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Book Probability and the Logic of Rational Belief

Download or read book Probability and the Logic of Rational Belief written by Henry Ely Kyburg and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Probability and the Logic of Rational Belief

Download or read book Probability and the Logic of Rational Belief written by Henry Ely Kyburg (Mathematician, Philosopher, United States) and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Putting Logic in Its Place

Download or read book Putting Logic in Its Place written by David Christensen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-04 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What role, if any, does formal logic play in characterizing epistemically rational belief? Traditionally, belief is seen in a binary way - either one believes a proposition, or one doesn't. Given this picture, it is attractive to impose certain deductive constraints on rational belief: that one's beliefs be logically consistent, and that one believe the logical consequences of one's beliefs. A less popular picture sees belief as a graded phenomenon. This picture (explored more bydecision-theorists and philosophers of science thatn by mainstream epistemologists) invites the use of probabilistic coherence to constrain rational belief. But this latter project has often involved defining graded beliefs in terms of preferences, which may seem to change the subject away fromepistemic rationality.Putting Logic in its Place explores the relations between these two ways of seeing beliefs. It argues that the binary conception, although it fits nicely with much of our commonsense thought and talk about belief, cannot in the end support the traditional deductive constraints on rational belief. Binary beliefs that obeyed these constraints could not answer to anything like our intuitive notion of epistemic rationality, and would end up having to be divorced from central aspects of ourcognitive, practical, and emotional lives.But this does not mean that logic plays no role in rationality. Probabilistic coherence should be viewed as using standard logic to constrain rational graded belief. This probabilistic constraint helps explain the appeal of the traditional deductive constraints, and even underlies the force of rationally persuasive deductive arguments. Graded belief cannot be defined in terms of preferences. But probabilistic coherence may be defended without positing definitional connections between beliefsand preferences. Like the traditional deductive constraints, coherence is a logical ideal that humans cannot fully attain. Nevertheless, it furnishes a compelling way of understanding a key dimension of epistemic rationality.

Book The Stability of Belief

Download or read book The Stability of Belief written by Hannes Leitgeb and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In everyday life we normally express our beliefs in all-or-nothing terms: I believe it is going to rain; I don't believe that my lottery ticket will win. In other cases, if possible, we resort to numerical probabilities: my degree of belief that it is going to rain is 80%; the probability that I assign to my ticket winning is one in a million. It is an open philosophical question how all-or-nothing belief and numerical belief relate to each other, and how we ought to reason with them simultaneously. The Stability of Belief develops a theory of rational belief that aims to answer this question by building new bridges between logic and probability theory, traditional and mathematical epistemology, and theoretical and practical rationality. Hannes Leitgeb develops a joint normative theory of all-or-nothing belief and numerical degrees of belief. While rational all-or-nothing belief is studied in traditional epistemology and is usually assumed to obey logical norms, rational degrees of belief constitute the subject matter of Bayesian epistemology and are normally taken to conform to probabilistic norms. One of the central open questions in formal epistemology is what beliefs and degrees of belief have to be like in order for them to cohere with each other. The answer defended in this book is a stability account of belief: a rational agent believes a proposition just in case the agent assigns a stably high degree of belief to it. Leitgeb determines this theory's consequences for, and applications to, learning, suppositional reasoning, decision-making, assertion, acceptance, conditionals, and chance. The volume builds new bridges between logic and probability theory, traditional and formal epistemology, theoretical and practical rationality, and synchronic and diachronic norms for reasoning.

Book Putting Logic in its Place

Download or read book Putting Logic in its Place written by David Christensen and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004-11-04 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What role, if any, does formal logic play in characterizing epistemically rational belief? Traditionally, belief is seen in a binary way - either one believes a proposition, or one doesn't. Given this picture, it is attractive to impose certain deductive constraints on rational belief: that one's beliefs be logically consistent, and that one believe the logical consequences of one's beliefs. A less popular picture sees belief as a graded phenomenon. This picture (explored more by decision-theorists and philosophers of science thatn by mainstream epistemologists) invites the use of probabilistic coherence to constrain rational belief. But this latter project has often involved defining graded beliefs in terms of preferences, which may seem to change the subject away from epistemic rationality. Putting Logic in its Place explores the relations between these two ways of seeing beliefs. It argues that the binary conception, although it fits nicely with much of our commonsense thought and talk about belief, cannot in the end support the traditional deductive constraints on rational belief. Binary beliefs that obeyed these constraints could not answer to anything like our intuitive notion of epistemic rationality, and would end up having to be divorced from central aspects of our cognitive, practical, and emotional lives. But this does not mean that logic plays no role in rationality. Probabilistic coherence should be viewed as using standard logic to constrain rational graded belief. This probabilistic constraint helps explain the appeal of the traditional deductive constraints, and even underlies the force of rationally persuasive deductive arguments. Graded belief cannot be defined in terms of preferences. But probabilistic coherence may be defended without positing definitional connections between beliefs and preferences. Like the traditional deductive constraints, coherence is a logical ideal that humans cannot fully attain. Nevertheless, it furnishes a compelling way of understanding a key dimension of epistemic rationality.

Book Probability and Conditionals

Download or read book Probability and Conditionals written by Ellery Eells and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-11-25 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on the state of research investigating the relationship between conditionals and conditional probabilities.

