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Formal Epistemology, Misc

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  • Amalia Amaya (2007). Formal Models of Coherence and Legal Epistemology. Artificial Intelligence and Law 15 (4).
    This paper argues that formal models of coherence are useful for constructing a legal epistemology. Two main formal approaches to coherence are examined: coherence-based models of belief revision and the theory of coherence as constraint satisfaction. It is shown that these approaches shed light on central aspects of a coherentist legal epistemology, such as the concept of coherence, the dynamics of coherentist justification in law, and the mechanisms whereby coherence may be built in the course of legal decision-making.
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  • Jean-Roch Beausoleil (1989). The Metamathematics-Popperian Epistemology Connection and its Relation to the Logic of Turing's Programme. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 40 (3):307-322.
    Turing's programme, the idea that intelligence can be modelled computationally, is set in the context of a parallel between certain elements from metamathematics and Popper's schema for the evolution of knowledge. The parallel is developed at both the formal level, where it hinges on the recursive structuring of Popper's schema, and at the contentual level, where a few key issues common to both epistemology and metamathematics are briefly discussed. In light of this connection Popper's principle of transference, akin to Turing's (...)
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  • Gregor Betz (forthcoming). Petitio Principii and Circular Argumentation as Seen From a Theory of Dialectical Structures. Synthese.
    This paper investigates in how far a theory of dialectical structures sheds new light on the old problem of giving a satisfying account of the fallacy of petitio principii, or begging the question. It defends that (i) circular argumentation on the one hand and petitio principii on the other hand are two distinct features of complex argumentation, and that (ii) it is impossible to make general statements about the defectiveness of an argumentation that exhibits these features. Such an argumentation, in (...)
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  • Panayot Butchvarov (2008). Epistemology Dehumanized. In Quentin Smith (ed.), Epistemology: New Essays. Oxford University Press.
    Fundamental disagreements in epistemology arise from legitimate differences of interest, not genuine conflict. It is because of such differences that there are three varieties of epistemology: naturalistic, subjective, and what I shall call epistemology-as-logic. All three have been with us at least since Socrates. My chief concern will be with the third, but I must begin with the first and second, which constitute standard epistemology.
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  • Jake Chandler (forthcoming). The Transmission of Support: A Bayesian Re-Analysis. Synthese.
    Crispin Wright’s discussion of the notion of ‘transmission-failure’ promises to have important philosophical ramifications, both in epistemology and beyond. This paper offers a precise, formal characterisation of the concept within a Bayesian framework. The interpretation given avoids the serious shortcomings of a recent alternative proposal due to Samir Okasha.
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  • Franz Dietrich & Christian List, A Model of Non-Informational Preference Change.
    According to standard rational choice theory, as commonly used in political science and economics, an agent’s fundamental preferences are exogenously …xed, and any preference change over decision options is due to Bayesian information learning. Although elegant and parsimonious, this model fails to account for preference change driven by experiences or psychological changes distinct from information learning. We develop a model of non-informational preference change. Alternatives are modelled as points in some multidimensional space, only some of whose dimensions play a role (...)
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  • Branden Fitelson (2010). Pollock on Probability in Epistemology. Philosophical Studies 148 (3).
    In Thinking and Acting John Pollock offers some criticisms of Bayesian epistemology, and he defends an alternative understanding of the role of probability in epistemology. Here, I defend the Bayesian against some of Pollock's criticisms, and I discuss a potential problem for Pollock's alternative account.
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  • Richard Foley (1993). Working Without a Net: A Study of Egocentric Epistemology. Oxford University Press.
    In this new book, Foley defends an epistemology that takes seriously the perspectives of individual thinkers. He argues that having rational opinions is a matter of meeting our own internal standards rather than standards that are somehow imposed upon us from the outside. It is a matter of making ourselves invulnerable to intellectual self-criticism. Foley also shows how the theory of rational belief is part of a general theory of rationality. He thus avoids treating the rationality of belief as a (...)
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  • Abraham A. Fraenkel (1960). Epistemology and Logic. Synthese 12 (4).
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  • Michael Friedman (1992). Epistemology in Theaufbau. Synthese 93 (1-2).
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  • Maria Carla Galavotti (2003). Harold Jeffreys' Probabilistic Epistemology: Between Logicism and Subjectivism. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (1).
    Harold Jeffreys' ideas on the interpretation of probability and epistemology are reviewed. It is argued that with regard to the interpretation of probability, Jeffreys embraces a version of logicism that shares some features of the subjectivism of Ramsey and de Finetti. Jeffreys also developed a probabilistic epistemology, characterized by a pragmatical and constructivist attitude towards notions such as ‘objectivity’, ‘reality’ and ‘causality’. 1 Introductory remarks 2 The interpretation of probability 3 Jeffreys' probabilistic epistemology.
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  • Anthony Gillies, Shifty Epistemology.
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  • Peter Godfrey-Smith, Progress and Procedures in Scientific Epistemology.
    My title is intended to echo Hans Reichenbach's The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951), and the phrase "scientific epistemology" is intended in two Reichenbachian senses. One involves the epistemology of science; the other involves epistemology undertaken with a scientific orientation. Talk of "progress and procedures" is intended in a similar dual sense. I start by looking back over the last century, at how a family of problems was tackled by scientifically oriented philosophers. These are problems with the nature of evidence (...)
