Abstract
What can rational deliberation indicate about belief? Belief clearly influences deliberation. The principle that rational belief is stake-invariant rules out at least one way that deliberation might influence belief. The principle is widely, if implicitly, held in work on the epistemology of categorical belief, and it is built into the model of choice-guiding degrees of belief that comes to us from Ramsey and de Finetti. Criticisms of subjective probabilism include challenges to the assumption of additive values (the package principle) employed by defenses of probabilism. But the value-interaction phenomena often cited in such challenges are excluded by stake-invariance. A comparison with treatments of categorical belief suggests that the appeal to stake-invariance is not ad hoc. Whether or not to model belief as stake-invariant is a question not settled here.
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Notes
Or persons, but I will suppose that what is at stake for others matters by way of the interests of the first person involved—the believer himself. What others take to be at stake for him may influence what they attribute to him; how that goes might provide us with reasons for thinking that his belief is or is not stake-sensitive, but I will not explore that indirect approach here.
For examples see Heil (1992), Foley (1993), Kelly (2002; 2003); there are many others. That belief may be held or withheld for pragmatic reasons is a familiar idea. How that may be accomplished and how pragmatic norms may govern believing is open to discussion, but it is not my present concern. I am instead interested in logical and epistemic norms for belief, whether for categorical belief or for choice-guiding belief that comes in degrees. So I am here less interested in how stakes can be pragmatic reasons for believing, for choosing to believe, for bringing it about that one believes, and instead more interested in whether stakes are determiners of what sort or degree of belief one has. I will try to make that idea clearer below. See also note (12).
The issue may be more complex; the magnitude of what is at stake, however measured, might not be the only source of stake-influence on belief. But I will not explore that here.
Ramsey (1926), p.67.
Here I focus on models of precise degrees of belief. About vague degrees of belief we can also raise questions of stake-sensitivity. Does what is at stake shift the range that characterizes a vague degree of belief? Does it make vague degrees of belief sharper or vaguer? These are models and questions that I set aside in this paper, except to suggest that the first sort of influence is at odds with usual ways of thinking of categorical belief in epistemology.
“We are driven therefore to the second supposition that the degree of a belief is a causal property of it, which we can express vaguely as the extent to which we are prepared to act on it. ... As soon as we regard belief quantitatively, this seems to me the only view we can take of it.” (Ramsey 1926, pp. 65–66). His assertion is that this is the only workable view. There can clearly be others; he immediately pursues a criticism of one, the view that degrees of belief are introspectible feelings.
For examples: Stalnaker (1984, Chapter 5) regards belief as one sort of acceptance concept; other sorts of acceptance involve acting as if one believes, in a variety of ways that may be for a purpose, compartmentalized, and direct products of decision. Similarly Bratman (1992). Note that Stalnaker distinguishes a belief from a belief state; the latter is a state of having a total set of beliefs. Van Fraassen (1980) takes acceptance of p (a theory T) to involve belief in a related p* (that T is empirically adequate), together with pragmatic commitments. Kaplan (1996) ties categorical belief that p to preference for asserting p in a particular sort of circumstance, a context of inquiry; this account is a descendent of one in which accepting that p was treated in a similar way. In both accounts Kaplan contrasts acceptance/belief with degrees of confidence. There are many other accounts that make use of an idea of acceptance.
I do not mean to assume here that it is entirely natural to think that his belief does shift. The point here is to suppose that a shift occurs and to reflect on what would follow from that.
I take responsiveness-to-altered-stakes to be a matter of the believer’s responsiveness to his revised assessment of stakes (not to their mere presence, of which he might be unaware); this is meant to include such cases as when one gives little or no occurrent thought to the stakes and then suddenly understands them to be high. The sudden understanding might be taken to be a revision of a dispositional doxastic state that differed from the belief that the stakes are high.
Notice that in focusing on the possibility of influence by what is at stake on the truth of p, our present concern differs from questions about the influence of what is at stake in believing that p. The former attends to the pragmatic significance of p, the latter attends to the pragmatic significance of belief that p, and is the central concern of discussions concerning pragmatic reasons for believing. I think the two issues are not completely and cleanly separable, but here I will so treat them, and will concentrate on the former.
Perhaps such models have been well developed; a more thorough search of the literature than I have done so far would tell.
The idea of beliefs having aims is of course metaphorical.
Stalnaker is discussing two ways of thinking about belief that are in tension: Available belief is appropriately calibrated to motivational states that determine how the information is to be used. The quoted remarks occur in a discussion of the problem of logical omniscience, and his larger point is to suggest that we need more subtle ways of thinking about these two sides of doxastic states, though there is no particular reason to think that stake-sensitivity would be a significant feature of the beliefs more subtly understood. In any case, my suggestion is that the quoted remarks express a standard approach in epistemology, as well as in our folk theory.
Ramsey (1926) p. 78.
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Acknowledgment
Thanks to the organizers of the 2007 Bled Conference on Epistemology, Mylan Engel, Danilo Šuster, Matjaž Potrc, Nenad Miščevič, and Vojko Strahovnik, and to the conference participants for stimulating discussions of these ideas.
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Armendt, B. Stake-Invariant Belief. Acta Anal 23, 29–43 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-008-0018-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-008-0018-0