Book Degrees of Belief

    Book Details:
  • Author : Franz Huber
  • Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
  • Release : 2008-12-21
  • ISBN : 1402091982
  • Pages : 352 pages

Download or read book Degrees of Belief written by Franz Huber and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-12-21 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology is the first book to give a balanced overview of the competing theories of degrees of belief. It also explicitly relates these debates to more traditional concerns of the philosophy of language and mind and epistemic logic.

Book Rational Belief Systems

Download or read book Rational Belief Systems written by Brian David Ellis and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Roots of Reason

    Book Details:
  • Author : David Papineau
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2006-01-26
  • ISBN : 0199288712
  • Pages : 253 pages

Download or read book The Roots of Reason written by David Papineau and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-26 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Papineau presents a controversial view of human reason, portraying it as a normal part of the natural world, and drawing on the empirical sciences to illuminate its workings. In these six interconnected essays he offers a fresh approach to some long-standing problems.Papineau rejects the contemporary orthodoxy that genuine thought hinges on some species of non-natural normativity. He explores the evolutionary histories of theoretical and practical rationality, indicating ways in which capacities underlying human reasoning have been selected for their biological advantages. He then looks at the connection between decision and probability, explaining how good decisions need to be informed by causal as well as probabilistic facts. Finally he defends theradical view that a satisfactory understanding of decision-making is only possible within a specific interpretation of quantum mechanics.By placing the subject in its scientific context, Papineau shows how human rationality plays an explicable role in the functioning of the natural world.

Book Probability in the Philosophy of Religion

Download or read book Probability in the Philosophy of Religion written by Jake Chandler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These specially written essays show that philosophy of religion is fertile ground for the application of probabilistic thinking. The authors examine central topics in the field: the status of evidence relating to the question of the existence of God; the rationality of religious belief; and the epistemic significance of religious disagreement.

Book Rational Belief

    Book Details:
  • Author : Albert Myrton Frye
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 1946
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 504 pages

Download or read book Rational Belief written by Albert Myrton Frye and published by . This book was released on 1946 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Probability Theory

    Book Details:
  • Author :
  • Publisher : Allied Publishers
  • Release : 2013
  • ISBN : 9788177644517
  • Pages : 436 pages

Download or read book Probability Theory written by and published by Allied Publishers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Probability theory

Book A Treatise on Probability

Download or read book A Treatise on Probability written by John Maynard Keynes and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic

Download or read book An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic written by Ian Hacking and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-07-02 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introductory 2001 textbook on probability and induction written by a foremost philosopher of science.

Book Between Probability and Certainty

Download or read book Between Probability and Certainty written by Martin Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martin Smith explores a question central to philosophy—namely, what does it take for a belief to be justified or rational? According to a widespread view, whether one has justification for believing a proposition is determined by how probable that proposition is, given one's evidence. In the present book this view is rejected and replaced with another: in order for one to have justification for believing a proposition, one's evidence must normically support it—roughly, one's evidence must make the falsity of that proposition abnormal in the sense of calling for special, independent explanation. This conception of justification bears upon a range of topics in epistemology and beyond, including the relation between justification and knowledge, the force of statistical evidence, the problem of scepticism, the lottery and preface paradoxes, the viability of multiple premise closure, the internalist/externalist debate, the psychology of human reasoning, and the relation between belief and degrees of belief. Ultimately, this way of looking at justification guides us to a new, unfamiliar picture of how we should respond to our evidence and manage our own fallibility. This picture is developed here.

Book Rational Belief

    Book Details:
  • Author :
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 1983
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 65 pages

Download or read book Rational Belief written by and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a tension between normative and descriptive elements in the theory of rational belief. This tension has been reflected in work in psychology and decision theory, as well as in philosophy. Canons of rationality should be tailored to what is humanly feasible. But rationality has normative content as well as descriptive content. A number of issues related to both deductive and inductive logic can be raised. Are there full beliefs -- statements that are just categorically accepted? Should statements be accepted when they become overwhelmingly probable? What is the structure imposed on these beliefs by rationality? Are they consistent? Are they deductively closed? What parameters, if any, does rational acceptance depend on? How can accepted statements come to be rejected on new evidence? Should degrees of belief satisfy the probability calculus? Does conformity to the probability calculus exhaust the rational constraints that can be imposed on partial beliefs? With the acquisition of new evidence, should beliefs change in accord with Bayes' theorem? Are decisions made in accord with the principle of maximizing expected utility? Should they be? A systematic set of answers to these questions is developed on the basis of a probabilistic rule of acceptance and a conception of interval-valued logical probability according to which probabilities are based on known frequencies. This leads to limited deductive closure, a demand for only limited consistency, and the rejection of Bayes' theorem as universally applicable to changes of belief. It also becomes possible, given new evidence, to reject previously accepted statements.

Book Bayesian Rationality

    Book Details:
  • Author : Mike Oaksford
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2007-02-22
  • ISBN : 0198524498
  • Pages : 342 pages

Download or read book Bayesian Rationality written by Mike Oaksford and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-02-22 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For almost 2,500 years, the Western concept of what is to be human has been dominated by the idea that the mind is the seat of reason - humans are, almost by definition, the rational animal. In this text a more radical suggestion for explaining these puzzling aspects of human reasoning is put forward.