not rely upon proving explicit and direct influences of Locke on the theorists I examine. Rather, I want to show that Locke's influence was more general and systemic than would be revealed through the search for explicit debts and appropriations. Locke's attempt to produce a moral (...) epistemology took for granted the assumptions of a traditional realist and rationalist natural law theory. In Locke we find an early and quite unique attempt to work out an epistemology of natural law that assumes neither innatism nor Hobbism. Locke endeavoured to find an account of natural law consistent with his own anti-innatist empiricism that might still support a realist conception of moral law. With this aim, he established the terms of moral theorizing for subsequent eighteenth century thinkers. As I will show, Locke's moral epistemology fails to fully cohere the presuppositions of his own realism and his commitment to natural law. In subsequent thinkers, we see attempts to solve this problem while maintaining Locke's basic moral assumptions. I look specifically at the works of Samuel Clarke, Francis Hutcheson, and Catharine Trotter Cockburn. What unites these theorists are the broad goals of establishing morality upon necessary and universal laws and of developing moral epistemologies that avoid both moral innatism and Hobbesian constructivism. More specifically, each is working to establish an epistemology that makes moral laws intuitively certain while maintaining a metaphysics of morality that relates moral law to the general teleological order of the universe. Despite the specific differences in their views, they can all seen to be working within a broadly Lockean frame of reference. (shrink)

On the Lockean thesis one ought to believe a proposition if and only if one assigns it a credence at or above a threshold (Foley in Am Philos Q 29(2):111–124, 1992). The Lockean thesis, thus, provides a way of characterizing sets of all-or-nothing beliefs. Here we give two independent characterizations of the sets of beliefs satisfying the Lockean thesis. One is in terms of betting dispositions associated with full beliefs and one is in terms (...) of an accuracy scoring system for full beliefs. These characterizations are parallel to, but not merely derivative from, the more familiar Dutch Book (de Finetti in Theory of probability, vol 1, Wiley, London, 1974) and accuracy (Joyce in Philos Sci 65(4):575–603, 1998) arguments for probabilism. (shrink)

I consider whether there is a plausible conception of personal identity that can accommodate the ‘Multiplicity Thesis’ (MT), the thesis that some ways of creating and deploying multiple distinct online personae can bring about the existence of multiple persons where before there was only one. I argue that an influential Kantian line of thought, according to which a person is a unified locus of rational agency, is well placed to accommodate the thesis. I set out such a (...) line of thought as developed by Carol Rovane, and consider the conditions that would have to be in place for the possibility identified by MT to be realised. Finally I briefly consider the prospects for MT according to neo-Lockean and animalist views of personhood. (shrink)

Criticisms of John Locke as a ‘bourgeois’ or ‘possessive individualist’ have been hotly contested since their appearance in the 1950s and 1960s. Locke's defenders have countered that his economic thought was governed by doctrines of charity, community and the public good. This project of recovering a kinder, gentler Locke has brought with it an emphasis on the centrality of Grotius and Pufendorf to seventeenth-century discussions of natural law. Still, the emergence of the ‘Grotius-Pufendorf thesis’ may have eclipsed other sources (...) of Locke's political economy. I will suggest that Locke's writings on trade and economic accumulation are better understood in light of a seventeenth-century economic discourse of pamphlets, tracts and sermons rooted in the practical theology of Calvinism. (shrink)

