Indirect epistemic reasons and religious belief

The Ontology of Epistemic Reasons

Epistemic reasons are mental states. They are not propositions or nonmental facts. The discussion proceeds as follows. Section 1 introduces the topic. Section 2 gives two concrete examples of how our topic directly affects the internalism/externalism debate in normative epistemology. Section 3 responds to an argument against the view that reasons are mental states. Section 4 presents two proble...

Social Norms and Religious Belief

It may seem odd to bring up the topic of religious belief in connection with sociology in any way other than to examine examples of specific norms advocated by particular religious traditions. But that is exactly what I intend to do here. My title should be taken in the broadest possible sense. It means to raise the question of how, in general, religious beliefs impact our concepts of social no...

Epistemic Profiles and Belief Structures

The paper is devoted to a novel formalization of beliefs in multiagent systems. Our aim is to bridge the gap between idealized logical approaches to modeling beliefs and their actual implementations. Therefore the stages of belief acquisition, intermediate reasoning and final belief formation are isolated and analyzed. We give a novel semantics reflecting those stages and suitable for building ...

A proper de jure objection to the epistemic rationality of religious belief

I answer Alvin Plantinga’s challenge to provide a ‘proper’ de jure objection to religious belief. What I call the ‘sophisticates’ evidential objection’ (SEO) concludes that sophisticated Christians lack epistemic justification for believing central Christian propositions. The SEO utilizes a theory of epistemic justification in the spirit of the evidentialism of Richard Feldman and Earl Conee. I...

Direct and Indirect Belief