Beliefs don’t simplify our reasoning, credences do

Analysis 81 (2):199-207 (2021)
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Abstract

Doxastic dualists acknowledge both outright beliefs and credences, and they maintain that neither state is reducible to the other. This gives rise to the ‘Bayesian Challenge’, which is to explain why we need beliefs if we have credences already. On a popular dualist response to the Bayesian Challenge, we need beliefs to simplify our reasoning. I argue that this response fails because credences perform this simplifying function at least as well as beliefs do.

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Alexander Dinges
Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

Citations of this work

On the Independence of Belief and Credence.Elizabeth Jackson - 2022 - Philosophical Issues 32 (1):9-31.
Degrees of Acceptance.Alexander Dinges - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly (3):578-594.
Assertion and certainty.Alexander Dinges - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.

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References found in this work

Knowledge and its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
Knowledge and Lotteries.John Hawthorne - 2003 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Knowledge and Its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - Philosophy 76 (297):460-464.
Knowledge and its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 64 (1):200-201.
Knowledge and Its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2005 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (2):452-458.

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