YOU JUST BELIEVE THAT BECAUSE…1

Should you believe that this coin is fair?

Faced with a sequence of N binary events, such as coin flips (or Ising spins), it is natural to ask whether these events reflect some underlying dynamic signals or are just random. Plausible models for the dynamics of hidden biases lead to surprisingly high probabilities of misidentifying random sequences as biased. In particular, this probability decays as N −1/4 , so that no reasonable amount...

Why Believe That There Is a God?

This article presents an argument for the existence of God, showing that the evident phenomena are best explained by supposing that a God causes them. The argument is based on the inductive force of four very evident general phenomena: that there is a physical Universe; that it is governed by very simple natural laws; that those laws are such as to lead to the existence of human bodies; and tha...

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?