Belief, credence, and norms

Abstract

There are currently two robust traditions in philosophy dealing with doxastic attitudes: the tradition that is concerned primarily with all-or-nothing belief, and the tradition that is concerned primarily with degree of belief or credence. This paper concerns the relationship between belief and credence for a rational agent, and is directed at those who may have hoped that the notion of belief can either be reduced to credence or eliminated altogether when characterizing the norms governing ideally rational agents. It presents a puzzle which lends support to two theses. First, that there is no formal reduction of a rational agent's beliefs to her credences, because belief and credence are each responsive to different features of a body of evidence. Second, that if our traditional understanding of our practices of holding each other responsible is correct, then belief has a distinctive role to play, even for ideally rational agents, that cannot be played by credence. The question of which avenues remain for the credence-only theorist is considered.

Truth, knowledge, and the standard of proof in criminal law

“…Thus, the act in question (e.g., imposing a prison sentence) has to be guided by certain kinds of consideration to be a punishment. If Agnes' reason for 23 Adler (2002) and Buchak (2013) have argued that the grounds needed for blame differ from the grounds needed for betting. A high degree of confidence might make it rational to bet on Chelsea (depending upon the odds) even if this high degree of confidence doesn't amount to full belief.…”

“…If, however, it's not reasonable to believe the defendant to be guilty, Reasonable Conviction tells us that it would 24 As an anonymous referee pointed out, a focus on blame might be too specific for my purposes. We can offer an account that parallels Buchak's (2013) even if punishment does not involve blame. All that matters for our purposes is that punishment is like blame in that it involves a backwards-looking element.…”

The gambler’s fallacy fallacy (fallacy)

“…When we supplement the notion of belief with the notion of probability, we arrive at the understanding of beliefs as degrees of belief (Ramsey 2016) -and the idea of beliefs as degrees of belief is, of course, precisely the subjectivist definition of probability. For the sake of conceptual clarity, the idea of beliefs as degrees of belief is sometimes referred to as credence (Buchak 2014).…”

Explaining enkratic asymmetries: knowledge-first style

“…There are two further kinds of objection to Permissive Evidentialism and Required Evidentialism that would, I think, also generate problems for Evidential Enkrasia that I do not have space to discuss. One stems from lottery propositions and mere statistical evidence (Nelkin 2000;Hawthorne 2004;Wedgwood 2012;Buchak 2013), and the second stems from concerns about pragmatic encroachment (Fantl and McGrath 2002). Again, such objections to Permissive Evidentialism and Required Evidentialism don't double as problems for Knowledge Evidentialism (since, there, one's evidence is constituted by one's knowledge of what one's knowledge entails).…”

“…This is primarily due to considerations of space. For there is significant reason to think outright belief and credences, while related, are distinct and that their rational statuses may not systematically vary (Wedgwood 2012;Buchak 2013;Staffel 2016;cf. Weisberg forthcoming).…”