Belief, Credence, and the Preface Paradox

Philosophy Compass, 2013

Beliefs come in different strengths. An agent's credence in a proposition is a measure of the strength of her belief in that proposition. Various norms for credences have been proposed. Traditionally, philosophers have tried to argue for these norms by showing that any agent who violates them will be lead by her credences to make bad decisions. In this article, we survey a new strategy for justifying these norms. The strategy begins by identifying an epistemic utility function and a decision-theoretic norm; we then show that the decision-theoretic norm applied to the epistemic utility function yields the norm for credences that we wish to justify. We survey results already obtained using this strategy, and we suggest directions for future research. Like the rest of us, Paul's beliefs come in degrees. Some are stronger than others. In particular , Paul believes that Linda is a bank teller and a political activist more strongly than he believes that she is a bank teller. That is, his credence in the former proposition is greater than his credence in the latter. Surely, Paul is irrational. But why? 1 In this survey, I describe a new strategy for answering such questions. It is a strategy that was first introduced by Jim Joyce (1998). The traditional strategy-the strategy that Joyce sought to replace or, at least, supplement is to show that such credences will lead the agent who has them to make decisions that are guaranteed to have a bad outcome. These are the well-known Dutch Book arguments. 2 For instance, Paul's credences will lead him to buy a book of bets on the two propositions concerning Linda that is guaranteed to lose him money. This, it is claimed, makes him irrational. Now, the validity of this argument has been the subject of much debate. However, even if it works, it only identifies one way in which Paul's credences are irrational: they are poor guides to action; from a pragmatic point of view, they are irrational. But, intuitively, there is something irrational about these credences from a purely epistemic point of view; they seem to exhibit a purely epistemic flaw. Even for an agent incapable of acting on her credences-and therefore incapable of making the bets that lead to the guaranteed loss-Paul's credences would be irrational. We will be concerned with identifying why that is so. That is, Joyce's strategy, which we describe here, provides a purely epistemic route to the norms that govern credences; this route does not rely on any connection between credence and action. We will begin by showing how the strategy works in the case of Paul. Then, we will show how to extend it to establish probabilism, which is the norm that Joyce considers in his original paper. Probabilism is one of the core tenets of so-called Bayesian episte-mology. Our next target is the other core tenet of that view, namely, conditionalization. We will give an argument for that norm that uses Joyce's strategy as well: it is due to Hilary Greaves and David Wallace (2006). After considering how we might strengthen these arguments by weakening the assumptions they make, we conclude by describing possible avenues for future research.

Philosophy Compass, 2020

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.

Erkenntnis

In this paper, I offer reasons to conclude that either belief impermissivism or credal impermissivism is false. That is to say, I argue against the conjunction of belief impermissivism and credal impermissivism. I defend this conclusion in three ways. First, I show what I take to be an implausible consequence of holding that for any rational credence in p, there is only one correlating rational belief-attitude toward p, given a body of evidence. Second, I provide thought experiments designed to support the intuition that there are at least a few credences in some cases for which more than one belief-attitude is rationally permissible. Third, I provide one possible theoretical grounding for my position by appeal to Jamesian values. Recently, Elizabeth Jackson and Greta Turnbull have defined credal permissivism as the view that "for a body of evidence and a proposition p, there is more than one credence in p that can be rationally held." 1 Similarly, they have defined belief permissivism as the view that "for a body of evidence and a proposition p, there is more than one belief-attitude in p that can be rationally held." 2 Building from these definitions, we can define forms of credal and belief impermissivism as follows: Credal Impermissivism: there is never more than one credence in p that can be rationally held given a body of evidence and a proposition p.

Synthese, 2020

I explore how rational belief and rational credence relate to evidence. I begin by looking at three cases where rational belief and credence seem to respond differently to evidence: cases of naked statistical evidence, lotteries, and hedged assertions. I consider an explanation for these cases, namely, that one ought not form beliefs on the basis of statistical evidence alone, and raise worries for this view. Then, I suggest another view that explains how belief and credence relate to evidence. My view focuses on the possibilities that the evidence makes salient. I argue that this makes better sense of the difference between rational credence and rational belief than other accounts.

