Explicating reliability
One may talk of a reliable car. “Reliable” here clearly means a car that has a high success rate of doing what it is supposed to (e.g. getting one where…
ACB on appealing to authority and a minimum level of understanding
ACB: This is an interesting point. Is there a minimum level of understanding that someone must have in order to derive justification from an authority? For example, if you are…
Dialogue – Kennethamy and Emil
Kennethamy in response to something about certainty: I did not say there was such a thing as objective certainty. I said objective certainty was what Descartes was aiming at, not…
A justification principle about logical implication
[Update 11/22/09] I note that Ben actually talked about this principle in a post on his blog, “if it’s reasonable to believe a bunch of premises, it’s also reasonable to…
Psychological and epistemic certainty
A rewrite of an earlier article "two kinds of certainty". - A quick explanation of two types of certainty that people tend to confuse. Psychological certainty The first is the…
Explicating epistemic possibility
It is clear that when we use the phrase “It is possible that...” it is not in all cases used to express mere alethic possibility, that is, “It is logically…
Re: Beliefs and probabilities 2
Opening post. More objections and thoughts. The infinite objection I discovered another objection to the thesis. Infinite regress. The most defendable version of the thesis is (T4) S believes that…
Re: Beliefs and probabilities 1
Opening post. My response: I think some clarification is in order. The thesis in question is this: (T1) If S believes that p, then S believes that the probability of…
Assertion and inference rules
Possible Worlds quote: “In the second place, the concept of conjunction can be conveyed without using any sentence connective whatever. One way - indeed one of the commonest of all…
The dispositional account of belief and an infinite number of beliefs
Quote from The Web of Belief “Rather, believing is a disposition that can linger latent and unobserved. It is a disposition to respond in certain ways when the appropriate issue…