Toleration is one possible response to diversity, and it is a defining feature of contemporary liberal democracies. Still, why we should tolerate and what we should tolerate are persistent political questions. This dissertation explores the reasons why citizens should sometimes refrain from embodying in law moral beliefs that they hold to be true. It claims that a neglected aspect of John Locke's writings on religious toleration, the formal relationship between moral principles and law, can instruct political deliberation. Since this portion (...) of Locke's thought is deeply influenced by Christian natural law, the approach is analogical. Locke confronted some political problems analogous to our own and there are alternative secular justifications available for the intermediate principles he employed. These intermediate principles can provide meaningful guidance in contemporary disputes about law and morality. ;Chapter Two explores Locke's most important insight into the formal relationship between law and morality, concerns about the use of "non-neutral principles" in political argument. A non-neutral principle is one that contains the very term under dispute between two contending parties. Neglected arguments in Locke's Third Letter Concerning Toleration provide formal tests for differentiating between non-neutral principles that do and do not justify coercive law. The Lockean criteria assume a "juridical equality" between persons such that at the persons who disagree are moral equals under a common set of public, general, and reasonable rules that determine when they may and may not use force. ;This Lockean insight has broad implications both for political theory and Locke scholarship. Chapter Three explores the relationship between natural law, consent, and the public good and argues that Lockean criteria can help modern readers choose between competing conceptions of the public good. Chapter Four explores the tensions between the Lockean formal criteria and Locke's specific views about which groups the government should tolerate. Chapter Five shows how a Lockean theory can account for institutional reasons for toleration, instances where a person refrains from putting a stop to an action for lack of jurisdiction. Chapter Six shows how both substantive and institutional forms of toleration should guide interpreters of the United States Constitution. (shrink)

A Lockean metaphysics of belief that understands outright belief as a determinable with degrees of confidence as determinates is supposed to effect a unification of traditional coarse-grained epistemology of belief with fine-grained epistemology of confidence. But determination of belief by confidence would not by itself yield the result that norms for confidence carry over to norms for outright belief unless belief and high confidence are token identical. We argue that this token-identity thesis is incompatible with the neglected phenomenon (...) of “mistuned knowledge” – knowledge in the absence of rational confidence. We show how partial epistemological unification can be secured, even without token identity, given determination of outright belief by degrees of confidence. Finally, we suggest a direction for the pursuit of thoroughgoing epistemological unification. (shrink)

[This is a paper that was originally written in 2017 and doesn't represent Silva's current thinking about degrees of confidence, conviction, and rationality.] Can there be knowledge and rational belief in the absence of a rational degree of confidence? Yes, and cases of "mistuned knowledge" demonstrate this. In this paper we leverage this normative possibility in support of advancing our understanding of the metaphysical relation between belief and credence. It is generally assumed that a Lockean metaphysics of belief that (...) reduces outright belief to degrees of confidence would immediately effect a unification of coarse-grained epistemology of belief with fine-grained epistemology of confidence. Scott Sturgeon has suggested that the unification is effected by understanding the relation between outright belief and confidence as an instance of the determinable-determinate relation. But determination of belief by confidence would not by itself yield the result that norms for confidence carry over to norms for outright belief unless belief and high confidence are token identical. We argue that this token-identity thesis is incompatible with the neglected phenomenon of “mistuned knowledge”—knowledge and rational belief in the absence of rational confidence. We contend that there are genuine cases of mistuned knowledge and that, therefore, epistemological unification must forego token identity of belief and high confidence. We show how partial epistemological unification can be secured given determination of outright belief by degrees of confidence even without token-identity. Finally, we suggest a direction for the pursuit of thoroughgoing epistemological unification. (shrink)

This essay develops a joint theory of rational (all-or-nothing) belief and degrees of belief. The theory is based on three assumptions: the logical closure of rational belief; the axioms of probability for rational degrees of belief; and the so-called Lockean thesis, in which the concepts of rational belief and rational degree of belief figure simultaneously. In spite of what is commonly believed, this essay will show that this combination of principles is satisfiable (and indeed nontrivially so) and that (...) the principles are jointly satisfied if and only if rational belief is equivalent to the assignment of a stably high rational degree of belief. Although the logical closure of belief and the Lockean thesis are attractive postulates in themselves, initially this may seem like a formal “curiosity”; however, as will be argued in the rest of the essay, a very reasonable theory of rational belief can be built around these principles that is not ad hoc and that has various philosophical features that are plausible independently. In particular, this essay shows that the theory allows for a solution to the Lottery Paradox, and it has nice applications to formal epistemology. The price that is to be paid for this theory is a strong dependency of belief on the context, where a context involves both the agent's degree of belief function and the partitioning or individuation of the underlying possibilities. But as this essay argues, that price seems to be affordable. (shrink)

