Finally, I consider an alleged advantage of COS over TCS in terms of explaining beliefs about lotteries. I also argue that TCS can easily avoid these problems. In this paper, I argue that COS has difficulties in accounting for three important features about belief: i) the compatibility between believing p and assigning non-zero credence to certain error possibilities that one takes to entail not-p, ii) the fact that outright beliefs can occur in different strengths, and iii) beliefs held by unconscious subjects. Credal sensitivism comes in two variants: while credence-one sensitivism (COS) holds that maximal confidence (credence one) is necessary for belief, threshold credal sensitivism (TCS) holds that belief consists in having credence above some threshold, where this threshold doesn't require maximal confidence. A prominent version of this view, called credal sensitivism, holds that the context-sensitivity of belief is due to the context-sensitivity of degrees of belief or credence. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions.Īccording to an increasingly popular view in epistemology and philosophy of mind, beliefs are sensitive to contextual factors such as practical factors and salient error possibilities. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does.
This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy.
The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so forth. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. And the latter account, we argue, is far more plausible than pragmatic credal reductivism, since it accords far better with a number of claims about belief that are very hard to deny. We show that while this account of belief can provide an elegant explanation of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, it is not alone in doing so, for an alternative account of belief, which we call the reasoning disposition account, can do so as well. On this view, what it is for an agent to believe a proposition is for her credence in this proposition to be above a certain threshold, a threshold that varies depending on pragmatic factors.
Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors).
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