The Epistemology of Indicative Conditionals

The Epistemology of Indicative Conditionals

Author: Igor Douven

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1107111455

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Addresses central questions concerning conditionals by combining the methods of formal epistemology with those of cognitive psychology.


Probabilistic Knowledge

Probabilistic Knowledge

Author: Sarah Moss

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0198792158

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Sarah Moss argues that in addition to full beliefs, credences can constitute knowledge. She introduces the notion of probabilistic content and shows how it plays a central role not only in epistemology, but in the philosophy of mind and language. Just you can believe and assert propositions, you can believe and assert probabilistic contents.


Conditionals

Conditionals

Author: Nicholas Rescher

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2007-05-04

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0262264439

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A unified treatment of conditionals based on epistemological principles rather than the semantical principles in vogue over recent decades. This book by distinguished philosopher Nicholas Rescher seeks to clarify the idea of what a conditional says by elucidating the information that is normally transmitted by its utterance. The result is a unified treatment of conditionals based on epistemological principles rather than the semantical principles in vogue over recent decades. This approach, argues Rescher, makes it easier to understand how conditionals actually function in our thought and discourse. In its concern with what language theorists call pragmatics—the study of the norms and principles governing our use of language in conveying information—Conditionals steps beyond the limits of logic as traditionally understood and moves into the realm claimed by theorists of artificial intelligence as they try to simulate our actual information-processing practices. The book's treatment of counterfactuals essentially revives an epistemological approach proposed by F. P. Ramsey in the 1920s and developed by Rescher himself in the 1960s but since overshadowed by the now-dominant possible-worlds approach. Rescher argues that the increasingly evident liabilities of the possible-worlds strategy make a reappraisal of the older style of analysis both timely and desirable. As the book makes clear, an epistemological approach demonstrates that counterfactual reasoning, unlike inductive inference, is not a matter of abstract reasoning alone but one of good judgment and common sense.


Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability

Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability

Author: Lee Walters

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2021-02-04

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 0198712731

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Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability comprises fifteen original essays on themes from the work of Dorothy Edgington, the first woman to hold a chair in philosophy at Oxford. Eminent contributors from philosophy and linguistics discuss a range of topics including conditionals, vagueness, knowledge, reasoning, and probability.


Suppose and Tell

Suppose and Tell

Author: Timothy Williamson

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0198860668

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What does 'if' mean? Timothy Williamson presents a controversial new approach to understanding conditional thinking, which is central to human cognitive life. He argues that in using 'if' we rely on psychological heuristics, fast and frugal methods which can lead us to trust faulty data and prematurely reject simple theories.


A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals

A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals

Author: Jonathan Bennett

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0199258872

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The author, one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of conditional sentences, distils many years' work and teaching into 'A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals', an authoritative treatment of the subject.


Epistemic Modality

Epistemic Modality

Author: Andy Egan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-06-23

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0199591598

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There's a lot we don't know, which means that there are a lot of possibilities that are, epistemically speaking, open. What these epistemic possibilities are, and how we understand the semantics of epistemic modals, are explored here through a variety of philosophical approaches.


Explaining Imagination

Explaining Imagination

Author: Peter Langland-Hassan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0198815069

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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Imagination will remain a mystery--we will not be able to explain imagination--until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or process--one with its own inscrutable principles of operation. Explaining Imagination upends that view, showing how, on closer inspection, the imaginings at work in hypothetical reasoning, pretense, the enjoyment of fiction, and creativity are reducible to other familiar mental states--judgments, beliefs, desires, and decisions among them. Crisscrossing contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and aesthetics, Explaining Imagination argues that a clearer understanding of imagination is already well within reach.


Moral Epistemology

Moral Epistemology

Author: Aaron Zimmerman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-06-10

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1136965343

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How do we know right from wrong? Do we even have moral knowledge? Moral epistemology studies these and related questions about our understanding of virtue and vice. It is one of philosophy’s perennial problems, reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Hume and Kant, and has recently been the subject of intense debate as a result of findings in developmental and social psychology. In this outstanding introduction to the subject Aaron Zimmerman covers the following key topics: What is moral epistemology? What are its methods? Including a discussion of Socrates, Gettier and contemporary theories of knowledge skepticism about moral knowledge based on the anthropological record of deep and persistent moral disagreement, including contextualism moral nihilism, including debates concerning God and morality and the relation between moral knowledge and our motives and reasons to act morally epistemic moral scepticism, intuitionism and the possibility of inferring ‘ought’ from ‘is,’ discussing the views of Locke, Hume, Kant, Ross, Audi, Thomson, Harman, Sturgeon and many others how children acquire moral concepts and become more reliable judges criticisms of those who would reduce moral knowledge to value-neutral knowledge or attempt to replace moral belief with emotion. Throughout the book Zimmerman argues that our belief in moral knowledge can survive sceptical challenges. He also draws on a rich range of examples from Plato’s Meno and Dickens’ David Copperfield to Bernard Madoff and Saddam Hussein. Including chapter summaries and annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, Moral Epistemology is essential reading for all students of ethics, epistemology and moral psychology.