This paper defends the thesis that privacy as a right is derived from fundamental rights to life, liberty, and property and does not permit restricting the commodification of bodily material; however, privacy as life, liberty, property does require conventions that ensure a robust and just market in bodily material. The analysis proceeds by defending a general commitment to liberty and markets, but not in the manner one might expect from a ‘doctrinaire’ libertarian. Ethical concerns about commodification are legitimate in (...) the context of new medical and information technologies, but these concerns are not sufficiently well defined to justify political conclusions, since not every ethical concern is in itself a political concern, and the best way to resolve certain ethical difficulties is to draw up political boundaries that facilitate the discovery and testing of various solutions to our ethical puzzles. To illustrate the point, I will indicate how privacy as life, liberty, property defines such a dynamic solution to the problems of commodification of human bodily material and slippery information in insurance markets. (shrink)

What attitude should philosophers take toward their favorite philosophical theories? I argue that the answer is belief and middling to low credence. I begin by discussing why disagreement has motivated the view that we cannot rationally believe our philosophical theories. Then, I show why considerations from disagreement actually better support my view. I provide two additional arguments for my view: the first concerns roles for belief and credence and the second explains why believing one’s philosophical theories is superior to accepting (...) them. I close by addressing objections, including implications my view has for the Lockean thesis, the view that there is a normative connection between belief and high credence. (shrink)

Part I of this essay supports the anti-egalitarian conclusion that individuals may readily become entitled to substantially unequal extra-personal holdings by criticizing end-state and pattern theories of distributive justice and defending the historical entitlement doctrine of justice in holdings. Part II of this essay focuses on a second route to the anti-egalitarian conclusion. This route combines the self-ownership thesis with a contention that is especially advanced by G.A. Cohen. This is the contention that the anti-egalitarian conclusion can be inferred (...) from the self-ownership thesis without the aid of additional controversial premises. Cohen advances this contention, not because he wants to support the anti-egalitarian conclusion, but rather because he wants to emphasize the need for one to reject the self-ownership thesis if one is to reject the anti-egalitarian conclusion. In Part II of this essay, I support this second route to the anti-egalitarian conclusion by reinforcing Cohen's special contention while rejecting his challenges to the self-ownership thesis. Cohen's special contention is reinforced by way of an explanation of why the redistributive state must trench upon some people's self-ownership rights. One important challenge to the self-ownership thesis is answered through the articulation of a new and improved Lockean proviso. Another challenge offered by Cohen is answered by arguing that the philosophical costs of denying the self-ownership thesis are as great as the self-ownership libertarian maintains. Thus, I defend both of the key elements of self-ownership libertarianism, the self-ownership thesis and the anti-egalitarian conclusion. Key Words: autonomy • distributive justice • egalitarianism • exploitation • Lockean proviso • self-ownership • slavery. (shrink)

Part I of this essay supports the anti-egalitarian conclusion that individuals may readily become entitled to substantially unequal extra-personal holdings by criticizing end-state and pattern theories of distributive justice and defending the historical entitlement doctrine of justice in holdings. Part II of this essay focuses on a second route to the anti-egalitarian conclusion. This route combines the self-ownership thesis with a contention that is especially advanced by G.A. Cohen. This is the contention that the anti-egalitarian conclusion can be inferred (...) from the self-ownership thesis without the aid of additional controversial premises. Cohen advances this contention, not because he wants to support the anti-egalitarian conclusion, but rather because he wants to emphasize the need for one to reject the self-ownership thesis if one is to reject the anti-egalitarian conclusion. In Part II of this essay, I support this second route to the anti-egalitarian conclusion by reinforcing Cohen's special contention while rejecting his challenges to the self-ownership thesis. Cohen's special contention is reinforced by way of an explanation of why the redistributive state must trench upon some people's self-ownership rights. One important challenge to the self-ownership thesis is answered through the articulation of a new and improved Lockean proviso. Another challenge offered by Cohen is answered by arguing that the philosophical costs of denying the self-ownership thesis are as great as the self-ownership libertarian maintains. Thus, I defend both of the key elements of self-ownership libertarianism, the self-ownership thesis and the anti-egalitarian conclusion. (shrink)

Vann McGee has presented a putative counterexample to modus ponens. I show that (a slightly modified version of) McGee’s election scenario has the same structure as a famous lottery scenario by Kyburg. More specifically, McGee’s election story can be taken to show that, if the Lockean Thesis holds, rational belief is not closed under classical logic, including classical-logic modus ponens. This conclusion defies the existing accounts of McGee’s puzzle.

