Rationality and Epistemic Sophistication by Griesmaier Franz-Peter;

Author:Griesmaier, Franz-Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1998835
Publisher: Lexington Books

Notes

1. The literature on deontologism in epistemology is quite large, and there is no hope we can do justice to all of it in the limited space of one chapter. For a good fairly recent overview of some of the central issues, see Nottelman, 2008.

2. Maintaining one’s belief set consists in either modifying it or keeping it unchanged in the light of new evidence. It’s comparable to maintaining one’s car: sometimes, parts have to be exchanged for new ones, at other times, nothing needs to be done. But one must always be vigilant.

3. Actually, things are not that simple. In light of the problems posed by the possibility of tacit beliefs, belief sets might not be precisely determined for any given time. On the one hand, if tacit beliefs are beliefs actually held at t, then the belief set is determined. However, this may amount to the assumption that the belief set is closed under logical consequence, and thus lead to the problem that agents believe whatever is implied by their beliefs, the doxastic equivalent to the problem of logical omniscience. And since there are bound to be contradictions in one’s belief set, the result is that all agents believe everything, and so that all agents have the same belief set (unless we adopt a paraconsistent logic for modeling belief sets, because such a logic is not explosive). On the other hand, if tacit beliefs are really the result of quick inferences from what’s in a belief set, and are thus added to the belief set on the occasion of some prompting, then what’s in the belief set at t+1 is a function of the agent’s inferential skills. However, we will ignore this complication for our current purpose.

4. Other examples include “and then, a hydrogen bond formed” (event), “the formation of his character was painful” (process), or “it took millions of years for those glaciers to form” (process again). The nature of the difference between events and processes is notoriously difficult to pin down, and I won’t attempt to do it here.

5. For example, Williams, 1972. For an interesting discussion, see Nottelman, 2007.

6. Of course, in the first passage just quoted, Alston also alludes to the second claim involved in DIV.

7. This claim will eventually be qualified by inserting the requirement that the conflicting information needs to be accessible by running the agent’s contextually proper satisficing strategy.

8. There is some empirical evidence for the claims just made. In a paper from 2006,Agnes Moors and Jan De Houwer summarize some of the research pertaining to this issue: “Other authors, such as Hasher and Zacks (1979), have argued that even when a stimulus is attended, certain stimulus aspects are nevertheless encoded automatically. They further suggested that learned automatic processes are susceptible to disruption, reserving the feature uncontrollable exclusively for innate automatic processes. The status of ‘uncontrollable’ as an automaticity feature has been questioned by other advocates of the capacity view as well. For example, Posner and Snyder (1975a) reviewed evidence showing that ‘automatic’ priming effects can be blocked by effortful processes (see also Logan, 1980).

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