In this paper, we explore Peirce's work for insights into a theory of learning and cognition for education. Our focus for this exploration is Peirce's paper The Fixation of Belief (FOB), originally published in 1877 in Popular Science Monthly. We begin by examining Peirce's assertion that the study of logic is essential for understanding thought and reasoning. We explicate Peirce's view of the nature of reasoning itself—the characteristic guiding principles or ‘habits of mind’ that underlie acts of inference, the (...) dimensions of and interaction between doubt and belief, and his four methods of resolving or ‘fixing’ belief (i.e., tenacity, authority, a priori, and experimentation). The four methods are then juxtaposed against current models of teaching and learning such as constructivism, schema theory, situated cognition, and inquiry learning. Finally, we discuss Peirce's modes of inference as they relate educationally to the resolution of doubt and beliefs and offer an example of belief resolution from an experienced teacher in a professional development environment. (shrink)

Isaac Levi's new book is concerned with how one can justify changing one's beliefs. The discussion is deeply informed by the belief-doubt model advocated by C. S. Peirce and John Dewey, of which the book provides a substantial analysis. Professor Levi then addresses the conceptual framework of potential changes available to an inquirer. A structural approach to propositional attitudes is proposed, which rejects the conventional view that a propositional attitude involves a relation between an agent and either (...) a linguistic entity or some other intentional object such as a proposition or set of possible worlds. The last two chapters offer an account of change in states of full belief understood as changes in commitments rather than changes in performance; one chapter deals with adding new information to a belief state, the other with giving up information. The book builds upon topics discussed in some of Levi's earlier work. It will be of particular interest to discussion theorists, epistemologists, philosophers of science, computer scientists, and cognitive psychologists. (shrink)

Coherence and correspondence are classical contenders as theories of truth. In this paper we examine them instead as interacting factors in the dynamics of belief across epistemic networks. We construct an agent-based model of network contact in which agents are characterized not in terms of single beliefs but in terms of internal belief suites. Individuals update elements of their belief suites on input from other agents in order both to maximize internal belief coherence and to (...) incorporate ‘trickled in’ elements of truth as correspondence. Results, though often intuitive, prove more complex than in simpler models (Hegselmann & Krause 2002, 2006; Grim, Singer, Reade & Fisher 2015). The optimistic finding is that pressures toward internal coherence can exploit and expand on small elements of truth as correspondence is introduced into epistemic networks. Less optimistic results show that pressures for coherence can also work directly against the incorporation of truth, particularly when coherence is established first and new data is introduced later. (shrink)

Tackles the problem of fixing the tenacity of believers in forming, holding, and modifying beliefs. in conversation with the history of philosophy and religion, the author attempts to expose and refute some aspects of the dominant epistemological framework for engaging belief fixation and improvement. In contrast to this framework, Dr. Frazier provides a model of responsible believing agent rooted in an ethic of the intellectual virtue tradition. In dialog with Aristotle, he proposes three principal virtues, which he calls (...) the generative, the transmissive, and the metamorphic. The author's alternative framework includes an examination of the role that intellectual passions play in the melioration of belief. This text considers whether Dostoevsky's claim that "Beauty will save the world" has a place in discussions of belief formation and revision and offers an account of its vitality in addressing the concerns raised in the book. (shrink)

Michael G. Titelbaum presents a new Bayesian framework for modeling rational degrees of belief—the first of its kind to represent rational requirements on agents who undergo certainty loss.

C.S. Peirce's and Isaac Levi's accounts of the belief-doubt-belief model are discussed and evaluated. It is argued that the contemporary study of belief change has metamorphosed into a branch of philosophical logic where empirical considerations have become obsolete. A case is made for reformulations of belief change systems that do allow for empirical tests. Last, a belief change system is presented that (1) uses finite representations of information, (2) can adequately deal with inconsistencies, (...) (3) has finite operations of change, (4) can do without extra-logical elements, and (5) only licenses consistent beliefs. (shrink)