John Locke proposed a straightforward relationship between qualitative and quantitative doxastic notions: belief corresponds to a sufficiently high degree of confidence. Richard Foley has further developed this Lockean thesis and applied it to an analysis of the preface and lottery paradoxes. Following Foley's lead, we exploit various versions of these paradoxes to chart a precise relationship between belief and probabilistic degrees of confidence. The resolutions of these paradoxes emphasize distinct but complementary features of coherent belief. These features suggest (...) principles that tie together qualitative and quantitative doxastic notions. We show how these principles may be employed to construct a quantitative model - in terms of degrees of confidence - of an agent's qualitative doxastic state. This analysis fleshes out the Lockean thesis and provides the foundation for a logic of belief that is responsive to the logic of degrees of confidence. (shrink)

John Locke proposed a straightforward relationship between qualitative and quantitative doxastic notions: belief corresponds to a sufficiently high degree of confidence. Richard Foley has further developed this Lockean thesis and applied it to an analysis of the preface and lottery paradoxes. Following Foley's lead, we exploit various versions of these paradoxes to chart a precise relationship between belief and probabilistic degrees of confidence. The resolutions of these paradoxes emphasize distinct but complementary features of coherent belief. These features suggest (...) principles that tie together qualitative and quantitative doxastic notions. We show how these principles may be employed to construct a quantitative model - in terms of degrees of confidence - of an agent's qualitative doxastic state. This analysis fleshes out the Lockean thesis and provides the foundation for a logic of belief that is responsive to the logic of degrees of confidence. (shrink)

This paper generalizes the (epistemic) preface paradox beyond the principle of belief aggregation and constructs a similar paradox for deontic reasoning. The analysis of the deontic case yields a solution strategy---restricting belief/obligation aggregation rather than giving it up altogether---that can be transferred to the epistemic case. Our proposal amounts to a reasonable compromise between two goals: (i) sticking to bridge principles between evidence and belief, such as the Lockean Thesis, and (ii) obtaining a sufficiently strong logic of doxastic (...) and deontic reasoning. (shrink)

The article proceeds upon the assumption that the beliefs and degrees of belief of rational agents satisfy a number of constraints, including: consistency and deductive closure for belief sets, conformity to the axioms of probability for degrees of belief, and the Lockean Thesis concerning the relationship between belief and degree of belief. Assuming that the beliefs and degrees of belief of both individuals and collectives satisfy the preceding three constraints, I discuss what further constraints may be imposed on (...) the aggregation of beliefs and degrees of belief. Some possibility and impossibility results are presented. The possibility results suggest that the three proposed rationality constraints are compatible with reasonable aggregation procedures for belief and degree of belief. (shrink)

Suppositions can be introduced in either the indicative or subjunctive mood. The introduction of either type of supposition initiates judgments that may be either qualitative, binary judgments about whether a given proposition is acceptable or quantitative, numerical ones about how acceptable it is. As such, accounts of qualitative/quantitative judgment under indicative/subjunctive supposition have been developed in the literature. We explore these four different types of theories by systematically explicating the relationships canonical representatives of each. Our representative qualitative accounts of indicative (...) and subjunctive supposition are based on the belief change operations provided by AGM revision and KM update respectively; our representative quantitative ones are offered by conditionalization and imaging. This choice is motivated by the familiar approach of understanding supposition as `provisional belief revision' wherein one temporarily treats the supposition as true and forms judgments by making appropriate changes to their other opinions. To compare the numerical judgments recommended by the quantitative theories with the binary ones recommended by the qualitative accounts, we rely on a suitably adapted version of the Lockean thesis. Ultimately, we establish a number of new results that we interpret as vindicating the often-repeated claim that conditionalization is a probabilistic version of revision, while imaging is a probabilistic version of update. (shrink)

