34 found
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  1. Is coherence truth conducive?Tomoji Shogenji - 1999 - Analysis 59 (4):338-345.
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  2. The degree of epistemic justification and the conjunction fallacy.Tomoji Shogenji - 2012 - Synthese 184 (1):29-48.
    This paper describes a formal measure of epistemic justification motivated by the dual goal of cognition, which is to increase true beliefs and reduce false beliefs. From this perspective the degree of epistemic justification should not be the conditional probability of the proposition given the evidence, as it is commonly thought. It should be determined instead by the combination of the conditional probability and the prior probability. This is also true of the degree of incremental confirmation, and I argue that (...)
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  3. (1 other version)Confirmation, transitivity, and Moore: the Screening-Off Approach.William Roche & Tomoji Shogenji - 2013 - Philosophical Studies (3):1-21.
    It is well known that the probabilistic relation of confirmation is not transitive in that even if E confirms H1 and H1 confirms H2, E may not confirm H2. In this paper we distinguish four senses of confirmation and examine additional conditions under which confirmation in different senses becomes transitive. We conduct this examination both in the general case where H1 confirms H2 and in the special case where H1 also logically entails H2. Based on these analyses, we argue that (...)
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  4. Dwindling Confirmation.William Roche & Tomoji Shogenji - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (1):114-137.
    We show that as a chain of confirmation becomes longer, confirmation dwindles under screening-off. For example, if E confirms H1, H1 confirms H2, and H1 screens off E from H2, then the degree to which E confirms H2 is less than the degree to which E confirms H1. Although there are many measures of confirmation, our result holds on any measure that satisfies the Weak Law of Likelihood. We apply our result to testimony cases, relate it to the Data-Processing Inequality (...)
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  5. Information and Inaccuracy.William Roche & Tomoji Shogenji - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (2):577-604.
    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 (...)
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  6. A condition for transitivity in probabilistic support.Tomoji Shogenji - 2003 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (4):613-616.
    It is well known that probabilistic support is not transitive. But it can be shown that probabilistic support is transitive provided the intermediary proposition screens off the original evidence with respect to the hypothesis in question. This has the consequence that probabilistic support is transitive when the original evidence is testimonial, memorial or perceptual (i.e., to the effect that such and such was testified to, remembered, or perceived), and the intermediary proposition is its representational content (i.e., to the effect that (...)
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  7. Reply to Akiba on the probabilistic measure of coherence.Tomoji Shogenji - 2001 - Analysis 61 (2):147-150.
  8. A defense of reductionism about testimonial justification of beliefs.Tomoji Shogenji - 2006 - Noûs 40 (2):331–346.
    This paper defends reductionism about testimonial justification of beliefs against two influential arguments. One is the empirical argument to the effect that the reductionist justification of our trust in testimony is either circular since it relies on testimonial evidence or else there is scarce evidence in support of our trust in testimony. The other is the transcendental argument to the effect that trust in testimony is a prerequisite for the very existence of testimonial evidence since without the presumption of people’s (...)
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  9. Justification by Coherence from Scratch.Tomoji Shogenji - 2005 - Philosophical Studies 125 (3):305-325.
    In this paper we make three points about justification of propositions by coherence “from scratch”, where pieces of evidence that are coherent have no individual credibility. First, we argue that no matter how many pieces of evidence are coherent, and no matter what relation we take coherence to be, coherence does not make independent pieces of evidence with no individual credibility credible. Second, we show that an intuitively plausible informal reasoning for justification by coherence from scratch is deficient since it (...)
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  10.  29
    Mediated Confirmation.Tomoji Shogenji - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science:axv053.
  11. Skepticism and Epistemic Closure: Two Bayesian Accounts.Luca Moretti & Tomoji Shogenji - 2017 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 7 (1):1-25.
    This paper considers two novel Bayesian responses to a well-known skeptical paradox. The paradox consists of three intuitions: first, given appropriate sense experience, we have justification for accepting the relevant proposition about the external world; second, we have justification for expanding the body of accepted propositions through known entailment; third, we do not have justification for accepting that we are not disembodied souls in an immaterial world deceived by an evil demon. The first response we consider rejects the third intuition (...)
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  12.  92
    Coherence of the contents and the transmission of probabilistic support.Tomoji Shogenji - 2013 - Synthese 190 (13):2525-2545.
    This paper examines how coherence of the contents of evidence affects the transmission of probabilistic support from the evidence to the hypothesis. It is argued that coherence of the contents in the sense of the ratio of the positive intersection reduces the transmission of probabilistic support, though this negative impact of coherence may be offset by other aspects of the relations among the contents. It is argued further that there is no broader conception of coherence whose impact on the transmission (...)
