Abstract
AbstractAccording to the so-called Lockean thesis, a rational agent believes a proposition just in case its probability is sufficiently high, i.e., greater than some suitably fixed threshold. The Preface paradox is usually taken to show that the Lockean thesis is untenable, if one also assumes that rational agents should believe the conjunction of their own beliefs: high probability and rational belief are in a sense incompatible. In this paper, we show that this is not the case in general. More precisely, we consider two methods of computing how probable must each of a series of propositions be in order to rationally believe their conjunction under the Lockean thesis. The price one has to pay for the proposed solutions to the paradox is what we call “quasi-dogmatism”: the view that a rational agent should believe only those propositions which are “nearly certain” in a suitably defined sense.
Funder
Università degli Studi di Torino
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Reference40 articles.
1. Adams, E. W. (1996). Probability and the logic of conditionals. In J. Hintikka & P. Suppes (Eds.), Aspects of Inductive Logic (pp. 265–316). Amsterdam: North-Holland.
2. Adams, E. W. (1975). The logic of conditionals: An application of probability to deductive logic. Dordrecht: Springer.
3. Benci, V., & Di Nasso, M. (2003). Alpha-theory: An elementary axiomatics for nonstandard analysis. Expositiones Mathematicae, 21(4), 355–386.
4. Benci, V., Horsten, L., & Wenmackers, S. (2016). Infinitesimal Probabilities. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 69(2), 509–552.
5. Cevolani, G. (2017). Fallibilism, verisimilitude, and the preface paradox. Erkenntnis, 82(1), 169–183.
Cited by
2 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献，注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献，订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献