The stability of belief how rational belief coheres with probability
In everyday life we normally express our beliefs in all-or-nothing terms: I believe it is going to rain; I don't believe that my lottery ticket will win. In other cases, if possible, we resort to numerical probabilities: my degree of belief that it is going to rain is 80%; the probability that...
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| Format: | UnknownFormat |
| Sprache: | eng |
| Veröffentlicht: |
Oxford, New York, NY
Oxford University Press
2017
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| Ausgabe: | First Edition |
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Tag hinzufügen | Zusammenfassung: | In everyday life we normally express our beliefs in all-or-nothing terms: I believe it is going to rain; I don't believe that my lottery ticket will win. In other cases, if possible, we resort to numerical probabilities: my degree of belief that it is going to rain is 80%; the probability that I assign to my ticket winning is one in a million. It is an open philosophical question how all-or-nothing belief and numerical belief relate to each other, and how we ought to reason with them simultaneously. The Stability of Belief develops a theory of rational belief that aims to answer this question. Hannes Leitgeb develops a joint normative theory of all-or-nothing belief and numerical degrees of belief. While rational all-or-nothing belief is studied in traditional epistemology and is usually assumed to obey logical norms, rational degrees of belief constitute the subject matter of Bayesian epistemology and are normally taken to conform to probabilistic norms. One of the central open questions in formal epistemology is what beliefs and degrees of belief have to be like in order for them to cohere with each other. The answer defended in this book is a stability account of belief: a rational agent believes a proposition just in case the agent assigns a stably high degree of belief to it. Leitgeb determines this theory's consequences for, and applications to, learning, suppositional reasoning, decision-making, assertion, acceptance, conditionals, and chance. The volume builds new bridges between logic and probability theory, traditional and formal epistemology, theoretical and practical rationality, and synchronic and diachronic norms for reasoning. -- 1. Introduction. The nature of belief ; Concepts of belief ; Elimination, reduction, irreducibility ; Norms for belief : how should beliefs cohere? ; The route to an answer ; Bridge principles for rational belief and rational degrees of belief ; What is to come -- Appendix A: The review argument : on the diachronic costs of not closing rational belief under conjunction -- 2 The Humean thesis on belief.. Introduction ; Explicating the Humean thesis ; The consequences of the Humean thesis ; Conclusions -- Appendix B: Where does stability come from? Stability through repetition -- 3. Logical closure and the Lockean thesis. The Lockean thesis and closure of belief under conjunction ; P-stability ; The theory and its costs ; Application to the Lottery Paradox ; A first shot at the Preface Paradox ; An application in formal epistemology ; Summary -- 4. Conditional belief and belief dynamics. A stability theory of conditional belief and belief dynamics : introduction and synopsis ; a stability theory of conditional belief and belief dynamics : the formal details ; some examples with a concrete interpretation -- Appendix C: Does rational belief reduce to subjective probability? Does it supervene? The first argument against supervenience ; The second argument against supervenience -- 5. Stability and epistemic decision theory. Belief's aiming at the truth ; Belief's aiming at subjective probability -- 6 Action, assertability, acceptance. Action ; assertability ; acceptance ; the preface paradox reconsidered -- Appendix D: On counterfactuals and chance. A new paradox ; The derivation ; Related arguments ; Diagnosis ; A new way out ; Evaluation and prospects |
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| Beschreibung: | Literaturverzeichnis: Seiten 349-360 |
| Beschreibung: | x, 365 Seiten Diagramme |
| ISBN: | 9780198732631 978-0-19-873263-1 |