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  13.  31
    Information and Inaccuracy.William Roche & Tomoji Shogenji - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science:axw025.
    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 (...)
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  14.  79
    Mediated Confirmation.Tomoji Shogenji - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (3):847-874.
    ABSTRACT This article aims to achieve two things: to identify the conditions for transitivity in probabilistic support in various settings, and to uncover the components and structure of the mediated probabilistic relation. It is shown that when the probabilistic relation between the two propositions, x and z, is mediated by multiple layers of partitions of propositions, the impact x has on z consists of the purely indirect impact, the purely bypass impact, and the mixed impact. It is also shown that (...)
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  15.  44
    Probability and proximity in surprise.Tomoji Shogenji - 2020 - Synthese 198 (11):10939-10957.
    This paper proposes an analysis of surprise formulated in terms of proximity to the truth, to replace the probabilistic account of surprise. It is common to link surprise to the low probability of the outcome. The idea seems sensible because an outcome with a low probability is unexpected, and an unexpected outcome often surprises us. However, the link between surprise and low probability is known to break down in some cases. There have been some attempts to modify the probabilistic account (...)
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  16.  25
    Formal Epistemology and Cartesian Skepticism: In Defense of Belief in the Natural World.Tomoji Shogenji - 2017 - New York: Routledge.
    This book develops new techniques in formal epistemology and applies them to the challenge of Cartesian skepticism. It introduces two formats of epistemic evaluation that should be of interest to epistemologists and philosophers of science: the dual-component format, which evaluates a statement on the basis of its safety and informativeness, and the relative-divergence format, which evaluates a probabilistic model on the basis of its complexity and goodness of fit with data. Tomoji Shogenji shows that the former lends support to Cartesian (...)
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  17. Why does coherence appear truth-conducive?Tomoji Shogenji - 2007 - Synthese 157 (3):361 - 372.
    This paper aims to reconcile (i) the intuitively plausible view that a higher degree of coherence among independent pieces of evidence makes the hypothesis they support more probable, and (ii) the negative results in Bayesian epistemology to the effect that there is no probabilistic measure of coherence such that a higher degree of coherence among independent pieces of evidence makes the hypothesis they support more probable. I consider a simple model in which the negative result appears in a stark form: (...)
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  18. Internalism and Externalism in Meliorative Epistemology.Tomoji Shogenji - 2012 - Erkenntnis 76 (1):59-72.
    This paper addresses the meta-epistemological dispute over the basis of epistemic evaluation from the standpoint of meliorative epistemology. Meliorative epistemology aims at guiding our epistemic practice to better results, and it comprises two levels of epistemic evaluation. At the social level (meliorative social epistemology) appropriate experts conduct evaluation for the community, so that epistemic evaluation is externalist since each epistemic subject in the community need not have access to the basis of the experts' evaluation. While at the personal level (meliorative (...)
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  19.  98
    The Role of Coherence of Evidence in the Non-Dynamic Model of Confirmation.Tomoji Shogenji - 2005 - Erkenntnis 63 (3):317-333.
    This paper examines the role of coherence of evidence in what I call the non-dynamic model of confirmation. It appears that other things being equal, a higher degree of coherence among pieces of evidence raises to a higher degree the probability of the proposition they support. I argue against this view on the basis of three related observations. First, we should be able to assess the impact of coherence on any hypothesis of interest the evidence supports. Second, the impact of (...)
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  20. The problem of the criterion in rule-following.Tomoji Shogenji - 2000 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (3):501-525.
    This paper addresses the issue of rule-following in the context of the problem of the criterion. It presents a line of reasoning which concludes we do not know what rule we follow, but which develops independently of the problem of extrapolation that plays a major role in many recent discussions of rule-following. The basis of the argument is the normativity of rules, but the problem is also distinct from the issue of the gap between facts and values in axiology. The (...)
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  21. Modest scepticism about rule-following.Tomoji Shogenji - 1993 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (4):486-500.
  22. The consistency of global relativism.Tomoji Shogenji - 1997 - Mind 106 (424):745-747.
  23.  56
    Hume’s Problem Solved: The Optimality of Meta-Induction: by Gerhard Schurz, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2019, 386pp., $60.00, £50, ISBN: 9780262039727.Tomoji Shogenji - 2019 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 32 (3-4):229-231.
    Volume 32, Issue 3-4, September - December 2019, Page 229-231.
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  24.  33
    (1 other version)Making Sense of Non-Attachment.Chang-Seong Hong & Tomoji Shogenji - forthcoming - Philosophy East and West.