Explanation and understanding are intimately connected notions, but the nature of that connection has generally not been considered a topic worthy of serious philosophical investigation. Most authors have avoided making reference to the notion of understanding in their accounts of explanation because they fear that any mention of the epistemic states of the individuals involved compromises the objectivity of explanation. Understanding is a pragmatic notion, they argue, and pragmatics should be kept at a safe distance from the universal features of (...) explanation. My main contention in this dissertation is that there is a sense in which it is meaningful and useful to talk about objective understanding, and that to characterize this notion it is necessary to formulate an account of objective explanation that makes reference to the beliefs and epistemic goals of the participants in a cognitive enterprise. ;My account of explanation is based on the belief-doubt model of inquiry first proposed by Peirce. Using the tools provided by decision theory, and the models of belief revision developed by Isaac Levi and by Alchourron, Gardenfors, and Makinson, I analyze the objective and pragmatic conditions that a piece of information must fulfill to be both explanatory and epistemically useful to an inquiring agent. The objective basis for an explanation is provided by the relation of probabilistic relevance that the fact described by the explanans bares to the fact described by the explanandum. But an explanation is much more than its foundation. As an epistemological notion, a potential explanation can only be a bona fide explanation if it becomes part of inquiry, that is, if an agent or a group of agents can see any value in it for their cognitive purposes. I provide a way to evaluate an explanation in terms of its credibility, its content, and its explanatory value. I argue that although an objective measure of the credibility and content of an explanation can be established, in many cases a complete determination of its explanatory value will ultimately depend on the interests and goals of the individual inquirers. (shrink)

There has been a great deal of interaction among game theorists, philosophers and logicians in certain foundational problems concerning rationality, the formalization of knowledge and practical reasoning, and models of learning and deliberation. This volume brings together the work of some of the pre-eminent figures in their respective disciplines, all of whom are engaged in research at the forefront of their fields. Together they offer a conspectus of the interaction of game theory, logic and epistemology in the formal models of (...) knowledge, belief, deliberation and learning, and in the relationship between Bayesian decision theory and game theory, as well as between bounded rationality and computational complexity. (shrink)

This work contrasts conservative or minimally mutilating revisions of empirical theories as they are identified in the presently dominant AGM model of formal belief revision and the structuralist program for the reconstruction of empirical theories. The aim is to make understandable why both approaches only partly succeed in substantially informing and formally restraining the issue. With respect to the rationality of minimal change, the overall result is negative. Readers with an interest in formal epistemology are provided with application (...) cases (mercury anomaly, revision of early thermo-dynamics, introduction of the neutrino), the historically inclined reader is offered a systematic perspective. The discussion can largely be followed without a background in formal logic. (shrink)

In this article we take issue with theory theory and simulation theory accounts of folk psychology committed to (i) the belief-desire (BD) model and (ii) the assumption of universality (AU). Recent studies cast doubt on the compatibility of these commitments because they reveal considerable cross-cultural differences in folk psychologies. We present both theory theory and simulation theory with the following dilemma: either (i) keep the BD-model as an account of the surface properties of specific explicit folk (...) psychologies and give up AU in light of the cross-cultural evidence; or (ii) defend AU with respect to core capacities underlying different culture-specific folk psychologies, and explain why the BD-model will be genuinely explanatory at this level. (shrink)

This book develops a framework for analysing strategic rationality, a notion central to contemporary game theory, which is the formal study of the interaction of rational agents and which has proved extremely fruitful in economics, political theory and business management. The author argues that a logical paradox lies at the root of a number of persistent puzzles in game theory, in particular those concerning rational agents who seek to establish some kind of reputation. Building on the work of Parsons, Burge, (...) Gaifman and Barwise and Etchemendy, Robert Koons constructs a context-sensitive solution to the whole family of liar-like paradoxes including, for the first time, a detailed account of how the interpretation of paradoxical statements is fixed by context. This analysis provides an understanding of how the rational agent model can account for the emergence of rules, practices and institutions. (shrink)

