How do Beliefs Simplify Reasoning?

Abstract

According to an increasingly popular epistemological view, people need outright beliefs in addition to credences to simplify their reasoning. Outright beliefs simplify reasoning by allowing thinkers to ignore small error probabilities. What is outright believed can change between contexts. It has been claimed that thinkers manage shifts in their outright beliefs and credences across contexts by an updating procedure resembling conditionalization, which I call pseudo‐conditionalization (PC). But conditionalization is notoriously complicated. The claim that thinkers manage their beliefs via PC is thus in tension with the view that the function of beliefs is to simplify our reasoning. I propose to resolve this puzzle by rejecting the view that thinkers employ PC. Based on this solution, I furthermore argue for a descriptive and a normative claim. The descriptive claim is that the available strategies for managing beliefs and credences across contexts that are compatible with the simplifying function of outright beliefs can generate synchronic and diachronic incoherence in a thinker's attitudes. Moreover, I argue that the view of outright belief as a simplifying heuristic is incompatible with the view that there are ideal norms of coherence or consistency governing outright beliefs that are too complicated for human thinkers to comply with.

Can Pragmatists Be Moderate?

“…In the case of Donald, there is nothing wrong with Donald's belief, or with his using it in his reasoning as such; it is just that he reaches the wrong conclusions on the basis of this belief. In Risks, conversely, since the decision to arrive at 3pm without checking would be the right decision conditional on the interview starting at 13 For a very interesting discussion, see Staffel (2019). 14 The point I make in what follows is an exact structural analogue of the one that Ichikawa (2012) makes in defending knowledge norms on action, specifically, against supposed counterexamples.…”

Good Guesses

“…And, as 39 E.g. Simon 1957, Cherniak 1986, Dagum and Luby 1993, Weirich 2004, Bradley 2017 This picture is related to (but interestingly distinct from) views on which subjects choose a set of possibilities to treat as certain in a given context-for discussion, see Harsanyi 1985, Lance 1995, Lin and Kelly 2012, Lin 2013, Clarke 2013, Tang 2015, Greco 2015, Leitgeb 2017, and Staffel 2019 mentioned above, people have some tendency to commit the conjunction fallacy when selecting bets-indicating that they're using their guess to frame and guide their actions.…”

A normative comparison of threshold views through computer simulations

“…I suspect that if we change the setup so much that there is no longer variation, then the simulation will no longer model anything remotely realistic. Staffel (2019) highlights the tension between the supposed function of outright beliefs to simplify reasoning and the cognitive mechanisms required to switch between graded and binary beliefs. She argues that the computation required to maintain coherence when moving between credences and outright beliefs undermines the purpose of such a transition to save on computation.…”