Doubts about ‘uncertainty without All the Doubt’

Call the following the storage hypothesis : degreed beliefs are stable attitudes of agents that can be appealed to for predicting and explaining patterns of behavior, judgment, and decision making. [1] the storage hypothesis is that humans have, or it is as if we have, degrees of belief, and our judgment and decision making across a wide range of situations is systematically predicted by them (more precisely, predicted by them in conjunction with some of our other states and processes, such as desires or preferences and intentions). [5] The critical assumption is that, like holding a map in your pocket, having some degree of belief or other in some proposition is a stable, persistent state. . . to give up the storage hypothesis is to allow for the possibility that an agent’s degrees of belief cannot be specified independently of a specification of the decision problem she faces. This would be a radical revision to the ordinary way of doing things, since the ordinary way of doing things assumes that an agent’s degrees of belief can be used to explain and predict her judgments and decisions because those degrees of belief are in place antecedent to the problems that prompt those judgments and decisions. [6]