The logic of indicative conditionals remains the topic of deep and intractable philosophical disagreement. I show that two influential epistemic norms—the Lockean theory of belief and the Ramsey test for conditional belief—are jointly sufficient to ground a powerful new argument for a particular conception of the logic of indicative conditionals. Specifically, the argument demonstrates, contrary to the received historical narrative, that there is a real sense in which Stalnaker’s semantics for the indicative did succeed in capturing the logic of (...) the Ramseyan indicative conditional. (shrink)

I show that the Lottery Paradox is just a version of the Sorites, and argue that this should modify our way of looking at the Paradox itself. In particular, I focus on what I call “the Cut-off Point Problem” and contend that this problem, well known by Sorites scholars, ought to play a key role in the debate on Kyburg’s puzzle. Very briefly, I show that, in the Lottery Paradox, the premises “ticket n°1 will lose”, “ticket n°2 will lose”… “ticket (...) n°1000 will lose” are equivalent to soritical premises of the form “~(the winning ticket is in {…, (tn)}) ⊃ ~(the winning ticket is in {…, tn, (tn + 1)})” (where “⊃” is the material conditional, “~” is the negation symbol, “tn” and “tn + 1” are “ticket n°n” and “ticket n°n + 1” respectively, and “{}” identify the elements of the lottery tickets’ set. The brackets in “(tn)” and “(tn + 1)” are meant to point out that in the antecedent of the conditional we do not always have a “tn” (and, as a result, a “tn + 1” in the consequent): consider the conditional “~(the winning ticket is in {}) ⊃ ~(the winning ticket is in {t1})”). As a result, failing to believe, for some ticket, that it will lose comes down to introducing a cut-off point in a chain of soritical premises. In this paper I explore the consequences of the different ways of blocking the Lottery Paradox with respect to the Cut-off Point Problem. A heap variant of the Lottery Paradox is especially relevant for evaluating the different solutions. One important result is that the most popular way out of the puzzle, i.e., denying the Lockean Thesis, becomes less attractive. Moreover, I show that, along with the debate on whether rational belief is closed under classical logic, the debate on the validity of modus ponens should play an important role in discussions on the Lottery Paradox. -/- . (shrink)

A popular way to relate probabilistic information to binary rational beliefs is the Lockean Thesis, which is usually formalized in terms of thresholds. This approach seems far from satisfactory: the value of the thresholds is not well-specified and the Lottery Paradox shows that the model violates the Conjunction Principle. We argue that the Lottery Paradox is a symptom of a more fundamental and general problem, shared by all threshold-models that attempt to put an exact border on something that (...) is intrinsically vague. We propose application of the language of relative analysis—a type of non-standard analysis—to formulate a new model for rational belief, called Stratified Belief. This contextualist model seems well-suited to deal with a concept of beliefs based on probabilities ‘sufficiently close to unity’ and satisfies a moderately weakened form of the Conjunction Principle. We also propose an adaptation of the model that is able to deal with beliefs that are less firm than ‘almost certainty’. The adapted version is also of interest for the epistemicist account of vagueness. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Kroedel has proposed a new solution, the permissibility solution, to the lottery paradox. The lottery paradox results from the Lockean thesis according to which one ought to believe a proposition just in case one’s degree of belief in it is sufficiently high. The permissibility solution replaces the Lockean thesis by the permissibility thesis according to which one is permitted to believe a proposition if one’s degree of belief in it is sufficiently high. This note shows (...) that the epistemology of belief that results from the permissibility thesis and the epistemology of degrees of belief is empty in the sense that one need not believe anything, even if one’s degrees of belief are maximally bold. Since this result can also be achieved by simply dropping the Lockean thesis, or by replacing it with principles that are logically stronger than the permissibility thesis, the question arises what the permissibility solution is a solution of. (shrink)

