Online research in philosophy

Causation is in trouble?at least as it is pictured in current theories in philosophy and in economics as well, where causation is also once again in fashion. In both disciplines the accounts of causality on offer are either modelled too closely on one or another favoured method for hunting causes or on assumptions about the uses to which causal knowledge can be put?generally for predicting the results of our efforts to change the world. The first kind of account supplies no reason to think that causal knowledge, as it is pictured, is of any use; the second supplies no reason to think our best methods will be reliable for establishing causal knowledge. So, if these accounts are all there is to be had, how do we get from method to use? Of what use is knowledge of causal laws that we work so hard to obtain?

Nowadays the traditional quest for certainty seems not only futile but pointless. Resisting skepticism no longer seems to require meeting the Cartesian demand for an unshakable foundation for knowledge. True beliefs can be less than maximally justified and still be justified enough to qualify as knowledge, even though some beliefs that are justified to the same extent are false. Yet a few philosophers suggest that there is a special sort of justification that only true beliefs can have. Call it 'full justification' or simply 'warrant.' One such philosopher is Trenton Merricks. He takes warrant to be "that, whatever precisely it is, which together with truth makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief," and argues that only true beliefs can have it.1 In his view, then, warrant makes the difference between knowledge and mere belief. Interestingly, Merricks does not concern himself with the nature of this remarkable property. He prefers a "formal characterization" of warrant as the "gap filler" between knowledge and mere true belief. Whatever warrant is exactly, a warranted belief cannot be true accidentally, for then the belief would not qualify as knowledge.

Some ambiguities in the verb ‘to know’ are analyzed, and it is argued that “undefeatably justified true belief” is the meaning of most philosophical interest with respect to specifying truth conditions for ‘S knows that p’. Two general conditions for an adequate definition of ‘S knows that p’ are discussed. Then a proposal for a quasi-causal theory of knowledge is introduced and defended.

Is knowledge more valuable than mere true belief? Few question the value of having true beliefs, and insofar as having knowledge entails (at least) having a true belief, we value knowledge. But traditionally it has been assumed that whatever it takes to turn true belief into knowledge has some additional value. Traditionally, then, philosophers have been committed to what I will call the ‘Value Principle'.

It is alleged that the causal inertness of abstract objects and the causal conditions of certain naturalized epistemologies precludes the possibility of mathematical know- ledge. This paper rejects this alleged incompatibility, while also maintaining that the objects of mathematical beliefs are abstract objects, by incorporating a naturalistically acceptable account of ‘rational intuition.’ On this view, rational intuition consists in a non-inferential belief-forming process where the entertaining of propositions or certain contemplations results in true beliefs. This view is free of any conditions incompatible with abstract objects, for the reason that it is not necessary that S stand in some causal relation to the entities in virtue of which p is true. Mathematical intuition is simply one kind of reliable process type, whose inputs are not abstract numbers, but rather, contemplations of abstract numbers.

relevant alternatives: I take it that a process is reliable in the actual world iff, in the actual set of outcomes (i.e. beliefs being formed), the frequency of successes (those beliefs being true) is much greater than the frequency of failures (those beliefs being false). One may wish to run a more sophisticated kind of reliabilism, where one demands that a reliable process also be reliable in counterfactual situations, but one need not, and I won’t here. If perception is a reliable belief forming process, then I can know things on the basis of perception. So let’s say I know p on the basis of perception. To know that I know p involves, first, knowing that I believe p, and second, knowing that I believe p on the basis of a reliable belief forming process, by the definition of knowledge. But can I know either of these things?

hen Democritus (460–370 BC) said that he would rather discover one true cause than gain the kingdom of Persia, he signalled both the difficulty and the value of gaining causal knowledge. It is arguably the acquisition of causal knowledge that is the primary goal of scientific enquiry; and within philosophy, causation has played a central role in recent theories of reference, perception, decision making, knowledge, intentional and other mental states, and the role of theoretical terms in scientific theories. Indeed, Samuel Alexander (1859–1938) suggested that causation was of the essence of existence itself with his dictum that to be real is to have causal powers. Moreover, assumptions about the nature of causation structure a great deal of discussion elsewhere in philosophy. For example, debates over free will often take as their starting point the question of how we can be free if our intentions to act are themselves part of the causal order. Again, debates in the metaphysics of mind often revolve around the claim that since every physical event has a physical cause, the mind must itself be in some sense physical in order to be the causal source of our actions qua physical events.