This thesis is comprised of four papers that explore the nature and practical implications of moral doubt. It starts from the observation that the appropriate way to understand and handle moral doubt will depend on the nature of our moral judgements themselves. The first and second papers take a cognitivist view of moral judgements and analyse moral doubt in terms of partial degrees of belief in moral propositions. The first, The Relevance of Belief: Subjective Norms (...) Under Empirical and Moral Uncertainty, argues that this form of moral uncertainty is relevant to our choices and that the norms most directly relevant to choice under moral uncertainty are the action-guiding subjective norms of instrumental rationality. The second, Preference and Commitment Under Moral Uncertainty, proposes a particular way of accommodating moral uncertainty within a decision theoretic model of rational choice, and shows that this has substantial advantages over existing alternatives. The third paper, Attitudinal Ambivalence: Moral Uncertainty for Non-cognitivists, provides an account of moral doubt that is consistent with non-cognitivism, by analysing the phenomenon in terms of ambivalence in one’s moral attitudes. The fourth and final paper, The Balance and Weight of Reasons, draws out some implications of ambivalence, by exploring the way in which the overall weight of reasons are reflected in the preferences of rational agents. (shrink)

The theory of imperatives is philosophically relevant since in building it — some of the long standing problems need to be addressed, and presumably some new ones are waiting to be discovered. The relevance of the theory of imperatives for philosophical research is remarkable, but usually recognized only within the field of practical philosophy. Nevertheless, the emphasis can be put on problems of theoretical philosophy. Proper understanding of imperatives is likely to raise doubts about some of our deeply entrenched and (...) tacit presumptions. In philosophy of language it is the presumption that declaratives provide the paradigm for sentence form; in philosophy of science it is the belief that theory construction is independent from the language practice, in logic it is the conviction that logical meaning relations are constituted out of logical terminology, in ontology it is the view that language use is free from ontological commitments. The list is not exhaustive; it includes only those presumptions that this paper concerns. (shrink)

This text aims to provide a contribution to the analysis of beliefs and, through the elaboration of the notion of good reasons, to make a significant contribution to the theory of rationality. It examines the main theories that have been used in the social sciences and psychology for the explanation of beliefs. The author develops a particular model which enables him to show that people often have good reasons to believe in false ideas. The central idea of this (...) class='Hi'>model is that people often draw controversial conclusions from valid arguments because they introduce implicit statements which they do not perceive, since they treat them - with good reasons - as self-evident. Hence they can hold doubtful, or even false, conclusions and regard them as solidly grounded. Boudon shows that this model can be used to reinterpret many findings from the sociology of religion and the sociology of knowledge, as well as from cognitive psychology. (shrink)

Sometimes the cognitive part of the human mind is modelled in a simplified way by degrees of belief. E.g., in philosophy of science and in formal epistemology agents are often identified by their credences in a set of claims. This line of dealing with the individual mind is currently expanded to groups by attempts of finding adequate ways of pooling individual degrees of belief into an overall group credence or, more abstractly speaking, into a collective mind. In this (...) paper, we model religious people’s minds as such a collective mind. Religious people are therein identified with a set of degrees of beliefs containing religious and secular credences. E.g., within a religious context a person may be sure that some statement is true, whereas the same person lacks non-religious support for such a credence and hence may doubt the truth of that statement within a secular context. We will also present two results on the adequacy of this model. (shrink)

This essay distinguishes between propositional belief and faith and considers the relationship between these two forms of belief, arguing that faith is not an entirely separate form of belief from propositional assent and that it does require a minimal cognitive content. The essay then goes on to consider beliefs about, and faith in, life after death and develops a metaphorical account of this faith using an Aristotelian concept of the soul as a form of life together with (...) a theological understanding of the death of Jesus in the New Testament. It is argued that the truth claims of assertions about life after death are beyond evidential support, but there are strong reasons for doubting the literal truth of such assertions. Faith in life after death however can be considered rational and truth-seeking. The essay concludes that semantic agnosticism is the proper attitude towards belief in life after death and justifies this position against two possible objections. (shrink)

We aim to further develop and evaluate the prospects of a uniquely Islamic extension of the Standard Aquinas/Calvin model. One obstacle is that certain Qur’an passages such as Surah 8:43–44 apparently suggest that Muslims have reason to think that Allah might be deceiving them. Consistent with perfect/maximally good being theology, Allah would allow such deceptions only if doing so leads to a greater good, so such passages do not necessarily give Muslims reason to doubt Allah’s goodness. Yet the (...) possibility of deception of the faithful threatens to provide a subjective defeater for the (epistemic) reliability of their cognitive faculties. (‘Even if Allah can be morally good while deceiving, how do you know you aren’t being deceived for a greater good on a more macro level, such as about the nature of the Qur’an?’) Similar in structure to Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN), this defeater threatens to undermine all of a Muslims warrant claims. We consider and evaluate the reply that there are other Qur’anic passages and/or additional conceptual resources in the Islamic tradition that provide grounds for thinking that God’s faithfulness or truthfulness is more centrally and securely embedded in a Muslim’s noetic structure than such doubts. Specifically, we will argue that under certain conditions, there exists a subjective defeater for some Muslims that, unlike McNabb’s approach, isn’t based off of the proper function condition but Plantinga’s truth aimed condition. (shrink)

