Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise

2002-09-19 Philosophy

Author : Louis E. Loeb
Release : 2002-09-19
Genre : Philosophy
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 508/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise by : Louis E. Loeb

Download or read book Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise written by Louis E. Loeb. This book was released on 2002-09-19. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature is famous for its extreme skepticism. Louis Loeb argues that Hume's destructive conclusions have in fact obscured a constructive stage that Hume abandons prematurely. Working within a philosophical tradition that values tranquillity, Hume favors an epistemology that links justification with settled belief. Hume appeals to psychological stability to support his own epistemological assessments, both favorable regarding causal inference, and unfavorable regarding imaginative propensities. The theory's success in explaining Hume's epistemic distinctions gives way to pessimism, since Hume contends that reflection on beliefs is deeply destabilizing. So much the worse, Hume concludes, for placing a premium on reflection. Hume endorses and defends the position that stable beliefs of unreflective persons are justified, though they would not survive reflection. At the same time, Hume relishes the paradox that unreflective beliefs enjoy a preferred epistemic status and strains to establish it. Loeb introduces a series of amendments to the Treatise that secures a more positive result for justified belief while maintaining Hume's fundamental principles. In his review of Hume's applications of his epistemology, Loeb uncovers a stratum of psychological doctrine beyond associationism, a theory of conditions in which beliefs are felt to conflict and of the resolution of this uneasiness or dissonance. This theory of mental conflict is also essential to Hume's strategy for integrating empiricism about meaning with his naturalism. However, Hume fails to provide a general account of the conditions in which conflicting beliefs lead to persisting instability, so his theory is incomplete. Loeb explores Hume's concern with stability in reference to his discussions of belief, education, the probability of causes, unphilosophical probability, the belief in body, sympathy and moral judgment, and the passions, among other topics.

The Stability of Belief

2017 Mathematics

Author : Hannes Leitgeb
Release : 2017
Genre : Mathematics
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 635/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Stability of Belief by : Hannes Leitgeb

Download or read book The Stability of Belief written by Hannes Leitgeb. This book was released on 2017. 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.

Epistemic Stability

2016

Author : Nilanjan Das (Ph. D.)
Release : 2016
Genre :
Kind : eBook
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Book Synopsis Epistemic Stability by : Nilanjan Das (Ph. D.)

Download or read book Epistemic Stability written by Nilanjan Das (Ph. D.). This book was released on 2016. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I argue that knowledge and rational belief are subject to stability conditions. A belief that amounts to knowledge couldn't easily have been lost due to the impact of misleading evidence. A belief that is rational couldn't easily have been withdrawn upon reflection on its epistemic credentials. In Chapter 1, I support a picture of epistemic rationality on which a belief, in order to be rational, must be stable under reflection, i.e., it must be capable of surviving reflective scrutiny. To make room for this condition, I defend the possibility of higher-order defeat, where a belief's rationally undermined by misleading higher order evidence, i.e., by evidence about what one's evidence supports. I sketch an account of-higher-order defeat on which higher-order evidence makes an agent's total body of evidence fragmented: even though a piece of evidence is available within the agent's cognitive system, the agent is unable to rationally bring it to bear upon certain questions. In Chapter 2, I explore an analogy between knowledge and moral worth. Just as knowledge requires the agent to non-accidentally believe the truth, so too does morally worthy action require the agent to non-accidentally perform the right action. I argue that the analogy lends support to an explanation-based account of knowledge: a belief amounts to knowledge only if the manner in which the agent forms the belief explains both why the agent holds the belief (rather than losing it) and why she forms a true belief (rather than a false one). I call this view explanationism. In Chapter 3, 1 discuss a consequence of explanationism: a belief that amounts to knowledge couldn't easily be rationally defeated by misleading evidence. This condition-safety from from defeat explains a range of different epistemic phenomena. It accounts for the explanatory role of knowledge in relation to certain kinds of behaviour, like rational perseverance. It obviates certain demanding "internalist" conditions on knowledge. It also illuminates the connection between knowledge and practical interests.

Contextualisms in Epistemology

2005-03-02 Philosophy

Author : Elke Brendel
Release : 2005-03-02
Genre : Philosophy
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 816/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Contextualisms in Epistemology by : Elke Brendel

Download or read book Contextualisms in Epistemology written by Elke Brendel. This book was released on 2005-03-02. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contextualism has become one of the leading paradigms in contemporary epistemology. According to this view, there is no context-independent standard of knowledge, and as a result, all knowledge ascriptions are context-sensitive. Contextualists contend that their account of this analysis allows us to resolve some major epistemological problems such as skeptical paradoxes and the lottery paradox, and that it helps us explain various other linguistic data about knowledge ascriptions. The apparent ease with which contextualism seems to solve numerous epistemological quandaries has inspired the burgeoning interest in it. This comprehensive anthology collects twenty original essays and critical commentaries on different aspects of contextualism, written by leading philosophers on the topic. The editors’ introduction sketches the historical development of the contextualist movement and provides a survey and analysis of its arguments and major positions. The papers explore, inter alia, the central problems and prospects of semantic (or conversational) contextualism and its main alternative approaches such as inferential (or issue) contextualism, epistemic contextualism, and virtue contextualism. They also investigate the connections between contextualism and epistemic particularism, and between contextualism and stability accounts of knowledge. Elke Brendel is Professor of Philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. She has published numerous articles on logic, epistemology, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of language. She is the author of Die Wahrheit über den Lügner (The Truth About the Liar, 1992), Grundzüge der Logik II – Klassen, Relationen, Zahlen (Foundations of Logic II – Sets, Relations, Numbers, with Wilhelm K. Essler, 1993), and Wahrheit und Wissen (Truth and Knowledge, 1999). Christoph Jäger is Lecturer in Philosophy at Aberdeen University, United Kingdom, and Privatdozent of Philosophy (honorary office) at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He has published numerous articles on epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of religion. Books: Selbstreferenz und Selbstbewusstsein (Self-reference and Self-knowledge, 1999), Analytische Religionsphilosophie (Analytic Philosophy of Religion, ed., 1998), Kunst und Erkenntnis (Art and Knowledge, ed., with Georg Meggle, 2004), Religion und Rationalität (Religion and Rationality, forthcoming).

Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise

2002 Knowledge, Theory of

Author : Louis E. Loeb
Release : 2002
Genre : Knowledge, Theory of
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 581/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise by : Louis E. Loeb

Download or read book Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise written by Louis E. Loeb. This book was released on 2002. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louis Loeb argues that the paradoxical corollary to Hume's 'stability-based' theory, stated in his 'Treatise on Human Nature', is that no belief generating mechanism is fully stable or justified - for a fully reflective person.

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