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  • Alan Hájek & Stephan Hartmann (forthcoming). Bayesian Epistemology. In Mathias Steup (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Epistemology. Blackwell.
    Bayesianism is our leading theory of uncertainty. Epistemology is defined as the theory of knowledge. So “Bayesian Epistemology” may sound like an oxymoron. Bayesianism, after all, studies the properties and dynamics of degrees of belief, understood to be probabilities. Traditional epistemology, on the other hand, places the singularly non-probabilistic notion of knowledge at centre stage, and to the extent that it traffics in belief, that notion does not come in degrees. So how can there be a Bayesian epistemology?
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  • M. Hammerton (1968). Bayesian Statistics and Popper's Epistemology. Mind 77 (305):109-112.
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  • William F. Harms (1998). The Use of Information Theory in Epistemology. Philosophy of Science 65 (3):472-501.
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  • Jaakko Hintikka (2007). Socratic Epistemology: Explorations of Knowledge-Seeking by Questioning. Cambridge University Press.
    Most current work in epistemology deals with the evaluation and justification of information already acquired. In this book, Jaakko Hintikka instead discusses the more important problem of how knowledge is acquired in the first place. His model of information-seeking is the old Socratic method of questioning, which has been generalized and brought up-to-date through the logical theory of questions and answers that he has developed.
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  • Mark Kaplan (1991). Epistemology on Holiday. Journal of Philosophy 88 (3):132-154.
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  • Mark Kaplan (1983). Decision Theory as Philosophy. Philosophy of Science 50 (4):549-577.
    Is Bayesian decision theory a panacea for many of the problems in epistemology and the philosophy of science, or is it philosophical snake-oil? For years a debate had been waged amongst specialists regarding the import and legitimacy of this body of theory. Mark Kaplan had written the first accessible and non-technical book to address this controversy. Introducing a new variant on Bayesian decision theory the author offers a compelling case that, while no panacea, decision theory does in fact have the (...)
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  • Kevin Kelly, Learning Theory and Epistemology.
    Learning is the acquisition of new knowledge and skills. It spans a range of processes from practice and rote memorization to the invention of entirely novel abilities and scientific theories that extend past experience. Learning is not restricted to humans: machines and animals can learn, social organizations can learn, and a genetic population can learn through natural selection. In this broad sense, learning is adaptive change, whether in behavior or in belief.
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  • Jonathan L. Kvanvig (1994). A Critique of Van Fraassen's Voluntaristic Epistemology. Synthese 98 (2).
    Van Fraassen's epistemology is forged from two commitments, one to a type of Bayesianism and the other to what he terms voluntarism. Van Fraassen holds that if one is going to follow a rule in belief-revision, it must be a Bayesian rule, but that one does not need to follow a rule in order to be rational. It is argued that van Fraassen's arguments for rejecting non-Bayesian rules is unsound, and that his voluntarism is subject to a fatal dilemma arising (...)
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  • Luca Moretti, Wright, Okasha and Chandler on Transmission Failure.
    Crispin Wright has introduced a principle of failure of transmission of warrant (or epistemic justification) across known entailment in the context of discussion of topics of epistemology and philosophy of mind. Formal epistemologists have struggled to turn Wright’s informal explanation of transmission failure into cogent Bayesian reasoning. In this paper I analyse two Bayesian models of Wright’s account recently proposed by Samir Okasha and Jake Chandler. I show that both models are inapt to formalize Wright’s explanation. After that, I lay (...)
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  • Luca Moretti & Ken Akiba (2007). Probabilistic Measures of Coherence and the Problem of Belief Individuation. Synthese 154 (1).
    Coherentism in epistemology has long suffered from lack of formal and quantitative explication of the notion of coherence. One might hope that probabilistic accounts of coherence such as those proposed by Lewis, Shogenji, Olsson, Fitelson, and Bovens and Hartmann will finally help solve this problem. This paper shows, however, that those accounts have a serious common problem: the problem of belief individuation. The coherence degree that each of the accounts assigns to an information set (or the verdict it gives as (...)
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  • Andrés Páez (2009). Artificial Explanations: The Epistemological Interpretation of Explanation in Ai. Synthese 170 (1).
    In this paper I critically examine the notion of explanation used in artificial intelligence in general, and in the theory of belief revision in particular. I focus on two of the best known accounts in the literature: Pagnucco’s abductive expansion functions and Gärdenfors’ counterfactual analysis. I argue that both accounts are at odds with the way in which this notion has historically been understood in philosophy. They are also at odds with the explanatory strategies used in actual scientific practice. At (...)
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  • Thomas D. Paxson Jr (1980). Decision Theoretic Epistemology. Noûs 14 (4):605-617.
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  • John L. Pollock (1983). Epistemology and Probability. Noûs 17 (1):65-67.