In a paper recently published in this journal, Navin and Largent argue in favour of a type of policy to regulate non-medical exemptions from childhood vaccination which they call ‘Inconvenience’. This policy makes it burdensome for parents to obtain an exemption to child vaccination, for example, by requiring parents to attend immunization education sessions and to complete an application form to receive a waiver. Navin and Largent argue that this policy is preferable to ‘Eliminationism’, i.e. to policies that do not (...) allow non-medical exemptions, because Inconvenience has been shown to maintain exemption rates low while not harming parents by forcing them to do something that goes against their beliefs. We argue that it is at least doubtful that Inconvenience is ethically preferable to Eliminationism: while the latter disregards the value of liberty, Inconvenience disregards the value of fairness in the distribution of the burdens entailed by the preservation of a public good like herd immunity. We propose a variant of Inconvenience, which we call ‘Contribution’, which we think is preferable to the versions of Inconvenience discussed by Navin and Largent in that it successfully strikes a balance between the values of parents’ liberty, fairness and expected utility. (shrink)

An aspect of Peirce’s thought that may still be underappreciated is his resistance to what Levi calls _pedigree epistemology_, to the idea that a central focus in epistemology should be the justification of current beliefs. Somewhat more widely appreciated is his rejection of the subjective view of probability. We argue that Peirce’s criticisms of subjectivism, to the extent they grant such a conception of probability is viable at all, revert back to pedigree epistemology. A thoroughgoing rejection of pedigree in the (...) context of probabilistic epistemology, however, _does_ challenge prominent subjectivist responses to the problem of the priors. (shrink)

In this paper, I present and defend a novel account of doubt. In Part 1, I make some preliminary observations about the nature of doubt. In Part 2, I introduce a new puzzle about the relationship between three psychological states: doubt, belief, and confidence. I present this puzzle because my account of doubt emerges as a possible solution to it. Lastly, in Part 3, I elaborate on and defend my account of doubt. Roughly, one (...) has doubt if and only if one believes one might be wrong; I argue that this is superior to the account that says that one has doubt if and only if one has less than the highest degree of confidence. (shrink)

Clausal complements of different kinds of attitude verbs such as believe, doubt, be surprised, wonder, say, and whisper behave differently semantically in a number of respects. For example, they differ in the inference patterns they display. This paper develops a semantic account of clausal complements using partial logic which accounts for such semantic differences on the basis of a uniform meaning of clauses. It focuses on explaining the heterogeneous inference patterns associated with different kinds of attitude verbs, but it (...) contributes also to explaining differences among clausal complements of attitude verbs regarding the possibility of de re reference, anaphora support, presupposition satisfaction, and the distribution of subjunctive in certain languages. Moreover, it gives a new account of factivity. The point of departure of this paper is the general observation that the failure of inferences from attitude reports is relative in that it depends both on the general type of attitude and on the particular instance of the attitude described. Thus, from John is surprised that P and Q one cannot infer John is surprised that P and John is surprised that Q, though this is possible with believe. Conversely, one can infer from John believes that P and John believes that Q, to John believes that P and Q, but only as long as the same belief state of John is involved. In order to capture this dependency of inferences from attitude reports on a particular mental state or act, I propose an account on which clausal complements of attitude verbs (as well as independent sentences) characterize the intentional state or act described by the attitude verb in question, rather than referring to independent propositions. The semantic account of attitude reports of this paper can hence be called an 'event-based account' of clauses. Formally, the denotation of any sentence, both independent and embedded, is construed as a function mapping an intentional state or act to a function from situations (which form the content of the state or act) to truth values.. (shrink)

