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Journal ArticleDOI

Belief and contextual acceptance

01 Nov 2010-Synthese (Springer Netherlands)-Vol. 177, Iss: 1, pp 41-66
TL;DR: A strategy for representing epistemic states and epistemic changes that seeks to be sensitive to the difference between voluntary and involuntary aspects of the authors' epistemic life, as well as to the role of pragmatic factors in epistemology is developed.
Abstract: I develop a strategy for representing epistemic states and epistemic changes that seeks to be sensitive to the difference between voluntary and involuntary aspects of our epistemic life, as well as to the role of pragmatic factors in epistemology. The model relies on a particular understanding of the distinction between full belief and acceptance, which makes room for the idea that our reasoning on both practical and theoretical matters typically proceeds in a contextual way. Within this framework, I discuss how agents can rationally shift their credal probability functions so as to consciously modify some of their contextual acceptances; the present account also allows us to represent how the very set of contexts evolves. Voluntary credal shifts, in turn, might provoke changes in the agent’s beliefs, but I show that this is actually a side effect of performing multiple adjustments in the total lot of the agent’s acceptance sets. In this way we obtain a model that preserves many pre-theoretical intuitions about what counts as adequate rationality constraints on our actual practices—and hence about what counts as an adequate, normative epistemological perspective.

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
*
Second version – June 16, 2008
Eleonora Cresto
CONICET (National Council for Scientific and Technical Research), Argentina
eleonora.cresto@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
In this paper I develop a strategy for representing epistemic states and epistemic changes that seeks to be
sensitive to the difference between voluntary and involuntary aspects of our epistemic life, as well as to the
role of pragmatic factors in epistemology. The model relies on a particular understanding of the distinction
between full belief and acceptance, which makes room for the idea that our reasoning on both practical and
theoretical matters typically proceeds in a contextual way. Within this framework, I discuss how agents can
rationally shift their credal probability functions so as to consciously modify some of their contextual
acceptances; the present account also allows us to represent how the very set of contexts evolves. Voluntary
credal shifts, in turn, might provoke changes in the agent’s beliefs, but I show that this is actually a side effect
of performing multiple adjustments in the total lot of the agent’s acceptance sets. In this way we obtain a
model that preserves many pre-theoretical intuitions about what counts as adequate rationality constraints on
our actual practices – and hence about what counts as an adequate, normative epistemological perspective.
1. Introduction. The belief/ acceptance distinction
In this paper I propose a strategy for modeling the epistemic state and epistemic changes of
a particular agent at a given time. The model seeks to
(a) illuminate the extent to which there is room for pragmatic factors in epistemology;
*
Part of the material included in this paper benefited from conversations with John Collins, Isaac Levi and
Achille Varzi, all of whom provided useful criticism and advice for improvement. 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). I am grateful to the participants for very
helpful comments and suggestions, especially to Anjan Chakravartty, Bas van Fraassen and Bradley Monton
(in Florianópolis), and to Eduardo Barrio, Ramiro Caso, Javier Castro Albano, Milton Laufer, Eleonora
Orlando, Federico Pailos, Gonzalo Rodríguez-Pereyra, Florencia Rimoldi, Laura Skerk, and Ezequiel
Zerbudis (in Buenos Aires).
1

(b) be sensitive to the difference between voluntary and involuntary aspects of our
epistemic life; and
(c) explore the extent to which our reasoning about both epistemic and practical matters
proceeds in a contextual way.
I will argue that, insofar as these goals are fulfilled, we obtain a representation tool that
preserves many pre-theoretical intuitions about what counts as adequate rationality
constraints on our actual practices – and hence about what counts as an adequate, normative
epistemological perspective. In addition, I hope to show that the particular account that I
offer here exhibits several technical advantages (to be mentioned in due course) over
alternative ways of proceeding. To carry out this project I shall rely on (some brand of) a
cognitive decision theoretic framework, and I shall suggest a particular way of construing
the distinction between believing a statement (idea, proposition, hypothesis or theory) and
accepting it.
The notion of belief has been credited with incompatible features on different
occasions; in particular, we need to reconcile somehow the Humean intuition that we
cannot believe at will, with the equally strong intuition that agents routinely make non-
deductive inferences and seek to change their minds on the basis of the conclusions of such
inferences, while they also seek to convince others through rational conversation. We might
be tempted to think that part of the problem here is that different authors have embraced
very different conceptions of belief, ontologically speaking. For example, if beliefs are
mainly characterized as epistemic commitments (as in Levi 1980, 1997, 2004 – to mention a
few), involuntarism does not look too promising; the very idea of commitment embodies an
irreducible normative element, and, prima facie, it seems to imply that we can be held
responsible for the beliefs we have. By contrast, if beliefs are understood first and foremost
as dispositions of some sort, involuntarism becomes more plausible: it seems that
dispositions can well be acquired (and maintained) without our willing this to happen; in
general, while it still makes some room for normativity, a conception of beliefs as
dispositions exhibits a more naturalistic bent than one cashed out entirely in terms of
commitments.
1
1
Theories that conceive of beliefs in terms of commitments typically claim that commitments are not fully
reducible to dispositions (cf. again Levi, 1997, ch.1); however, they may well entail that if an agent is, say,
committed to p, then she has all sorts of dispositions to act or feel as if p – depending on the details of the
2