    Probability is sometimes regarded as a universal panacea for epistemology. It has been supposed that the rationality of belief is almost entirely a matter of probabilities. Unfortunately, those philosophers who have thought about this most extensively have tended to be probability theorists first, and epistemologists only secondarily. In my estimation, this has tended to make them insensitive to the complexities exhibited by epistemic justification. In this paper I propose to turn the tables. I begin by laying out some rather simple (...)
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  • Stathis Psillos (2007). Putting a Bridle on Irrationality : An Appraisal of Van Fraassen's New Epistemology. In Bradley John Monton (ed.), Images of Empiricism: Essays on Science and Stances, with a Reply From Bas C. Van Fraassen. Oxford University Press.
    Over the last twenty years, Bas van Fraassen has developed a “new epistemology”: an attempt to sail between Bayesianism and traditional epistemology. He calls his own alternative “voluntarism”. A constant pillar of his thought is the thought that rationality involves permission rather than obligation. The present paper aims to offer an appraisal of van Fraassen’s conception of rationality. In section 2, I review the Bayesian structural conception of rationality and argue that it has been found wanting. In sections 3 and (...)
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  • W. Schaeken (1996). Tense, Aspect, and Temporal Reasoning. Thinking and Reasoning 2 (4):309 – 327.
    We report two experiments on temporal reasoning with problems, such as: John has cleaned the house. John is taking a shower. John is going to read the paper. Mary always does the dishes when John cleans the house. Mary always drinks her coffee when John reads the paper. What for Mary is the relation between doing the dishes and drinking coffee? The experiments showed that problems such as this one, which require one mental model, elicited correct answers more often than (...)
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  • Jonah N. Schupbach (forthcoming). New Hope for Shogenji's Coherence Measure. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    I show that the two most devastating objections to Shogenji’s formal account of coherence necessarily involve information sets of cardinality n>2. Given this, I surmise that the problem with Shogenji’s measure has more to do with his means of generalizing the measure than with the measure itself. I defend this claim by offering an alternative generalization of Shogenji’s measure. This alternative retains the intuitive merits of the original measure while avoiding both of the relevant problems that befall it. In the (...)
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  • Martin Smith (forthcoming). A Generalised Lottery Paradox for Infinite Probability Spaces. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Many epistemologists have responded to the lottery paradox by proposing formal rules according to which high probability defeasibly warrants acceptance. Douven and Williamson (2006) present an ingenious argument purporting to show that such rules invariably trivialise, in that they reduce to the claim that a probability of 1 warrants acceptance. Douven and Williamson’s argument does, however, rest upon significant assumptions – amongst them a relatively strong structural assumption to the effect that the underlying probability space is both finite and uniform. (...)
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  • Daniel Steel & S. Kedzie Hall, What If the Principle of Induction is Normative? Formal Learning Theory and Hume's Problem.
    This essay argues that a successful answer to Hume’s problem of induction can be developed from a sub-genre of philosophy of science known as formal learning theory. One of the central concepts of formal learning theory is logical reliability: roughly, a method is logically reliable when it is assured of eventually settling on the truth for every sequence of data that is possible given what we know. I show that the principle of induction (PI) is necessary and sufficient for logical (...)
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  • W. J. Talbott (1991). Two Principles of Bayesian Epistemology. Philosophical Studies 62 (2).
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  • Jonathan Y. Tsou (2003). The Justification of Concepts in Carnap's Aufbau. Philosophy of Science 70 (4):671-689.
    This paper concerns the recent debate on the nature and motivations of the epistemological project advanced in Rudolf Carnap's (18911970) Aufbau. Much of this debate has been initiated by Michael Friedman and Alan Richardson who argue (against the received view of the Aufbau as a foundationalist defense of empiricism) that Carnap's epistemological project is located in the tradition of neo-Kantian epistemology. On this revisionist reading of the Aufbau, Carnap's project is not motivated to address traditional empiricist problems regarding the justification (...)
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  • Ruth Weintraub (1990). Decision-Theoretic Epistemology. Synthese 83 (1).
    In this paper, I examine the possibility of accounting for the rationality of belief-formation by utilising decision-theoretic considerations. I consider the utilities to be used by such an approach, propose to employ verisimilitude as a measure of cognitive utility, and suggest a natural way of generalising any measure of verisimilitude defined on propositions to partial belief-systems, a generalisation which may enable us to incorporate Popper's insightful notion of verisimilitude within a Bayesian framework. I examine a dilemma generated by the decision-theoretic (...)
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  • Gregory Wheeler, Jon Williamson, Prasanta S. Bandyopadhyay & Malcolm Forster, Evidential Probability and Objective Bayesian Epistemology.
    In this chapter we draw connections between two seemingly opposing approaches to probability and statistics: evidential probability on the one hand and objective Bayesian epistemology on the other.
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  • J. R. G. Williams, Gradational Accuracy and Non-Classical Semantics.
    Joyce (1998) gives an argument for probabilism: the doctrine that rational credences should conform to the axioms of probability. Joyce presupposes that the truth values of the propositions over which credences are defined are classical. This note generalizes Joyce’s argument. On the same assumptions as Joyce uses, the credences of a rational agent should always be weighted averages of truth value assignments. In the special case where the truth values are classical, the weighted averages of truth value assignments are exactly (...)
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