Online research in philosophy

When one depends on a belief source in sustaining a belief that that very belief source is trustworthy, then that belief is an epistemically circular belief (EC-belief).[1]Â A number of philosophers have objected to externalism in epistemology on the grounds that it commits one to thinking EC-beliefs can be justified, something they view as..

This paper argues that it is possible to knowingly believe something while judging that one ought not to believe it and (so) viewing the belief as manifesting a sort of failure. I offer examples showing that such ‘alienated belief’ has several potential sources. I contrast alienated belief with self-deception, incontinent (or akratic) belief and half-belief. I argue that the possibility of alienated belief is compatible with the so-called ‘transparency’ of first-person reflection on belief, and that the descriptive and expressive difficulties it involves stem from well-understood sources. I conclude by speculating that endorsed belief is in important respects like intentional action. Reflection on the possibility of alienated belief may thus help us to see one respect in which an agent can be responsible for her attitudes.

An account is offered of Dooyeweerd’s non-reductionist ontology. It also includes the role of religious belief in theory making, although it omits his case for why such a role is unavoidable. The ontology is a theory of the nature of (created) reality which presupposes and is regulated by belief in the God of Judeo-Christian theism. Because it takes everything in creation to be directly dependent on God, it offers an account of the natures of both natural things and artifacts which avoids regarding anything in the cosmos as what all else in the cosmos depends on.

This book provides a formal ontology of senses and the belief-relation that grounds the distinction between de dicto, de re, and de se beliefs as well as the opacity of belief reports. According to this ontology, the relata of the belief-relation are an agent and a special sort of object-dependent sense (a "thought-content"), the latter being an "abstract" property encoding various syntactic and semantic constraints on sentences of a language of thought. One bears the belief-relation to a thought-content T just in case one (is disposed as one who) inwardly affirms a certain sentence S of one’s language of thought that satisfies what T encodes, which in turn requires that S’s non-logical parts stand in appropriate semantical relations to items specified by T. Since these items may include other senses as well as ordinary objects, beliefs of arbitrary complexity are automatically accommodated. Within the framework of the formal ontology, a context-dependent compositional semantics is then provided for a fragment of regimented English capable of formulating ascriptions of belief—a semantics that treats substitutional opacity as a genuine semantic datum. Finally, the resulting picture of belief and its attribution is defended by showing how it solves standard puzzles, avoids objections to rival accounts, and satisfies certain adequacy conditions not fulfilled by traditional theories. Along the way, clarification and defense is offered for the ingredient conception of object-dependent senses, and it is shown how adoption of the language of thought hypothesis permits Bertrand Russell’s obscure doctrine of logical forms to be understood in a way that not only vindicates his Multiple Relation theory of de re belief but also reveals the connection between these logical forms and thought-contents.

In this paper I discuss the problem of animals' beliefs and the ontology associated with the idea of having non propositional content. It is argue that the beliefs of mute animals mainly serve an explanatory purpose.

(DRAFT) It is commonplace that belief in possible worlds not only burdens one with a large ontology, but with metaphysical problems about their existence and identity conditions and epistemological problems about justifying belief in them. In this paper, we challenge these commonplaces, and show that belief in possible worlds doesn’t burden necessarily one with large ontology, nor with the mentioned metaphysical and epistemological problems. We argue specifically for the claim that the most fundamental existence principle of world theory is not only true in small models, but is derivable from analytically true principles. If this is true, it puts the lie to the commonplace view that a commitment to possible worlds entails a commitment to a large ontology. Moreover, the particular theory we use to support our claims precisely addresses the metaphysical problems about the existence and identity of worlds and offers a solution of the epistemological problem of justifying our belief in worlds.

In Republic V, Plato makes the astonishing claim that knowledge is a different and independent power from belief, in the way, for example, that sight differs from hearing. I will argue that this is a fundamentally different conception of knowledge than the, also Platonic, conception of knowledge as 'true belief with an account'. I examine the reasons why Plato holds this position, and the ontology and epistemology which sustain its claims.