Where you wouldn't believe

You gotta believe

I argue that proper assertion requires belief. Jennifer Lackey has recently argued otherwise. Here I respond to Lackey’s argument and provide positive evidence that permissible assertion does require belief. The positive evidence takes the form of an explanatory argument from linguistic patterns surrounding the give and take of assertion. Looming large in the background of the discussion is whe...

You can't not believe everything you read.

Can people comprehend assertions without believing them? Descartes (1644/1984) suggested that people can and should, whereas Spinoza (1677/1982) suggested that people should but cannot. Three experiments support the hypothesis that comprehension includes an initial belief in the information comprehended. Ss were exposed to false information about a criminal defendant (Experiments 1 and 2) or a ...

Can you believe what you read?

Do You Believe in Presentiment?

with, the supernatural, which would seem to relegate it to the domain of the theologian or the preacher ? To which of these it more properly belongs, need not be determined at present, but I may be permitted to add that I think it may be accounted for on either hypothesis, without any serious offence to, or violent disruption of, existing beliefs, and 1 heartily agree with Copland* when he says...

How much do you believe?

This paper responds to a number of criticisms of Dempster-Shafer theory made by Judea Pearl. He criticises Dempster-Shafer belief for not obeying the laws of Bayesian belief," however, these laws lead to well-known problems in the face of ignorance, and seem unreasonably restrictive. It is argued that it is not reasonable to expect a measure of belief to obey Pearl's sandwich principle. The sta...