The belief-desire model of action explanation is deeply ingrained in multiple disciplines. There is reason to think that it is a cultural artifact. But is there an alternative? In this discussion, I will consider the radical critique of this action explanation model by Rüdiger Bittner, which argues that the model appeals to dubious mental entities, and argues for a model of reasons as responses to states or events. Instead, for Bittner, agents are reason-selectors—selecting the states (...) or events to respond to and selecting the ones the agent is disposed to respond to. By getting rid of the explanatory role of beliefs, this model runs into difficulties over errors usually attributed to false beliefs. These can be resolved by expanding the notion of dispositions to cover the case of false belief. But this suggests that the belief-reason model serves to divide the category of dispositions in an arbitrary or culturally specific way. (shrink)

The assumption of rational expectations (RE) plays two roles in economic models: it imposes restrictions on behaviour of agents, and it ensures model consistency. Dissatisfaction with RE on behavioural grounds has, in a variety of models, led to its replacement by more behaviourally plausible postulates. However, replacing RE by ad hoc behavioural postulates may result in internally inconsistent models. This work introduces a conceptual framework within which the nature of the issue can be described, and points to potential problems (...) that the abandonment of RE entails. We argue that the RE-based notion of consistency is model-specific rather than general, and introduce a weaker consistency condition that is relevant for non-RE models. To assess the consistency of these models, we propose a test and illustrate its use taking an example from the recent literature. Broader implications of the findings are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, we take issue with the belief–desire model of second- and third-person action interpretation as it is presented by both theory theories and cognitivist versions of simulation theory. These accounts take action interpretation to consist in the (tacit) attribution of proper belief–desire pairs that mirror the structure of formally valid practical inferences. We argue that the belief–desire model rests on the unwarranted assumption that the interpreter can only reach the agent's practical context of (...) action through inference. This assumption betrays a deep-seated bias toward disengaged, observational interpretation strategies. On our alternative picture, the interpreter can start off on the assumption of a shared practical context and proceed to reason discourse in those cases in which this assumption runs aground. Following Brandom's non-formalist account of reason discourse, we suggest that interpreting other people's actions in terms of reasons is not a matter of following the principles of formally valid practical syllogisms, but of endorsing practical material inferences that are correct in virtue of a shared practical world. (shrink)

I defend the claim that propositional religious faith that p implies belief that p. While this claim might seem trivial, it has been criticized by Alston, Pojman, Audi, and McKaughan and Howard-Snyder. I begin by defending this view against four objections. In addition to criticizing the belief-plus model, each of the above philosophers have offered their own alternatives to the belief-plus model. I focus on McKaughan’s recent accounts of faith: ”trusting acceptance’ and ”hopeful affirmation’. I (...) argue, following Howard-Snyder, that hopeful affirmation fails to give sufficient conditions for faith. I then argue that there is no reason to think that the token acceptances in faith as trusting acceptance are not instances of belief. (shrink)

Whereas the belief-desire model maintains that reasons for action either are or depend on reasons which consist in the agent's own beliefs and desires, I contend that reasons for action, whether taken normatively or explanatorily, are states of affairs. I defend this view by reference to non-deliberative responses to states of affairs agents encounter directly – stopping for a stop sign or answering a knock at the door, for instance–actions which I take to be common, to presuppose no (...) specific attitudes on the part of agents, and to be basic to all action. (shrink)

