Intentions, Intending, and Belief: Noninferential Weak Cognitivism

Intending is Believing: A Defense of Strong Cognitivism

We argue that intentions are beliefs—beliefs that are held in light of, and made rational by, practical reasoning. To intend to do something is neither more nor less than to believe, on the basis of one’s practical reasoning, that one will do it. The identification of the mental state of intention with the mental state of belief is what we call strong cognitivism about intentions. It is a stron...

Strong Belief and Weak Assumption

Battigalli and Siniscalchi’s [Journal of Economic Theory 106, 356-391 (2002)] notion of “strong belief”in conditional probability systems and Yang’s [Journal of Economic Theory, forthcoming] notion of “weak assumption”in lexicographic probability systems are unified by the same requirements on preferences. Our analysis, hence, reconciles the tension between Battigalli and Siniscalchi’s characte...

Non-cognitivism and Inconsistency

No Longer Intending: The Relationship Between Relinquished Fertility Intentions and Distress

We use data from both waves of the National Survey of Families and Households to assess whether relinquishing a serious intention to have (more) children leads to greater increases in depressive symptoms than continuing confidence in childbearing intentions. Our sample includes 2,200 individuals of childbearing age, men and women, all parities, and all marital statuses. Change score analysis sh...

The Topology of Full and Weak Belief

We introduce a new topological semantics for belief logics in which the belief modality is interpreted as the interior of the closure of the interior operator. We show that the system wKD45, a weakened version of KD45, is sound and complete w.r.t. the class of all topological spaces. Moreover, we point out a problem regarding updates on extremally disconnected spaces that appears in the setting...