Induction, Acceptance, and Rational Belief PDF Download

Author: M. Swain
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401033900
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The papers collected in this volume were originally presented at a sym posium held at the University of Pennsylvania in December of 1968. Each of the papers has been revised in light of the discussions that took place during this symposium. None of the papers has appeared in print previously. The extensive bibliography that appears at the end of the volume was originally distributed during the symposium and was revised on the basis of many helpful suggestions made by those who participated. The symposium was made possible by a grant from The National Science Foundation and funds contributed by the Philosophy Depart ment of the University of Pennsylvania. On behalf of the contributors to this volume, I would like to express my thanks to these organizations for their generous support. In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to the members of the Graduate Philosophy Students Organization at the University of Penn sylvania for the considerable assistance they gave me during the sym posium. My thanks, also, to Judith Sofranko and Lynn Luckett for their very responsible efforts in the preparation of the manuscript. Finally, I would like to thank Professor James Cornman for his invaluable advice and encouragement.

Author: Igor Douven
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108386407
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
We talk and think about our beliefs both in a categorical (yes/no) and in a graded way. How do the two kinds of belief hang together? The most straightforward answer is that we believe something categorically if we believe it to a high enough degree. But this seemingly obvious, near-platitudinous claim is known to give rise to a paradox commonly known as the 'lottery paradox' – at least when it is coupled with some further seeming near-platitudes about belief. How to resolve that paradox has been a matter of intense philosophical debate for over fifty years. This volume offers a collection of newly commissioned essays on the subject, all of which provide compelling reasons for rethinking many of the fundamentals of the debate.

Author: Scott Sturgeon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192584669
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Scott Sturgeon presents an original account of mental states and their dynamics. He develops a detailed story of coarse- and fine-grained mental states, a novel perspective on how they fit together, an engaging theory of the rational transitions between them, and a fresh view of how formal methods can advance our understanding in this area. In doing so, he addresses a deep four-way divide in literature on epistemic rationality. Formal epistemology is done in specialized languages—often seeming a lot more like mathematics than Plato—and so can alienate philosophers who are drawn to more traditional work on thought experiments in epistemic rationality. Conversely, informal epistemology appears to be a lot more like Plato than mathematics and, as such, it tends to deter philosophers drawn to formal models of the phenomena. Similarly, the epistemology of coarse-grained states boils down everything to a discussion of rational belief—making the area appear a lot more like foundations of knowledge than anything useful for the theory rational decision, such as decision-making under uncertainty. The Rational Mind unifies work in all of these areas for the first time.

Author: Ralph Wedgwood
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198874499
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
This book gives a general theory of rational belief. Although it can be read by itself, is a sequel to the author's previous book The Value of Rationality (Oxford, 2017). It takes the general conception of rationality that was defended in that earlier book, and combines it with an account of the varieties of belief, and of what it is for these beliefs to count as "correct", to develop an account of what it is for beliefs to count as rational. According to this account, rationality comes in degrees: the degree to which one's beliefs counts as rational is determined by their distance from a corresponding probability function - where this distance is measured by those beliefs' "expected degree of incorrectness" according to the probability function; the account also involves an explanation of what determines exactly which probability function plays this role in each case, and of why this probability function should play this role. In developing and defending this account, new light is shed on several central epistemological issues. These issues include: the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification; the debates between internalism and externalism, and between foundationalism and coherentism; the significance - or lack of it - of the notion of 'evidence'; the relationship between credences, full belief, inference, and suspension of judgment; the nature of the kind of possibility that is presupposed by the relevant sort of probability; and whether rationality is "diachronic" - so that the beliefs that it is rational for us to have now depend, in part, on the beliefs that we held in the past. Finally, some suggestions are made about how this theory bears on a range of further topics, including the defeasibility of inference, scepticism, and the analysis of knowledge.

Author: Laura Frances Callahan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199672156
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Is religious faith consistent with being an intellectually virtuous thinker? In this volume 14 original essays, written by a diverse and distinguished group of thinkers, offer new approaches to the central issues and controversies surrounding the place of intellectual virtue in religious faith.