This is a study of John Dewey's philosophy based on three interrelated themes. I maintain, first, that the best understanding of Deweys work is achieved by a Peircean reading. On that reading Deweys philosophy is partly interpreted through the conceptual framework provided by C. S. Peirce. Second, I argue that a detailed grasp of Dewey's theory of inquiry is essential for a convincing assessment of his philosophical views. Third, I show that Dewey's theory of inquiry creates a common context for (...) different kinds of inquiry. ;Problem-solving is at the core of Dewey's philosophy. A general notion of inquiry does not presuppose that successful methods need to be copied. To understand inquiry as an activity sharing common features one needs to see how problem-solving in one field can be facilitated by problem-solving in other fields. ;I discuss recent debates on Dewey's philosophy based on Rorty's interpretation of his work and argue that because of a failure to emphasise Dewey's methodological approach, some Dewey-scholars who claim to be true to Dewey's word and spirit present implausible objections to the work of philosophers who, like Rorty, interpret Dewey liberally. Although I do not think that Rorty presents a very useful interpretation of Dewey, I do think that the attempt to incorporate Dewey's work into a forceful and spirited philosophical argument is more useful and interesting than a learned discussion about what Dewey's views were exactly at any given point in time. ;The second chapter of my study is devoted to an exploration of some central parts of Charles Peirce's philosophy, especially the role and place of the belief/doubt model in Peirce's thought. The belief/doubt model outlines a framework for inquiry that defines the basic tenets of pragmatism. ;The chapters that follow deal with Dewey's theory of inquiry. I discuss the central parts of this theory arguing that Dewey's presentation of reasoning at the early defining stages of inquiry makes it plausible to understand it as abductive reasoning. Such reasoning is concerned with selecting possible hypotheses. Thus for Dewey the stage in inquiry where hypotheses are selected is the crucial stage. ;Dewey's idea of natural science as a model for inquiry is derived from the view that scientific success in modern times secures natural science a special status. This, according to Dewey, is something the philosophical community has failed to appreciate. Dewey's examination of some concepts and procedures of natural science leads him to criticise many common philosophical assumptions, such as the idea that science must be based on a strict distinction between objective facts and subjective factors. Knowledge for Dewey should be characterised in terms of a certain relationship between an agent and his environment rather than in terms of true statements of objective facts. (shrink)

The relationship between personal meaning, belief systems, and health and wellbeing is discussed. It is argued that our conceptions of health and wellbeing must incorporate a concern for spirituality. As information is processed via our senses in the course of human development, we gradually construct complex belief systems, including worldviews, life-philosophies, religions, mythologies, and spiritual paths. Though differing in content, these complex belief systems guide our behavior and provide us with a sense of personal meaning. However, meaning-making (...) is not the end point of the process. Rather, meaning-making must be accompanied by the willingness to doubt. It is the dialectical tension between belief and doubt that gives rise to a spiritual sense of being-characterized by awe, reverence, and meaning-that has salutogenic consequences. (shrink)

Articles, most previously published in periodicals, 1955-1975.

Peirce makes it clear that doubt and belief oppose one another. But that slogan admits of a weaker and a stronger reading. The weaker reading permits and the stronger reading forbids one to be in a state of doubt and of belief with respect to the same proposition at the same time. The stronger claim is standardly attributed to Peirce, for textual and philosophical reasons. This paper maintains that this standard construal is excessively strong. It argues (...) that the secondary literature tends to presuppose the strong reading and that it often does so by confusing sufficient conditions for belief with necessary ones. It acknowledges some textual evidence on behalf of the strong reading but maintains that,taken as a whole, the relevant passages are as friendly to the weak as to the strong interpretation of Peirce. The paper then links the doubt–belief theory of“The Fixation of Belief” to the papers on probability that occupy the bulk of the Illustrations of the Logic of Science. It shows that Peirce's discussion of probability, strength of belief, and weight of evidence makes room for confidence, but not belief, to be undermined and thus offers a more flexible version of Peirce's theory of inquiry. (shrink)

What is it for a group to believe something? A summative account assumes that for a group to believe that p most members of the group must believe that p. Accounts of this type are commonly proposed in interpretation of everyday ascriptions of beliefs to groups. I argue that a nonsummative account corresponds better to our unexamined understanding of such ascriptions. In particular I propose what I refer to as the joint acceptance model of group belief. I argue (...) that group beliefs according to the joint acceptance model are important phenomena whose aetiology and development require investigation. There is an analogous phenomenon of social or group preference, which social choice theory tends to ignore. (shrink)