This paper argues that the role of knowledge in the explanation and production of intentional action is as indispensable as the roles of belief and desire. If we are interested in explaining intentional actions rather than intentions or attempts, we need to make reference to more than the agent's beliefs and desires. It is easy to see how the truth of your beliefs, or perhaps, facts about a setting will be involved in the explanation of an action. If you believe you can stop your car by pressing a pedal, then, if your belief is true, you will stop. If it is false, you will not. By considering cases of unintentional actions, actions involving luck and cases of deviant causal chains, I show why knowledge is required. By looking at the notion of causal relevance, I argue that the connection between knowledge and action is causal and not merely conceptual.

The process of changing beliefs as a result of accepting the new information is often called Belief revision. It occupies a central position in the area of philosophy, theoretical computer science and logic. However, problem of Belief revision in general is how an agent revises her current beliefs when new information obtained from reliable and evidential source contradicts some of the old beliefs, while preserving the core beliefs. One of the key aspects of the problem of changing beliefs is to provide a means of accommodating new information causing minimal change to the beliefs already held by an agent. Therefore, providing an appropriate mechanism for ordering beliefs in the belief revision is important. This dissertation is a contribution to the study of belief revision from both causal and constructive perspective. Modeling of belief revision address the following general question: Given an initial knowledge base and a new piece of information to be incorporated into it, what should be the appropriate ordering of beliefs so that less entrenched beliefs are lost when compared to more entrenched beliefs. In this study we focus on \emph{causal relevance} and propose a new entrenchment ordering, called as causal epistemic entrenchment (CEE). We ground it on a solid semantic foundation by making use of structure, intervention, causal properties, and causal mechanism. The key idea of such an entrenchment ordering is that not all conditional beliefs in a belief set are important and hence not all beliefs would be relevant for the Belief revision. Precisely, the thesis makes the following contributions. 1. Motivated by scientific theory change in the philosophy and history of science in the context of causality, we present an explanatory approach to model belief revision based on the notion causal relevance. However, our formulation of causal relevance is based on semantic considerations such as structure, intervention, causal process, and causal mechanism. 2. Development of a new entrenchment ordering namely the Causal Epistemic Entrenchment (CEE), suitable for prioritizing conditional beliefs in the belief revision process. It works better especially in preserving the core beliefs, and cases arising from iterated belief revision, theory choice, and the causal dependencies of beliefs. 3. We explored the link between causality and the dynamics of beliefs while emphasizing on causal consistency apart from the logicalconsistency.

Analytic theories of knowledge have traditionally maintained that the provenance of a true belief is critically important to deciding whether it is knowledge. However, a comparably widespread view is that it is our beliefs alone, regardless of their (potentially dubious) provenance which feature in psychological explanation, including the explanation of action: thus, that knowledge itself and as such is irrelevant in psychological explanation. The paper gives initial reasons why the ‘beliefs alone’ view of explanation should be resisted—arguments deriving ultimately from the Meno indicate that the provenance of a true belief may be relevant to the explanation of action. However, closer scrutiny of these arguments shows that they are incapable of according provenance anything like as central a role in action explanation as provenance has traditionally been given in the theory of knowledge. A consideration of the history of science suggests anyway that all knowledge has a compromised provenance if one looks back any significant distance. It is concluded that the importance of the provenance of our beliefs is something that has been seriously over-emphasised in epistemology.