Still, taking a stance on the ontological debate does not suffice to settle the issue as
to whether particular putative features should or should not hold. For instance, we might
well be able to offer a theory of beliefs according to which we find ourselves, as it were,
having or lacking certain specific commitments. In other words, the potential
inconsistencies that we may find among alternative characterizations of beliefs are not
guaranteed to go away once we clarify our ontological assumptions.
In the light of this, we might want to stipulate a belief-acceptance distinction in
order to restore consistency and alleviate the tension. 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. Indeed, a quick look at the literature shows that there is
no uniform way of understanding these concepts. Some authors, for instance, have
emphasized that believing that something is the case usually entails being convinced of its
truth, and have pointed out that at times we would like the connection with truth to be
relaxed. Probably the best-known example of this perspective is found in Bas van
Fraassen’s discussion of the difference between being fully convinced of the truth of a
given hypothesis and coming to accept it in order to keep on working along a particular
research line; cf. (van Fraassen, 1989, 2002); similar motivations can be found in (Maher,
1993), although Maher’s and van Fraassen’s accounts do not yield extensionally equivalent
pairs of concepts. In van Fraassen’s case, in addition, the idea of acceptance is meant to
help agents avoid committing themselves to the truth of hypotheses or theories that refer to
unobservable entities. On the other hand, authors such as Jonathan Cohen (Cohen, 1992)
have stressed that beliefs are not voluntary; as opposed to acceptances, they grow in us
passively (similarly, cf. Lehrer, 2000). Still others, such as (Stalnaker, 1984) or (Bratman,
1992), have suggested that acceptances, as opposed to beliefs, refer to those propositions
that we are only willing to assert in particular contexts.
2
view. Similar qualifications may apply to comparisons between theories of belief as
commitments/dispositions and descriptions of beliefs in terms of mental states. In any case, I should warn the
reader that here I am not attempting to draw a complete map of different perspective on the nature of belief,
and this is certainly not the place to dig into the difficulties and potential advantages of alternative positions.
As I shall emphasize below, the model I build in this paper seeks to be neutral among different conceptions of
what beliefs actually are.
2
Cf. also the articles in Engel (2000). For yet other proposals see Kaplan (1996), Tuomela (2000), or Da
Costa and French (2003).
3

Which way shall we go, then? In subsequent pages I shall develop a representation
strategy to model beliefs and acceptances, which seeks to fulfill the goals mentioned at the
beginning of this section.
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. We 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 our
favorite theory.
(B) The level of the agent’s attitudes towards statements of her own language, such as
acceptance, rejection, or suspension of judgment.
3
(C) The level of the agent’s semantic assumptions about statements of her own
language (in a way to be clarified soon).
(D) The representation level.
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. As for level (C), notice that by merely looking at the level of the agent’s attitudes
towards statements of her own language (level (B)) we do not know whether the agent is, or
is not, committed to bivalence. 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. Independently of this problem, an agent might accept [reject] a statement of her
language and suspend judgment on its truth-value. Consequently, a representation
3
Notice that, depending on our favorite theory, this level might involve the identification of at least two
different ways of “accepting” a sentence – in agreement with the identification of different epistemic attitudes
in (A).
4

apparatus could give us all the information we deem relevant about level (B) without
thereby providing enough information about what statements the agent takes to be true,
false, or undefined (in case there are such undefined statements according to her favorite
semantic theory).
4
In this paper I shall focus on level (D), 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). Let me emphasize, then, that I shall not attempt to develop a
comprehensive, complete theory about the agent’s real epistemic state; in particular, I shall
bypass what we might dub “the ontological question” on beliefs: the analytic tool I offer
here will be compatible with many different approaches on the exact nature (at level (A)) of
the potential epistemic states that are being so represented (such as sets of commitments,
elements of a Boolean algebra, sets of dispositions, or neurological events, to mention a
few – where these options need not be pairwise incompatible). Likewise, I shall not be
particularly concerned with levels (B) or (C). As we shall see, I shall model epistemic
attitudes by means of sentences of a representation language L, such that the sentences of L
(at level (D)) might be taken to be idealizations (or perhaps suitable translations) of
sentences of a language the agent speaks; nevertheless, an analysis of the agent’s attitudes
about sentences of her own language, or of her semantic assumptions, will not be a goal in
itself.
In the next section I shall argue that, according to well-entrenched pre-theoretical
intuitions, there are pragmatic and contextual factors that shape crucial features of the
agent’s epistemic life – at the level of her real epistemic state.
3. Contextual assumptions
Consider an agent who:
(i) tries to convince others about the truth of a particular set of claims, or about the
correctness, or the convenience, of a particular course of action; or
4
In Cresto (2008b) I develop a proposal that relies on the explicit distinction between the agent’s semantic
assumptions and the semantics embedded it the representation tool.
5

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  • ...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 )....

    [...]

  • ...…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)....

    [...]

  • ...Cf. Herron et al. (1994)....

    [...]

  • ...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)....

    [...]

  • ...Cf. Herron, Seidenfeld and Wasserman (1994) ....

    [...]

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  • ...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)
Q1. What are the contributions mentioned in the paper "Belief and contextual acceptance" ?

In this paper I develop a strategy for representing epistemic states and epistemic changes that seeks to be sensitive to the difference between voluntary and involuntary aspects of their epistemic life, as well as to the role of pragmatic factors in epistemology. Within this framework, I discuss how agents can rationally shift their credal probability functions so as to consciously modify some of their contextual acceptances ; the present account also allows us to represent how the very set of contexts evolves. 

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 ) = 

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. 

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 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.