In this essay, I shall propose a general conception of the kind of inference that counts as justified or rational. This conception involves a version of the idea that justified belief is “closed” under competent inference—that is, roughly, whenever one competently infers a conclusion from a set of premises each of which one justifiedly believes, this inference always puts one in a position to h...

In five patients with acute arthritis in whom gout was eventually documented, an initial synovial fluid analysis failed to reveal urate crystals. Four of the patients were seen in one hospital during a period of 30 months in which 103 cases of gout were documented on initial aspiration. While this is an uncommon event, the importance of being able to make a definitive diagnosis of gout is such ...

It is sometimes thought that the lottery paradox and the paradox of the preface demand a uniform solution (Hunter (1996) and Foley (1992), for example). Let us see why that appears to be the case. I am justified in believing that my lottery ticket—call it t1—will not win, on statistical grounds. Those grounds apply equally to any other ticket, so I am justified in believing of any other ticket ...

Assumptions are often not considered to be definitely true, but only as prima facie justified. When an assumption is prima facie justified, there can for instance be a reason against it, by which the assumption is not actually justified. The assumption is then said to be defeated. This requires a revision of the standard conception of logical interpretation of sets of assumptions in terms of th...

We are most grateful for the comments made by Earl (2014) on our paper, Frey and Gallus (2014). In particular, we are pleased that we can fully agree on the fundamental point we wanted to make: decisions by individuals (as well as by organizational units) do not map directly and in an unchanged way to the macro level. Rather, the aggregation process linking the microand the macro-level must be ...

In 1937, Ronald Coase argued that firms will exist only in environments in which firms perform better than markets could. To create space for firms, Coase suggested that some environments might be plagued by “transaction costs” that cause markets to perform poorly. Coase’s paper was to become the cornerstone of the economic theory of the firm (i.e., the “make or buy” decision: which activities ...