Online research in philosophy

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. Belief is thus central to epistemology. It comes in a qualitative form, as when Sophia believes that Vienna is the capital of Austria, and a quantitative form, as when Sophia's degree of belief that Vienna is the capital of Austria is at least twice her degree of belief that tomorrow it will be sunny in Vienna. Formal epistemology, as opposed to mainstream epistemology (Hendricks 2006), is epistemology done in a formal way, that is, by employing tools from logic and mathematics. The goal of this entry is to give the reader an overview of the formal tools available to epistemologists for the representation of belief. A particular focus will be the relation between formal representations of qualitative belief and formal representations of quantitative degrees of belief.

Please send the completed questionnaire by October 1, 2005 either electronically to Vincent F. Hendricks (vincent@ruc.dk) or John Symons (jsymons@utep.edu) or mail (fax) to Vincent F. Hendricks, Dept. of Philosophy and Science Studies, Roskilde University, DK4000 Roskilde, Denmark, Fax: +45 4674 3012..

Formal epistemology is the study of crucial concepts in general or mainstream epistemology including knowledge, belief (-change), certainty, rationality, reasoning, decision, justi…cation, learning, agent interaction and information processing using a spread of di¤erent formal tools. The formal tools may be drawn from logic, probability theory, game theory, decision theory, formal learning theory, distributed computing and is thus not simply a purely philosophical province. Its practitioners include philosophers, computer scientists, social scientists, cognitive psychologists, theoretical economists, mathematicians, and theoretical linguists. Formal epistemology is a thoroughly interdisciplinary …eld with many agendas, actors and issues. What follows is a breezy overview of formal epistemology as organized around notions of agency and interaction.

This book provides a valuable look at the work of up and coming epistemologists. The topics covered range from the central issues of mainstream epistemology to the more formal issues in epistemic logic and confirmation theory. This book should be read by anyone interested in seeing where epistemology is currently focused and where it is heading. - Stewart Cohen , Arizona State University..

The goal with these questions is to gain a sense of what contemporary epistemology is up to and its broader intellectual environment , with particular emphasis on the meeting point between mainstream and formal epistemology.

As Vincent Hendricks remarks early on in this book, the formal and mainstream traditions of epistemic theorising have mostly evolved independently of each other. This initial impression is confirmed by a comparison of the main problems and methods practitioners in each tradition are concerned with. Mainstream epistemol- ogy engages in a dialectical game of proposing and challenging definitions of knowledge. Formal epistemologists proceed differently, as they design a wide variety of axiomatic and model-theoretic methods whose consequences they investigate independently of the need of giving counterexample-free definitions of knowledge. Or at least, this is a common way to explain where both disciplines stand in the larger landscape of epistemic theorising, and why interactions between them remain scarce. The main ambition of this book is to show that the distinction between formal and mainstream approaches should not preclude a fruitful interaction, and that it only takes the right outlook on their respective practices to disclose plenty of room for interaction.

Mainstream and Formal Epistemology provides the first easily accessible yet erudite and original analysis of the meeting point between mainstream and formal theories of knowledge. These two strands of thinking have traditionally proceeded in isolation from one another but in this book Vincent F. Hendricks brings them together for a systematic comparative treatment. He demonstrates how mainstream and formal epistemology may significantly benefit from one another, paving the way for a new unifying program of 'plethoric' epistemology. His book will both define and further the debate between philosophers from two very different sides of the epistemological spectrum.