Theoria, 2020

According to the Rational Threshold View, a rational agent believes p if and only if her credence in p is equal to or greater than a certain threshold. One of the most serious challenges for this view is the problem of statistical evidence: statistical evidence is often not sufficient to make an outright belief rational, no matter how probable the target proposition is given such evidence. This indicates that rational belief is not as sensitive to statistical evidence as rational credence. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we argue that, in addition to playing a decisive role in rationalizing outright belief, non-statistical evidence also plays a preponderant role in rationalizing credence. More precisely, when both types of evidence are present in a context, non-statistical evidence should receive a heavier weight than statistical evidence in determining rational credence. Second, based on this result, we argue that a modified version of the Rational Threshold View can avoid the problem of statistical evidence. We conclude by suggesting a possible explanation of the varying sensitivity to different types of evidence for belief and credence based on the respective aims of these attitudes.

Religious Studies, 2019

In this paper, I argue that faith’s going beyond the evidence need not compromise faith’s epistemic rationality. First, I explain how some of the recent literature on belief and credence points to a distinction between what I call B-evidence and C-evidence. Then, I apply this distinction to rational faith. I argue that the idea that faith is more sensitive to B-evidence than to C-evidence entails that faith can go beyond the evidence and still be epistemically rational.

Argues that resolving the central dispute in the ethics of belief between evidentialists and pragmatists turns on the correct explanation of the first-personal deliberative perspective on belief. Although evidentialism does not follow directly from the mere psychological truth that we cannot believe for non-evidential reasons, it does follow directly from the conceptual truth about belief that explains why we cannot do so.

Synthese 143 (2005), pp.273-290

Some philosophers understand epistemological skepticism as merely presenting a paradox to be solved, a paradox given rise to by some apparently forceful arguments. I argue that such a view needs to be justified, and that the best way to do so is to show that we cannot help seeing skepticism as obviously false. The obviousness (to us) of the falsity of skepticism is, I suggest, explained by the fact that we cannot live without knowledge-beliefs (a knowledge-belief about the world is a belief that a person or a group of people know that p, where p is an empirical proposition about the world). I then go on to argue for the indispensability of knowledge-beliefs. The first line of argument appeals to the practical aspects of our employment of the concept of knowledge, and the second line of argument draws on some Davidsonian ideas concerning understanding and massive agreement.

Synthese , 2013

The idea that knowledge can be extended by inference from what is known seems highly plausible. Yet, as shown by familiar preface paradox and lottery-type cases, the possibility of aggregating uncertainty casts doubt on its tenability. We show that these considerations go much further than previously recognized and significantly restrict the kinds of closure ordinary theories of knowledge can endorse. Meeting the challenge of uncertainty aggregation requires either the restriction of knowledge-extending inferences to single premises, or eliminating epistemic uncertainty in known premises. The first strategy, while effective, retains little of the original idea—conclusions even of modus ponens inferences from known premises are not always known. We then look at the second strategy, inspecting the most elaborate and promising attempt to secure the epistemic role of basic inferences, namely Timothy Williamson’s safety theory of knowledge. We argue that while it indeed has the merit of allowing basic inferences such as modus ponens to extend knowledge, Williamson’s theory faces formidable difficulties. These difficulties, moreover, arise from the very feature responsible for its virtue- the infallibilism of knowledge.

Synthese, 2019

Duncan Pritchard’s Epistemic Angst promises a novel solution to the closure-based sceptical problem that, unlike more traditional solutions, does not entail revising our fundamental epistemological commitments. In order to do this, it appeals to a Wittgensteinian account of rational evaluation, the overarching theme of which is that it neither makes sense to doubt nor to believe in our anti-sceptical hinge commitments. The purpose of this paper is to show that the argument for the claim that there can be no rational basis to believe our anti-sceptical hinge commitments relies upon an implicit assumption about rational support that I label The Pritchensteinian Rational Grounds Principle. I argue that, insofar as this principle is intended to apply to closure-style inferences, it leads to irrational doxastic attitudes. I consider a seemingly plausible modification of the principle that would avoid this result but show that this modified principle faces serious problems of its own.

