Simple belief
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Simple belief John Collins1
Received: 6 August 2016 / Accepted: 24 February 2018 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract We have reasons to want an epistemology of simple belief in addition to the Bayesian notion of belief which admits of degree. Accounts of simple belief which attempt to reduce it to the notion of credence all face difficulties. We argue that each conception captures an important aspect of our pre-theoretic thinking about epistemology; the differences between the two accounts of belief stem from two different conceptions of unlikelihood. On the one hand there is unlikelihood in the sense of improbability, on the other hand there is unlikelihood in the sense of far-fetchedness. A non-reductive account of simple belief is outlined. Belief aims not just at truth, but at attaining the status of knowledge, and knowledge should satisfy the weak modal principle: If S knows that p then S is certain that there is no possibility very close to actuality at which p is false. The account faces a difficulty in dealing with statistical inductive cases. We sketch a speculative strategy for dealing with such cases, based on the pragmatic considerations that lead to an agent’s partition of the space of possibilities and a nonprobabilistic notion of the “estimated distance” of elements of such a partition from actuality.
Early versions of this material were presented as the Jerrold Katz Memorial Lecture at the CUNY Graduate Center on February 7, 2007, at the Synthese Annual Conference “Between Logic and Intuition: David Lewis and the Future of Formal Methods in Philosophy”, the Carlsberg Academy, Copenhagen, October 3, 2007, at “Another World is Possible: a Conference on the Work of David Lewis” at the University of Urbino, June 16–18, 2011, and at a Columbia Philosophy Work-in-Progess Seminar on March 6, 2014. My thanks to the audiences on those occasions and to two anonymous referees for this journal for insightful comments and criticism. For the Synthese special issue on “The Legacy of David Lewis” edited by Marianna Antonutti and Pierluigi Graziani. Final version of February 9th, 2018.
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John Collins [email protected] Columbia University, New York, USA
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Synthese
Keywords Belief · Credence · Unlikelihood · Improbability · Far-fetchedness
1 Two kinds of unlikelihood Much recent philosophy of mind and language has focused on the problem of content; my primary concern has always been with attitude problems. That is to say, my main interest is not in what makes a particular mental state a belief about X , but in what makes it a belief about X , rather than some other attitude with that content. According to a commonsense functionalism, mental states are those inner states that occupy certain constitutive roles in the pattern of causal connection that obtains between a thinker’s sensory input, her behavioral output, and her other mental states. I think that such an account of the mind must be correct, at least in broad outline. Functionalists have tended to focus on
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