    The aim of this paper is to outline a version of “non-attachment” that is conceptually clear and practically viable. We turn to the Buddhist traditions for their wealth of insights into non-attachment, but our goal is not exegetical. We are not constrained by the Buddhist traditions and turn to Anglophone moral psychology as well to point out a close connection between non-attachment and adaptive preference. We offer the reason for adopting the outlined version of non-attachment and depict what it is (...)
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  25. My way or her way: A conundrum in bayesian epistemology of disagreement.Tomoji Shogenji - manuscript
    The proportional weight view in epistemology of disagreement generalizes the equal weight view and proposes that we assign to judgments of different people weights that are proportional to their epistemic qualifications. It is shown that if the resulting degrees of confidence are to constitute a probability function, they must be the weighted arithmetic means of individual degrees of confidence, while if the resulting degrees of confidence are to obey the Bayesian rule of conditionalization, they must be the weighted geometric means (...)
     
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  26.  38
    A Twofold Tension in Schurz’s Meta-Inductive Solution to Hume’s Problem of Induction.Tomoji Shogenji - 2023 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 54 (3):379-392.
    This paper examines a twofold tension in Gerhard Schurz’s (2019) recent proposal to solve Hume’s problem of induction. Schurz concedes to the skeptic that there is no non-circular epistemic justification of the reliability of induction, but then argues for the optimality of meta-induction so that if any prediction method is reliable, then meta-induction is. There is a tension in this proposal between meta-induction and our inductive practice: Are we supposed to abandon our inductive practice in favor of meta-induction? Schurz claims (...)
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  27. An externalist guide to epistemic practice.Tomoji Shogenji - manuscript
     
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  28.  38
    A unified account of the conjunction fallacy by coherence.Tomoji Shogenji & Martin L. Jönsson - 2019 - Synthese 196 (1):221-237.
    We propose a coherence account of the conjunction fallacy applicable to both of its two paradigms. We compare our account with a recent proposal by Tentori et al. : 235–255, 2013) that attempts to generalize earlier confirmation accounts. Their model works better than its predecessors in some respects, but it exhibits only a shallow form of generality and is unsatisfactory in other ways as well: it is strained, complex, and untestable as it stands. Our coherence account inherits the strength of (...)
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  29. Boomerang defense of rule following.Tomoji Shogenji - 1992 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 30 (3):115-122.
    Can there be a good argument for the total denial of rule following? The question concerns the "total" denial, where the targeted rules include those meta-rules presumably required for philosophical argumentation. In this paper the author contends that such a self-undermining argument can never be a good argument even in a "reductio ad absurdum" form, but that the defender of rule following cannot dismiss a challenge on this ground when the opponent adopts "the virus strategy".
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  30. Sceptical Paradoxes of Rule Following.Tomoji Shogenji - 1991 - Dissertation, University of Southern California
    In this dissertation I examine the sceptical problem of rule following presented by Saul Kripke in his interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later works: Do any facts determine what rule we were following in our apparently rule-following activities such as the use of language? I distinguish three ways of understanding this question--modest scepticism, radical scepticism, and metascepticism--and address them in Parts 1, 2 and 3 of the dissertation, respectively. ;Part 1 discusses modest scepticism, which asserts that no finite facts about humans (...)
     
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  31.  73
    The epistemic status of reflective beliefs.Tomoji Shogenji - manuscript
    This paper examines the epistemic status of the reflective belief about the content of one’s own conscious mental state, with emphasis on perceptual experience. I propose that the process that gives a special epistemic status to a reflective belief is not observation, inference, or conceptual articulation, but semantic ascent similar to the transition from a sentence in the object language to a sentence in the meta-language that affirms the truth of the original sentence. This account of the process of reflection (...)
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  32.  86
    The problem of rule-following in compositional semantics.Tomoji Shogenji - 1995 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 33 (1):97-108.
    One of the central issues in the recent discussion of rule-following has been the apparent gap between the finitude of any facts about the rule-follower and the infinitude of possible applications of rules. In this paper the author argues that the combination of the rule-follower's disposition and explicit directions can fill this gap with respect to the interpretation of individual words, but that the problem of finitude remains a serious threat to compositional semantics for natural language because there are no (...)
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  33.  25
    The Problem of Rule‐Following in Compositional Semantics.Tomoji Shogenji - 2010 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 33 (1):97-107.
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  34. Against Coherence: Truth, Probability, Justification. [REVIEW]Tomoji Shogenji - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1):292-296.
    Erik Olsson’s Against Coherence: Truth, Probability, and Justification is an important contribution to the growing literature on Bayesian coherentism. The book applies the formal theory of probability to issues of coherence in two contexts. One is the philosophical debate over radical skepticism, and the other is common sense and scientific reasoning. As the title of the book suggests, Olsson’s view about coherence is negative on both accounts. With regard to radical skepticism, Olsson states that “the connection between coherence and truth (...)
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