Much of the literature on the relationship between belief and credence has focused on the reduction question: that is, whether either belief or credence reduces to the other. This debate, while important, only scratches the surface of the belief-credence connection. Even on the anti-reductive dualist view, belief and credence could still be very tightly connected. Here, I explore questions about the belief-credence connection that go beyond reduction. This paper is dedicated to what I call the independence question: just how independent (...) are belief and credence? I look at this question from two angles: a descriptive one (as a psychological matter, how much can belief and credence come apart?) and a normative one (for a rational person, how closely connected are belief and credence?) Ultimately, I suggest that the two attitudes are more independent than one might think. (shrink)

I argue that physicians can save women from life-threatening pregnancies by performing a craniotomy, placentectomy, or salpingotomy without intending death or harm. To support this conclusion, I defend the relevance thesis about intentions (a person intends X only if X explains the action). I then criticize the identity thesis (if a person intends X and knows X is Y then the person intends Y) and three mistakenly strict moral principles: (1) one may not intend something that is a (...) serious harm for an innocent person, (2) one may not intend to terminate pregnancy before viability, which would prohibit, and (3) one may not act on a person’s body in a harmful way in order to benefit another person. (1) would prohibit procuring organs from living donors, (2) would prohibit treating hepatic pregnancies and other ectopic pregnancies, and (3) would prohibit procuring organs from living donors and performing many prenatal surgeries. (shrink)

Decision theory and folk psychology both purport to represent the same phenomena: our belief-like and desire- and preference-like states. They also purport to do the same work with these representations: explain and predict our actions. But they do so with different sets of concepts. There's much at stake in whether one of these two sets of concepts can be accounted for with the other. Without such an account, we'd have two competing representations and systems of prediction and explanation, a dubious (...) dualism. Folk psychology structures our daily lives and has proven fruitful in the study of mind and ethics, while decision theory is pervasive in various disciplines, including the quantitative social sciences, especially economics, and philosophy. My interest is in accounting for folk psychology with decision theory -- in particular, for believe and wanting, which decision theory omits. Many have attempted this task for belief. (The Lockean Thesis says that there is such an account.) I take up the parallel task for wanting, which has received far less attention. I propose necessary and sufficient conditions, stated in terms of decision theory, for when you're truly said to want; I give an analogue of the Lockean Thesis for wanting. My account is an alternative to orthodox accounts that link wanting to preference (e.g. Stalnaker (1984), Lewis (1986)), which I argue are false. I argue further that want ascriptions are context-sensitive. My account explains this context-sensitivity, makes sense of conflicting desires, and accommodates phenomena that motivate traditional theses on which 'want' has multiple senses (e.g. all-things-considered vs. pro tanto). (shrink)

John Locke's political theory has been the subject of many detailed treatments by philosophers and political scientists. But The Lockean Theory of Rights is the first systematic, full-length study of Locke's theory of rights and of its potential for making genuine contributions to contemporary debates about rights and their place in political philosophy. Given that the rights of persons are the central moral concept at work in Locke's and Lockean political philosophy, such a study is long overdue.

This paper introduces a new argument against Richard Foley’s threshold view of belief. His view is based on the Lockean Thesis (LT) and the Rational Threshold Thesis (RTT). The argument introduced here shows that the views derived from the LT and the RTT violate the safety condition on knowledge in way that threatens the LT and/or the RTT.

The Lockean theory of communication is here defined as the theory that communication takes place when a hearer grasps some sort of mental object, distinct from the speaker's words, that the speaker's words express. This theory contrasts with the view that spoken languages are the very medium of a kind of thought of which overt speech is the most basic form. This article is a critique of some of the most common motives for adopting a Lockean theory of (...) communication. It is not enough that words in some sense express thoughts. It is not enough that animals and prelinguistic infants in some sense think. It is not enough that speakers mean something by what they say or that hearers must understand a speaker's presuppositions. On the contrary, any explanation of how children can learn to communicate in the way the Lockean imagines will presuppose that words can instill beliefs in some way more fundamental than the Lockean theory itself can explain. (shrink)