Author: P. Engel
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9780792362388
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
The notion of belief figures prominently in contemporary philosophy of language and mind and in cognitive science. These essays address a range of issues concerning the complexity of our belief attitudes, their contents, and the influence of motivational factors on beliefs. The book is addressed to philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists and social theorists interested in the problem of representation, metarepresentation and the contents of propositional attitudes.

Author: R. Bogdan
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400977182
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
The aim of this series is to inform both professional philosophers and a larger readership (of social and natural scientists, methodologists, mathematicians, students, teachers, publishers, etc.) about what is going on, who's who, and who does what in contemporary philosophy and logic. PROFILES is designed to present the research activity and the results of already outstanding personalities and schools and of newly emerging ones in the various fields of philosophy and logic. There are many Festschrift volumes dedicated to various philosophers. There is the celebrated Library of Living Philosophers edited by P. A. Schilpp whose format influenced the present enterprise. Still they can only cover very little of the contemporary philosophical scene. Faced with a tremendous expansion of philosophical information and with an almost frightening division oflabor and increas ing specialization we need systematic and regular ways of keeping track of what happens in the profession. PROFILES is intended to perform such a function. Each volume is devoted to one or several philosophers whose views and results 'are presented and discussed. The profiled philosopher(s} will summarize and review his (their) own work in the main fields of signifi cant contribution. This work will be discussed and evaluated by invited contributors. Relevant historical and/or biographical data, an up-to-date bibliography with short abstracts of the most important works and, whenever possible, references to significant reviews and discussions will also be included.

Author: P.K. Moser
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400945264
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Broadly speaking, this is a book about truth and the criteria thereof. Thus it is, in a sense, a book about justification and rationality. But it does not purport to be about the notion of justification or the notion of rationality. For the assumption that there is just one notion of justification, or just one notion of rationality, is, as the book explains, very misleading. Justification and rationality come in various kinds. And to that extent, at least, we should recognize a variety of notions of justification and rationality. This, at any rate, is one of the morals of Chapter VI. This book, in Chapters I-V, is mainly concerned with the kind of justification and rationality characteristic of a truth-seeker, specifically a seeker of truth about the world impinging upon the senses: the so-called empirical world. Hence the book's title. But since the prominent contemporary approaches to empirical justification are many and varied, so also are the epistemological issues taken up in the following chapters. For instance, there will be questions about so-called coherence and its role, if any, in empirical justification. And there will be questions about social consensus (whatever it is) and its significance, or the lack thereof, to empirical justification. Furthermore, the perennial question of whether, and if so how, empirical knowledge has so-called founda tions will be given special attention.

Author: G.A. Pearce
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401025487
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
During Hallowe'en of 1970, the Department of Philosophy of the Univer sity of Western Ontario held its annual fall colloquium at London, On tario. The general topic of the sessions that year was conceptual change. The thirteen papers composing this volume stem more or less directly from those meetings; six of them are printed here virtually as delivered, while the remaining seven were subsequently written by invitation. The programme of the colloquium was to have consisted of major papers delivered by Professors Wilfrid Sellars, Stephan Korner, Paul Ziff and Hilary Putnam, with shorter commentary thereupon by Professors Robert Binkley, Joseph Ullian, Jerry Fodor and Robert Barrett, respec tively. And that is the way it happened, with one important exception: at the eleventh hour, Sellars and Binkley exchanged roles. This gave Binkley the rather unusual and challenging task of providing a suitable Sellarsian answer to a question not of his own asking - for Binkley's paper was written under Sellars' original title. Sellars' own contribution to the vo lume is perhaps more nearly what he would have presented as main speaker than a direct response to Binkley. However, it has seemed best, on balance, to attempt no further stylistic accommodation of the one paper to the other; their mutual philosophical relevance will be evident in any case. The editors would here like to extend special thanks to both Sellars and Binkley for their extraordinary efforts under the circumstances.

Author: Franz Huber
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402091982
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
This anthology is the first book to give a balanced overview of the competing theories of degrees of belief. It also explicitly relates these debates to more traditional concerns of the philosophy of language and mind and epistemic logic.