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.

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..

I offer a novel account of the absurdity of Moore-paradoxical assertion in terms of an interlocutor’s fully conscious beliefs. This account starts with an original argument for the principle that fully conscious belief collects over conjunction. The argument is premised on the synchronic unity of consciousness and the transparency of belief.

Moran conceives of conscious belief as a conscious activity, rather than awareness of a mental state. Once conscious belief is understood in this way, the notion of suppressed belief becomes problematic. In this paper, I draw on the work of Merleau-Ponty to sketch an account of suppressed belief. I suggest that suppressed beliefs should not be understood as attitudes towards propositions. Instead, they should be conceived as ways of perceiving and interacting with the world that are out of keeping with how one repre-sents it as being.

Some of the topics presented in this volume of original essays on contemporary approaches to belief include the problem of misrepresentation and false belief, conscious versus unconscious belief, explicit versus tacit belief, and the durable versus ephemeral question of the nature of belief. The contributors, Fred Dretske, Keith Lehrer, William Lycan, Stephen Schiffer, Stephen P. Stich, and the editor, Radu Bogdan, focus on the mental realization of belief, its cognitive and behavioral aspects, and the semantic aspects of its content. This interdisciplinary study takes advantage of many new theories in what has become an important area of research.