The scheme of concepts we employ in daily life to explain intentional behaviour form a belief-desire model, in which motivating states are sorted into two suitably broad categories. The BD model embeds a philosophy of action, i.e. a set of assumptions about the ontology of motivation with subsequent restrictions on psychologising and norms of practical reason. A comprehensive critique of those assumptions and implications is offered in this work, and various criticisms of the model are met. (...) The model’s predictive and explanatory value exploits realistic notions of beliefs and desires as inner states underlying behavioural patterns. It is argued that the popular explication that beliefs and desires differ in their “direction of fit” is insufficient and inescapably normative. Essential to the model is the causal role given to desires. ‘Desire’ is therefore focussed. A dispositional and functional characterisation of desires is compatible with an eliminative view of dispositions. These views taken together do not exclude regarding desires as causes. Desires have propositional content. Content is a feature of desire’s dispositionality, and thereby causally relevant. This functional characterisation of content allows for non-linguistic content. The phenomenal conception of desire is criticised and diagnosed. A theme defended in various ways throughout the work is that desires mostly are unknown to agents and that the agent is in a less privileged position when it comes to analysis of his own motivational states, than e.g. people close to him. There are formal and empirical reasons to be pessimistic about agents’ abilities to make reliable predictions about their own intentional behaviour. The BD model’s concept of ‘intention’ is discussed and compared with non-reductive views of intentions. Criticisms of the common view that David Hume defends a BD model are presented, but it is argued that the BD interpretation of Hume is plausible, although this reading requires important qualifications in order to preserve internal consistency. The BD model leaves room for focussing attention, making foregrounded practical judgements, higher order desiring and other activities affecting one’s decision process. However, these various forms of deliberation in many cases are overrated. Three suggested norms of internal structural rationality are criticised in favour of simple Humean instrumentalism about practical reason. That position implies that criticism of other people’s ultimate ends is not a matter of internal rationality, but an inevitably social practice; it is dependent upon our concern for others, our view of their social roles and our own intrinsic desires. (shrink)

The following considerations concern modelling Belief Dynamics (BD) not just in the sense of a formalization, but rather in the sense of building a computational model and implementing the corresponding data structures and algorithms of recomputing beliefs. The purpose of such a project is to illustrate some ideas about belief changes in a Web of Beliefs (WoB) to explore and deepen one's understanding of belief changes by trying to implement or improve corresponding algorithms.

This paper tries to answer the question why the epistemic value of so many social simulations is questionable. I consider the epistemic value of a social simulation as questionable if it contributes neither directly nor indirectly to the understanding of empirical reality. To examine this question, two classical social simulations are analyzed with respect to their possible epistemic justification: Schelling’s neighborhood segregation model and Axelrod’s reiterated Prisoner’s Dilemma simulations of the evolution of cooperation. It is argued that Schelling’s simulation (...) is useful because it can be related to empirical reality, while Axelrod’s simulations and those of his followers cannot and thus that their scientific value remains doubtful. I relate this findingto the background beliefs of modelers about the superiority of the modeling method as expressed in Joshua Epstein’s keynote address “Why model?”. (shrink)

We distinguish the set of explicit beliefs of a reasoner, his "belief base", from the beliefs that are merely implicit. Syntax-based belief change governed by the structure of the belief base and the ranking ("prioritization") of its elements is reconstructed with the help of an epistemic entrenchment relation in the style of Gärdenfors and Makinson. Though priorities are essentially different from entrenchments, distinguished relations of epistemic entrenchment may be obtained from prioritized belief bases by a number (...) of different constructions. An approximate reconstruction of syntax-based belief change is possible, which can be strengthened to a strict identity in some important special cases. A competitive interpretation and a minimal change interpretation of the basic idea of entrenchment are discussed. It is argued that entrenchment essentially involves multiple belief changes, i.e., changes by sets of sentences. (shrink)

An experiment is reported examining dual-process models of belief bias in syllogistic reasoning using a problem complexity manipulation and an inspection-time method to monitor processing latencies for premises and conclusions. Endorsement rates indicated increased belief bias on complex problems, a finding that runs counter to the “belief-first” selective scrutiny model, but which is consistent with other theories, including “reasoning-first” and “parallel-process” models. Inspection-time data revealed a number of effects that, again, arbitrated against the selective scrutiny (...) class='Hi'>model. The most striking inspection-time result was an interaction between logic and belief on premise-processing times, whereby belief - logic conflict problems promoted increased latencies relative to non-conflict problems. This finding challenges belief-first and reasoning-first models, but is directly predicted by parallel-process models, which assume that the outputs of simultaneous heuristic and analytic processing streams lead to an awareness of belief - logic conflicts than then require time-consuming resolution. (shrink)