A central question in epistemology is: which beliefs are rational? However, I intend to argue that the notion of rationality is, in fact, a conflation of two quite different notions: the notion of what we ought to believe and the notion of what the evidence supports. I also think that many of the problems that epistemologists face can be solved by distinguishing these two notions. I will say more about these notions later in the paper, but for now, the crucial point to note is that what beliefs we ought to have depends, in part, on our cognitive capacities, whereas what beliefs the evidence supports does not. In this paper, I will focus on how this distinction can be used to address some puzzling issues that arise with regard to the question of how precise our doxastic attitudes should be.

2007

Some of the few who endorse some such requirement are Fumerton [1995], Bonjour [1998], Wright [2004a]-but not without qualification. 2 For instance Van Cleve [1984], Greco [1999]. 1 This proposition is, at least at the face of it, not equivalent to the proposition (1) and (2) epistemically support (3). The latter proposition is about an epistemic supportrelation, not about a logical relation. But I think that some of the things said in this chapter about L apply to the latter proposition too. But there are very important differences between the two [cf. Cohen, 1998], so that they must be properly treated separately. I discuss similar issues with respect to the proposition about epistemic support in chapter 4. 2 "equivocation" may be understood as designating the fact that the same linguistic expression in two different premises stands for two different concepts. In this sense the mental process of inferring cannot show "equivocation". But whenever we fall prey to an "equivocation", it is also true that our reasoning is defective. It is this defect in reasoning that I call equivocation. 3 I discuss the relation between evidence and attitudes in section 2.2. 4 I sometimes express this fact by saying that the subject "has justification for (3)" or that for the subject "(3) has positive epistemic status". 5 I express the fact that the subject believes (3) for her good epistemic reason sometimes by saying that she "justifiably believes (3)" or that she "is justified in believing (3)". Furthermore, the subject's believing (3) for her good epistemic reason in N , involves the fact that I express by saying that the subject "bases her belief in (3) on her beliefs in (1) and (2)". See below in the text. 12 Furthermore Fumerton does not distinguish between E makes probable P and E supports/justifies P. In his commentary to Fumerton [1995], Stewart Cohen [1998] objects to taking the latter two propositions to be equivalent.

2011

This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors). After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. On this view, what it is for an agent to believe a proposition is for her credence in this proposition to be above a certain threshold, a threshold that varies depending on pragmatic factors. We show that while this account of belief can provide an elegant explanation of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, it is not alone in doing so, for an alternative account of belief, which we call the reasoning disposition account, can do so as well. And the latter account, we argue, is far more plausible than pragmatic credal reductivism, since it accords f...

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

This paper defends a principle I call Equal Treatment, according to which the rationality of a belief is determined in precisely the same way as the rationality of any other state. For example, if wearing a raincoat is rational just in case doing so maximizes expected value, then believing some proposition P is rational just in case doing so maximizes expected value. This contrasts with the popular view that the rationality of belief is determined by evidential support. It also contrasts with the common idea that in the case of belief, there are two different incommensurable senses of rationality, one of which is distinctively epistemic. I present considerations that favor Equal Treatment over these two alternatives, reply to objections, and criticize some arguments for Evidentialism. I also show how Equal Treatment opens the door to a distinctive kind of response to skepticism.

Nous

We argue that giving up on the closure of rational belief under conjunction comes with a substantial price. Either rational belief is closed under conjunction, or else the epistemology of belief has a serious diachronic deficit over and above the synchronic failures of conjunctive closure. The argument for this, which can be viewed as a sequel to the preface paradox, is called the 'review paradox'; it is presented in four distinct, but closely related versions.