Disagreement, Relativism and Doxastic Revision

Disagreement and Attitudinal Relativism

Relativism and Disagreement

It has often been proposed that claims about what is funny, delicious, or likely are “subjective,” in the sense that their truth depends not only on how things are with the objects they explicitly concern, but on how things are with some subject not explicitly mentioned. This thought is supported by the striking degree to which we differ in our judgements about these matters. If there are wholl...

Epistemic Relativism and Reasonable Disagreement [version of June, 2007]

I begin with some familiar conceptions of epistemic relativism. One kind of epistemic relativism is descriptive pluralism. This is the simple, non-normative thesis that many different communities, cultures, social networks, etc. endorse different epistemic systems (E-systems), i.e., different sets of norms, standards, or principles for forming beliefs and other doxastic states. Communities try ...

Doxastic Attitudes as Belief-Revision Policies

While propositional doxastic attitudes, like knowledge and belief, capture an agent’s opinion about certain propositions, her attitudes towards sources of information express her opinion about the reliability (or trustworthiness) of those sources. If an agent trusts a witness, then she will, within certain limits, tend to accept his testimony as veridical. But if she considers the witness to be...

Conditional Doxastic Models: A Qualitative Approach to Dynamic Belief Revision

In this paper, we present a semantical approach to multi-agent belief revision and belief update. For this, we introduce relational structures called conditional doxastic models (CDM’s, for short). We show this setting to be equivalent to an epistemic version of the classical AGM Belief Revision theory. We present a logic of conditional beliefs that is complete w.r.t. CDM’s. Moving then to beli...