The Capgras delusion is a condition in which a person believes that an imposter has replaced some close friend or relative. Recent theorists have appealed to Bayesianism to help explain both why a subject with the Capgras delusion adopts this delusional belief and why it persists despite counter-evidence. The Bayesian approach is useful for addressing these questions; however, the main proposal of this essay is that Capgras subjects also have a delusional conception of epistemic possibility, more specifically, they think (...) more things are possible, given what is known, than non-delusional subjects do. I argue that this is a central way in which their thinking departs from ordinary cognition and that it cannot be characterized in Bayesian terms. Thus, in order to fully understand the cognitive processing involved in the Capgras delusion, we must move beyond Bayesianism. 1 The Simple Bayesian Model2 Anomalous Evidence and the Capgras Delusion3 Impaired Reasoning4 Setting Priors5 Epistemic Modality6 Delusions of Possibility7 Delusions of Possibility in Different Contexts8 How Many Factors? (shrink)

There are three well-developed sorts of answer to the question ‘What kind of meaning is possessed by religious beliefs?’ The first sort regards religious beliefs as truth claims of the kind encountered in the natural and social sciences and in everyday life. Religious beliefs are claims about how things stand in some part of the world. They are to be counted as true or false depending on whether those claims correspond with how things in fact stand. On this reading, religious (...) beliefs are at least in principle verifiable or falsifiable through experiences of appropriate types. There are of course different notions of ‘experiences of the appropriate type’. A Russian cosmonaut returned from space saying that there was no God. He regarded religious beliefs as falsified by the observations he made when he went into the sky and looked around. Others think of religious beliefs as testable, not through ordinary sense experience, but through rather similar kinds of experiences after death. In either of these versions, the sort of meaning possessed by religious beliefs and the sort of truth or falsehood of which they are susceptible are not radically different from the sorts of meaning and truth typical of claims about empirical facts. (shrink)

From an ethnomethodological perspective, this article describes social actors’ everyday and virtual stances in terms of their practices of provisional doubt and belief for the purpose of fact-establishment. Facts are iterated, reinforced, elaborated, and transformed via phenomenal practices configuring relations of equipment, interpretation, and method organized as “other” than, but relevant to, the everyday. Such practices in scientific research involve forms of suspended belief; in other areas they can instead involve forms of suspended doubt. As an (...) illuminating example of this latter class of virtual fact-establishment practices, I offer an extended analysis of the “yes; and…” principle of information-establishment used in improvisational theatre to progressively develop the content of a performance. (shrink)

The paper suggests a way of modeling belief changes within the tradition of formal belief revision theories. The present model extends the scope of traditional proposals, such as AGM, so as to take care of “structural belief changes” – a type of radical shifts that is best illustrated with, but not limited to, instances of scientific discovery; we obtain AGM expansions and contractions as limiting cases. The representation strategy relies on a non-standard use of a semantic (...) machinery. More precisely, the model seeks to correlate knowledge states with interpretations of a given formal language L, in such a way that the epistemic state of an agent at a given time gives rise to a picture of how things could be, if there weren’t anything else to know. Interpretations of L proceed along supervaluational ideas; hence, the model as a whole can be seen as a particular application of supervaluational semantics to epistemic matters. (shrink)

In this highly original text, Christopher Steinsvold explores an alternative semantics for logics of rational belief. Topologies, as mathematical objects, are typically interpreted in terms of space; here topologies are re-interpreted in terms of an agent with rational beliefs. The topological semantics tells us that the agent can never, in principle, know everything; that the agent's beliefs can never be complete. -/- A number of completeness proofs are given for a variety of logics of rational belief. Beyond this, (...) the author explores the philosophical question of why our beliefs can never be complete, and considers the possibility that a totality of truths is a dialethia. -/- This work will be of interest to all philosophers interested in epistemology, and modal logicians as well. (shrink)

Jeffrey updating is a natural extension of Bayesian updating to cases where the evidence is uncertain. But, the resulting degrees of belief appear to be sensitive to the order in which the uncertain evidence is acquired, a rather un-Bayesian looking effect. This order dependence results from the way in which basic Jeffrey updating is usually extended to sequences of updates. The usual extension seems very natural, but there are other plausible ways to extend Bayesian updating that maintain order-independence. I (...) will explore three models of sequential updating, the usual extension and two alternatives. I will show that the alternative updating schemes derive from extensions of the usual rigidity requirement, which is at the heart of Jeffrey updating. Finally, I will establish necessary and sufficient conditions for order-independent updating, and show that extended rigidity is closely related to these conditions. (shrink)