Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-tj2md Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T19:29:49.785Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Change in View: Principles of Reasoning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Gilbert Harman
Edited by
Jonathan E. Adler  and
Lance J. Rips
Gilbert Harman
Affiliation:
Princeton University
Jonathan E. Adler
Affiliation:
Brooklyn College, City University of New York
Lance J. Rips
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Illinois
Get access

Summary

BELIEF AND DEGREE OF BELIEF

Probabilistic Implication

We have a rule connecting implication and reasoning:

Principle of Immediate Implication That P is immediately implied by things one believes can be a reason to believe P.

Is there also a weaker probabilistic version of this rule?

Hypothetical Principle of Immediate Probabilistic Implication That P is obviously highly probable, given one's beliefs, can be a reason to believe P.

Suppose Mary purchases a ticket in the state lottery. Given her beliefs, it is obviously highly probable that her ticket will not be one of the winning tickets. Can she infer that her ticket will not win? Is she justified in believing her ticket is not one of the winning tickets?

Intuitions waver here. On the one hand, if Mary is justified in believing her ticket is not one of the winning tickets, how can she be justified in buying the ticket in the first place? Furthermore, it certainly seems wrong to say she can know that her ticket is not one of the winning tickets if it is really a fair lottery. On the other hand the probability that the ticket is not one of the winning tickets seems higher than the probability of other things we might easily say Mary knows. We ordinarily allow that Mary can come to know various things by reading about them in the newspaper, even though we are aware that newspapers sometimes get even important stories wrong.

Type
Chapter
Information
Reasoning
Studies of Human Inference and its Foundations
 , pp. 35 - 46
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, J. R., and Bower, G. H. (1973). Human Associative Memory (Washington, D.C.: Winston).Google Scholar
Dorling, Jon (1972). “Bayesianism and the rationality of scientific inference,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 23:181–190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doyle, Jon (1979). “A truth maintenance system,” Artificial Intelligence 12:231–272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doyle, Jon (1980). “A Model for Deliberation, Action, and Introspection,” MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Technical Report 581.
Glymour, Clark (1980). Theory and Evidence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press).Google Scholar
Goldman, Alvin I. (1978). “Epistemology and the psychology of belief,” Monist 61:525–535.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horwich, Paul (1982). Probability and Evidence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Jeffrey, Richard C. (1983). The Logic of Decision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
Kyburg, Henry (1961). Probability and the Logic of Rational Belief (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press).Google Scholar
Nisbett, Richard, and Ross, Lee (1980). Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgement (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall).Google Scholar
Peirce, C. S. (1877). “The fixation of belief,” Popular Science Monthly 12:1–15. Reprinted in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, Justice Buchler, ed. (New York: Dover, 1955), 5–22.Google Scholar
Pollock, John (1979). “A plethora of epistemological theories,” in Justification and Knowledge, Pappas, George, ed. (Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel), 93–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ross, Lee, and Anderson, Craig A. (1982). “Shortcomings in the attribution process: On the origins and maintenance of erroneous social assessments,” in Judgement under Certainty: Heuristics and Biases, Kahneman, Daniel, Slovic, Paul, and Tversky, Amos, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 129–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sosa, Ernest (1980). “The raft and the pyramid: Coherence versus foundations in the theory of knowledge,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5:3–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×