How to Believe Long Conjunctions of Beliefs: Probability, Quasi-Dogmatism and Contextualism

Intuitionistc probability and the Bayesian objection to dogmatism

Given a few assumptions, the probability of a conjunction is raised, and the probability of its negation is lowered, by conditionalising upon one of the conjuncts. This simple result appears to bring Bayesian confirmation theory into tension with the prominent dogmatist view of perceptual justification – a tension often portrayed as a kind of ‘Bayesian objection’ to dogmatism. In a recent paper...

How to Believe the Impossible

What You Should Believe: Obligations and Beliefs

This paper presents and discusses a novel approach to indeterministic belief revision. An indeterministic belief revision operator assumes that, when an agent is confronted with a new piece of information, it can revise its belief base in more than one way. We define a rational agent not only in terms of what it believes, as often assumed in belief revision, but also of what it ought or is obli...

Reasons to Believe: Cognitive Models of Beliefs Change

It is a fact of life that we cannot believe everything we observe or that we are told. We accept a given information or datum as a belief on the basis of our previous beliefs, of its evidences, supports and sources, and of others psychological factors. Here I will sketch some crucial points of these cognitive mechanisms. Our knowledge base is not a file where one can introduce new data or elimi...

Occam’s Razor, Dogmatism, Skepticism, and Skeptical Dogmatism

Underdetermination arguments for skepticism maintain that our common sense view of the external world is no better, evidentially speaking, than some skeptical competitors. An important and well-known response by dogmatists, those who believe our commonsense view is justified, appeals to abduction or inference to the best explanation. The predominant version of this strategy, going back at least...