Belief and contextual acceptance
Summary (2 min read)
1. Introduction. The belief/ acceptance distinction
- Early drafts have been presented at the Vth Principia Symposium (Florianopolis, August 2007), and at a discussion session at the GAF (Grupo de Acción Filosófica, Buenos Aires, September 2007).
- (b) be sensitive to the difference between voluntary and involuntary aspects of their epistemic life; and (c) explore the extent to which their reasoning about both epistemic and practical matters proceeds in a contextual way.
- As is well known, different variants of the belief-acceptance distinction have been proposed during recent decades, with the aim of solving very different problems.
2. Levels of analysis
- Before presenting the structure of the model let me distinguish four possible levels of analysis; the distinction will help me clarify the scope of the paper.
- The authors find, at the very least: (A) The level of the agent’s real epistemic state, which may be constituted by epistemic attitudes such as doubts, beliefs, and acceptances, among others – depending on their favorite theory.
- 3 (C) The level of the agent’s semantic assumptions about statements of her own language (in a way to be clarified soon).
- If the agent is not committed to bivalence, the set of sentences she rejects [accepts] and the set of sentences she takes to be false [true] may not coincide, as she might accept or reject statements that she takes to be semantically undefined.
- With the aim of capturing some phenomena (in particular, with the aim of representing a number of distinctions) that are already intuitively clear at level (A).
3. Contextual assumptions
- I develop a proposal that relies on the explicit distinction between the agent’s semantic assumptions and the semantics embedded it the representation tool.
- In what follows I shall not be concerned with them, but only with what the authors might call “epistemic assumptions.”6.
- Thus, I shall say that agents find themselves holding specific epistemic assumptions for specific contexts of action and deliberation – or contextual certainties – in addition to epistemic assumptions for all contexts they deem relevant.
- I shall have much more to say about doubts in the next section.
- The two cases, however, are not analogous.
4. Modeling beliefs and contextual acceptances
- The authors stress the idea that there is a peculiar continuity between an agent’s state of certainty and doubt.
- Finally, in the next section I hope to show that, by letting contexts be associated with sets of probability functions in the manner just suggested, the authors obtain a neat way of tracking how contexts themselves change.
- Before proceeding any further, let me consider two potential objections.
- Alternative systems that share at least some of van Fraassen’s motivations can be found in Arló Costa (2001), or Arló Costa and Parikh (2005), to mention a few.
5. Voluntary epistemic changes
- In this section I shall explore how the model behaves at the time of representing epistemic changes.
- Consider the possibility of expanding acceptance set Tb with sentence α consistent with Tb, where Tb is, as usual, determined by a particular set Δb correlated with context b. .
- Next, the agent can use the chosen epistemic utility function to calculate the expected epistemic utility of the relevant sentences of L (i.e., of the 28 In Cresto (2008b).
- (This, however, does not mean to say that empirical evidence does not play any role in acceptance, of course, but only that the decision theoretic exercise I am considering here takes place well after gathering the evidence and well after using such evidence to update probabilities in a Bayesian way).
- Second, by (3) the definition entails that at least some probability function in Δb has been updated.
6. Involuntary epistemic changes
- I have suggested that voluntary epistemic expansions are essentially contextual expansions.
- The way I see it, at the time of engaging in research and reflecting on the particular “gain” the authors obtain from a given hypothesis or statement (for instance, a particular explanatory relief), an agent does not consider the advantages or disadvantages of coming to believe, for all contexts, that the statement is true.
- In the first place, in addition to the contextual expansions that I have described so far, the present model can well allow for spontaneous, involuntary expansions of K, which will affect every acceptance set Ai⊆M.
- The acquisition of new perceptual beliefs constitutes a paradigmatic example of this situation.
- A similar story could in principle be told for contractions, although I shall not enter into the details here.
7. Conclusions
- Let me summarize briefly what the authors have achieved.
- In more mundane contexts, however (say, when not pressed by the urge to obtain results relevant to her current research line) she is not so convinced – actually, in more mundane contexts she tends to be wary about fully assenting to the truth of general explanations, or even to the truth of (non-tautological) disjunctions of explanations.
- During normal pregnancy, progesterone stimulates the production of Gal-1, which induces tolerogenic dendritic cells (a mechanism already postulated in tumor growth), ultimately suppressing T-cell activity against the fetus, also known as u.