The concept of empiricism evokes both a historical tradition and a set of philosophical theses. The theses are usually understood to have been developed by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. But these figures did not use the term “empiricism,” and they did not see themselves as united by a shared epistemology into one school of thought. My dissertation analyzes the debate that elevated the concept of empiricism (and of an empiricist tradition) to prominence in English-language philosophy. -/- In the 1870s and (...) ’80s a lively debate about psychology emerged. Neo-Kantian idealists criticized the very idea that the mind can be studied scientifically. A group of philosopher-psychologists responded, often in Mind. They were among the first to call themselves “empiricists,” arguing that psychology could provide a scientific basis for philosophical progress. Idealists held that empirical psychology depended on premises developed by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. These premises were allegedly absurd because they rendered ideas of extension, as well as other ideas crucial to natural science, unreal. Those who wanted to advance psychology towards becoming a legitimate science were forced to engage these philosophical attacks, while at the same time to develop empirical theories that could successfully explain some characteristics of experience. I show how James’s theory of space perception accomplished both tasks. -/- In developing this theory, James found he had to reject the Lockean notion that reality is associated with passively-registered sensations. James also abandoned Berkeley and Hume’s claim that ideas are ultimately derived from atomic sensations. Instead, James presented experimental evidence that sensation is a continuous stream. The mind must actively parse this stream if it is to gain a coherent representation of its environment. I argue that James’s stream-of-thought thesis served as a presupposition of his entire psychology. The thesis showed how the labor of investigating the mind could be divided between philosophers and scientists, and in a manner sensitive to the concerns of both. The stream thesis also provided a scientific basis for a new philosophical empiricism that, I argue, has a hidden legacy in the history of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This guide accompanies the following article(s): Jackson, E., Philosophy Compass 15/6 (2020) pp. 1-13 10.1111/phc3.12668.x.

"John Locke is considered as one of the most important philosophers of the modern era. The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were both highly influenced by Locke's philosophical ideas. Commonly known as the 'Father of Liberalism' Locke heavily influences contemporary libertarianism, with its emphasis on small government, the requirement of actual consent to that government, and a natural executive right to establish one's own sovereignty and enforce one'' own rights. The Lockean Mind provides a comprehensive survey (...) of his work, not only placing it in its historical context but also exploring its contemporary significance. Comprising almost sixty chapters by a superb team of international contributors, the volume is divided into twelve parts covering the full range of Locke's thought: Historical Background, Locke's Interlocutors, Locke's Epistemology, Locke's Philosophy of Mind, Locke on Philosophy of Language and Logic, Locke's Metaphysics, Locke's Natural Philosophy, Locke's Moral Philosophy, Locke on Education, Locke's Political Philosophy, Locke's Social Philosophy, Locke on Religion. This collection is essential reading for students and researchers working in political philosophy, philosophy of mind, libertarianism, British Empiricism, epistemology and political theory, as well as for those in related Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines with an interest in John Locke"--. (shrink)

A private property account is central to a liberal theory of justice. Much of the appeal of the Lockean theory stems from its account of the so-called `enough-and-as-good' proviso, a principle which aims to specify each employable person's fair share of the earth's material resources. I argue that to date Lockeans have failed to show how the proviso can be applied without thereby undermining a guiding intuition in Lockean theory. This guiding intuition is that by interacting in accordance (...) with the proviso persons interact as free and equal, or as reciprocally subject to the `laws of nature' rather than as subject to one another's arbitrary will. Because Locke's own and contemporary Lockean conceptions of the proviso subject some persons to some other persons' arbitrary will, the proviso so conceived cannot function as it should, namely as a principle that restricts interacting persons' actions reciprocally and thereby enables Lockean freedom under law. (shrink)

This paper is about the statics and dynamics of belief states that are represented by pairs consisting of an agent's credences (represented by a subjective probability measure) and her categorical beliefs (represented by a set of possible worlds). Regarding the static side, we argue that the latter proposition should be coherent with respect to the probability measure and that its probability should reach a certain threshold value. On the dynamic side, we advocate Jeffrey conditionalisation as the principal mode of changing (...) one's belief state. This updating method fits the idea of the Lockean Thesis better than plain Bayesian conditionalisation, and it affords a flexible method for adding and withdrawing categorical beliefs. We show that it fails to satisfy the traditional principles of Inclusion and Preservation for belief revision and the principle of Recovery for belief withdrawals{, as well as the Levi and Harper identities. We take this to be a problem for the latter principles rather than for the idea of coherent belief change. (shrink)

