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Author: Franz Huber
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402091982
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
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.
Author: Franz Huber
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402091982
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
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.
Author: Steven G. Vick
Publisher: ASCE Publications
ISBN: 0784470863
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 469
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Book Description
Observing at a risk analysis conference for civil engineers that participants did not share a common language of probability, Vick, a consultant and geotechnic engineer, set out to not only examine why, but to also bridge the gap. He reexamines three elements at the core of engineering the concepts
Author: David Christensen
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0199263256
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
Does logic help determine whether beliefs are rational? The author argues that it does - but only once we understand beliefs as coming in degrees. He explains the degree-of-belief approach offers the key to understanding how logical arguments work.
Author: Hannes Leitgeb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191047015
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
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. 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.
Author: Steven G. Vick
Publisher: ASCE Publications
ISBN: 9780784405987
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 472
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Book Description
Observing at a risk analysis conference for civil engineers that participants did not share a common language of probability, Vick, a consultant and geotechnic engineer, set out to not only examine why, but to also bridge the gap. He reexamines three elements at the core of engineering the concepts
Author: Michael G. Titelbaum
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199658307
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
This book presents a new Bayesian framework for modeling rational degrees of belief, called the Certainty-Loss Framework.
Author: Julia Staffel
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198833717
Category : Rationalism
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
How should thinkers cope with uncertainty? What makes their degrees of belief rational, and how should they reason about uncertain matters? In epistemology, recent research has attempted to answer these questions by developing formal models of ideally rational credences. However, we know from psychological research that perfect rationality is unattainable for human thinkers--and so this raises the question of how rational ideals can apply to human thinkers. A popular reply is that the more a thinker's imperfectly rational credences approximate compliance with norms of ideal rationality, the better. But what exactly does this mean? Why is it better to be less irrational, if we can't ever be completely rational? And what does being closer to ideally rational amount to? If ideal models of rationality are supposed to help us understand the rationality of human, imperfect thinkers, we need answers to these questions. Unsettled Thoughts breaks new ground in the study of rationality in providing these answers: we can explain why it's better to be less irrational, because less irrational degrees of belief are generally more accurate and better at guiding our actions. Moreover, the way in which approximating ideal rationality is beneficial can be made formally precise by using a variety of distance measures that track the benefits of being more rational.
Author: Rik Peels
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190608110
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
What we believe and what we do not believe has a great impact on what we do and fail to do. Hence, if we want to act responsibly, we should believe responsibly. However, do we have the kind of control over our beliefs that such responsibility for our beliefs seems to require? Do we have certain obligations to control or influence our beliefs on particular occasions? And do we sometimes believe responsibly despite violating such obligations, namely because we are excused by, say, indoctrination or ignorance? By answering each of these questions, Rik Peels provides a theory of what it is to believe responsibly. He argues that we lack control over our beliefs, but that we can nonetheless influence our beliefs by performing actions that make a difference to what we believe. We have a wide variety of moral, prudential, and epistemic obligations to perform such belief-influencing actions. We can be held responsible for our beliefs in virtue of such influence on our beliefs. Sometimes, we believe responsibly despite having violated such obligations, namely if we are excused, by force, ignorance, or luck. A careful consideration of these excuses teaches us, respectively, that responsible belief entails that we could have failed to have that belief, that responsible belief is in a specific sense radically subjective, and that responsible belief is compatible with its being a matter of luck that we hold that belief.
Author: Nicholas J. J. Smith
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191552712
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 351
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Book Description
In Vagueness and Degrees of Truth, Nicholas Smith develops a new theory of vagueness: fuzzy plurivaluationism. A predicate is said to be vague if there is no sharply defined boundary between the things to which it applies and the things to which it does not apply. For example, 'heavy' is vague in a way that 'weighs over 20 kilograms' is not. A great many predicates - both in everyday talk, and in a wide array of theoretical vocabularies, from law to psychology to engineering - are vague. Smith argues, on the basis of a detailed account of the defining features of vagueness, that an accurate theory of vagueness must involve the idea that truth comes in degrees. The core idea of degrees of truth is that while some sentences are true and some are false, others possess intermediate truth values: they are truer than the false sentences, but not as true as the true ones. Degree-theoretic treatments of vagueness have been proposed in the past, but all have encountered significant objections. In light of these, Smith develops a new type of degree theory. Its innovations include a definition of logical consequence that allows the derivation of a classical consequence relation from the degree-theoretic semantics, a unified account of degrees of truth and subjective probabilities, and the incorporation of semantic indeterminacy - the view that vague statements need not have unique meanings - into the degree-theoretic framework. As well as being essential reading for those working on vagueness, Smith's book provides an excellent entry-point for newcomers to the era - both from elsewhere in philosophy, and from computer science, logic and engineering. It contains a thorough introduction to existing theories of vagueness and to the requisite logical background.
Author: John J. McGraw
Publisher: AEGIS PRESS
ISBN: 0974764507
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 422
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Book Description
From its beginnings in prehistoric religion to its central importance in Western faith traditions, the soul has been a constant source of fascination and speculation. Brain & Belief seeks to understand mankind's obsession with life, death, and the afterlife. Exploring the latest insights from neuroscience, psychopharmacology, and existential psychology, McGraw exhaustively researches the various takes on the human soul and considers the meaning of the soul in a postmodern world. The ambitious scope of the book is balanced by a deeply personal voice whose sympathy for both science and religion is resonant.