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"Belief and contextual acceptance" refers background in this paper
...gathering of new data fulfills further conditions that guarantee that no asymptotic dilation occurs – at least for cases of dilation related to the acquisition of new empirical evidence (on this cf. especially Herron, Seidenfeld and Wasserman 1994, 1997 )....
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...…uncountably many priors)31 we can still seek to ensure that the gathering of new data fulfills further conditions that guarantee that no asymptotic dilation occurs—at least for cases of dilation related to the acquisition of new empirical evidence (on this cf. especially Herron et al. 1994, 1997)....
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...Cf. Herron et al. (1994)....
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...Cf. for instance Walley (1991, p. 299), Seidenfeld and Wasserman (1993), Herron et al. (1994), Herron et al. (1997), Van Fraassen (2005; 2006) or White (2008), among others; cf. Sturgeon (2008) for an attempt to deal with White (2008)....
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...Cf. Herron, Seidenfeld and Wasserman (1994) ....
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"Belief and contextual acceptance" refers background in this paper
...In particular, let me recall here that arguments that appeal to diachronic Dutch Books have been contested on several occasions; cf. for example Levi (1987, 2002), Maher (1992) or Howson and Urbach (1993, pp. 99 and ff.), among others....
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Frequently Asked Questions (8)
Q2. What are the future works in "Belief and contextual acceptance" ?
40 the authors can reconstruct her inference to the best explanation along the following lines. ( Notice that u clearly excels in both unification power and fertility, insofar as it helps to get a unified picture of two seemingly disparate phenomena – fetus and tumor growth – while it suggests a path of further tests that might ultimately lead to therapies to enhance both tumor survival and reduction of spontaneous abortions. ) In addition, Jill ’ s new epistemic state will have functions P2 ’ and P2 ’ ’ such that: 40 Incidentally, in the course of her research many evidential statements ( such as the observational results of several tests ) have already become full certainties of Jill ; the authors can suppose that they have already helped update the probability of both t and u in every context, in a standard Bayesian manner. 41 A rationale for this suggestion can be found in the thought that, if the authors assume a hypothesis to be false, then no epistemic satisfaction can be obtained from it, and hence eu ( -h ) is 0. P2 ’ ( p ) =P2 ’ ( q ) =P2 ’ ( r1 ) =…= P2 ’ ( rn ) =1 ; P2 ’ ( s ) =0. 99 ; P2 ’ ( t ) =0. 4 ; P2 ’ ( u ) =0. 6 ; and P2 ’ ’ ( p ) =P2 ’ ’ ( q ) =P2 ’ ’ ( r1 ) =…=P2 ’ ’ ( rn ) =1 ; P2 ’ ’ ( s ) =0. 99 ; P2 ’ ’ ( t ) =0. 375 ; P2 ’ ’ ( u ) =
Q3. What is the level of the agent’s attitudes towards statements of her own language?
The agent’s real doubts, beliefs and acceptances, at level (A), are obviously compatible with more than one linguistic manifestation of (at least part of) such states, at level (B); in addition, elements at levels (A) and (B) are compatible with more than one modeling strategy.
Q4. What is the way to conceive of IBE?
In other words, The authorhave suggested that the authors conceive of IBE as a decision theoretic exercise, in which the authors focus on the epistemicattention to other sets
Q5. What is the argument that the present model violates the Bayesian conditionalization principle?
It might be contended that allowing probability functions to be modified in the way The authoram advocating here commit us to a violation of so-called Bayesian conditionalization, and that the authors are therefore in trouble.
Q6. What does the definition require that a full doubt occur?
In other words, in order to be fulfilled this definition requires that some real probability change occur, and that some acceptance set be actuallyenlarged, regardless of whether α had already been in M; on the other hand, if α is a fullbelief of the agent at t, the definition cannot be satisfied: α needs to be, if not a full doubt, at least a contextual doubt.
Q7. What is the way to explain IBE?
In (Cresto, 2006, 2008a) The authorhave argued that conscious, voluntarily implementedexpansions can be paradigmatically illustrated with instances of inferences to the best explanation (IBE), and The authorhave also argued that the concept of IBE is best elucidated with the aid of some brand of cognitive decision theory.
Q8. What does the agent have to say about the possibility of not-p?
if the agent is unable to represent to herself the possibility that such circumstances occur, that means that p is a full belief, rather than a mere contextual acceptance.