This paper advances a historical and philosophical explanation of the dynamics of irregular migration and the EU-external border policy in Africa. The refugee crisis in Europe has led to tougher security measures, including the EU’s externalization of its boundaries to transit countries with serious implication for human security and regional stability in Africa. In re-assessing the foundation of international migration policies through historical and philosophical lenses, this work brings to the fore the internal contradictions in EU-external border policy in Africa. (...) Whereas migration studies have drawn insights from political and applied moral philosophy, this approach is rare in the debate on irregular migration and informal transborder flows between the EU and Africa. The article particularly unveils the inter-relational complexity between globalization, migration, human rights and development. The approach is qualitative based on the critical analysis of ethnographic survey, government documents, mass media reports and existing literature. Underpinned by the philosophical tenets of the Hobbesian “collective right” and Lockean concept of “inalienable” human rights, as well as the discourse on the “priority thesis”, it concludes that the resolution of the migration dilemma lies in the ethical modification of the immigration laws in line with the universal notion of democratic values, the rule of law, human rights and the reality of global inter-connectivity. Keywords: Africa, External Border Control, European Union, Development, Human Rights, Irregular Migration; Priority Thesis. (shrink)

In this paper we compare Leitgeb’s stability theory of belief and Spohn’s ranking-theoretic account of belief. We discuss the two theories as solutions to the lottery paradox. To compare the two theories, we introduce a novel translation between ranking functions and probability functions. We draw some crucial consequences from this translation, in particular a new probabilistic belief notion. Based on this, we explore the logical relation between the two belief theories, showing that models of Leitgeb’s theory correspond to certain models (...) of Spohn’s theory. The reverse is not true. Finally, we discuss how these results raise new questions in belief theory. In particular, we raise the question whether stability is rightly thought of as a property pertaining to belief. (shrink)

Within Robert Nozick's theory of Justice as presented in his Anarchy, State and Utopia, does the Lockean proviso dovetail with the theory of entitlement? The main burden of this paper is to establish that far from dovetailing, there is a serious conflict between the two.Nozick's theory of Justice consists of at least three principles, namely, the principle of Justice in acquisition, the principle of Justice in transfer, and the principle of rectification of injustice. These principles treat the topics of (...) how unheld things came to be held, how they came to be transferred, and how injustice in respect to them came to be corrected or rectified. Although Nozick does not provide a detailed philosophical picture of these principles of Justice, he says enough about each of them by way of examples and explanations to constitute a powerful, criticizable doctrine. (shrink)

In the literature, one finds two accounts of the normative status of rational belief: the ought account and the permissibility account. Both accounts have their advantages and shortcomings, making it difficult to favour one over the other. Imagine that there were two principles of rational belief or rational degrees of belief commonly considered plausible, but which, however, yielded a paradox together with one account, but not with the other. One of the accounts therefore requires us to give up one of (...) the plausible principles; whereas the other allows us to save them both. The fact that it allows us to save both of the plausible principles might well be considered a strong reason in favour of the relevant account. The permissibility-account-based resolution of the lottery paradox suggests that the permissibility account is a candidate for being supported in this way, since the account seems to save two plausible principles of rational belief and rational degrees of belief. I argue that even if the permissibility account were supported in this way the support would be defeated, since one cannot provide an analogous resolution of the preface paradox. The principles remain unsaved by the permissibility account. (shrink)

: In a recent essay, “Forcing Nozick Beyond the Minimal State: The Lockean Proviso and Compensatory Welfare,” I argue that Nozick’s own reading of the Lockean Proviso commits him to a welfare state. In a forceful response, Jan Narveson calls my argument into question by arguing for an especially austere reading of the Lockean Proviso as ….