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Optimistic beliefs have been criticized by philosophers as being irrational or epistemically deficient. This paper argues for the possibility of a rational optimism. We propose a novel four-fold taxonomy of optimistic beliefs and argue that people may hold optimistic beliefs rationally for at least two of the four types (resourced optimism and agentive optimism). These forms of rational optimism are grounded in facts about one's resources and agency and may be epistemically justified under certain conditions. We argue that the fourth type of optimism in our taxonomy (perspectival optimism) is not subject to epistemic scrutiny in the same way. It is better evaluated on practical and moral grounds. This paper advances the discussion of optimism within both the philosophical and psychological literatures by providing a compelling and philosophically rich taxonomy of optimism that clarifies the sometimes-competing forms of optimism identified by psychologists. This advances the field by putting forward cases of epistemically justified optimism, in contrast with unrealistic optimism, that is sometimes justified for its instrumental or adaptive characteristics, and also by highlighting a form of optimism, perspectival optimism, that is not being considered in the mainstream optimism literature in psychology. The paper concludes by suggesting several avenues for future empirical and philosophical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What kind of mental state is trust? It seems to have features that can lead one to think that it is a doxastic state but also features that can lead one to think that it is a non-doxastic state. This has even lead some philosophers to think that trust is a unique mental state that has both mind-to-world and world-to-mind direction of fit, or to give up on the idea that there is a univocal analysis of trust to be had. Here, I propose that ‘trust’ is the name we give to mental states that we would think of as beliefs if belief was to be thought of in ‘pragmatist’ terms (that is, as a state posited primarily to explain agents’ actions) and belief resists ‘pragmatist’ treatment. Only such an account, I argue, can univocally account for all the diverse features of trust. As such, I also propose that the explanation of trust provides us with a case for understanding the limitations of a comprehensively ‘pragmatist’, or ‘Neo-Wittgensteinian’ conception of the mental. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I solve a puzzle generated by three conflicting claims about the relationship between faith, belief, and control: according to (1) the Identity Thesis, faith is a type of belief, and according to (2) Fideistic Voluntarism, we sometimes have control over whether or not we have faith, but according to (3) Doxastic Involuntarism, we never have control over what we believe. To solve the puzzle, I argue that the Identity Thesis is true, but that either (2) or (3) is false, depending on how we understand "control." I distinguish two notions of control: direct intention-based control and indirect reflective control. I argue that though we have direct intention-based control over neither belief nor faith, we have indirect reflective control over each of them. Moreover, indirect reflective control helps explain how we can be held accountable for each. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the Transmission View of Testimony (TVT): TVT: If a speaker testifies to a hearer that p, and if the hearer is justified in believing that p on the basis of that speaker's testimony, then the hearer's belief is justified by whatever justification the speaker has for believing that p. The aim of this paper is to develop and defend a novel objection to the TVT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidentialism is the thesis that all reasons to believe p are evidence for p. Pragmatists hold that pragmatic considerations--incentives for believing--can also be reasons to believe. Nishi Shah, Thomas Kelly and others have argued for evidentialism on the grounds that incentives for belief fail a 'reasoning constraint' on reasons: roughly, reasons must be considerations we can reason from, but we cannot reason from incentives to belief. In the first half of the paper, I show that this argument fails: the claim that we cannot reason from incentives is either false or does not combine with the reasoning constraint to support evidentialism. However, the failure of this argument suggests an alternative route to evidentialism. Roughly, reasons must be premises of good reasoning, but it is not good reasoning to reason from incentives to belief. The second half of the paper develops and defends this argument for evidentialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I present an argument for the claim that you ought to do something only if you may believe that you ought to do it. More exactly, I defend the following principle about normative reasons: An agent A has decisive reason to f only if she also has sufficient reason to believe that she has decisive reason to f. I argue that this principle follows from the plausible assumption that it must be possible for an agent to respond correctly to her reasons. In conclusion, I discuss some implications of this argument (given that some other standard assumptions about reasons hold). One such implication is that we are always in a position to be justified in believing all truths about what we have decisive reason (or ought) to do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I examine the ground and validity of Peirce's claim that 'belief has no place in science'. Contrary to the general view, such a claim should not be understood as merely an overreaction to William James' thesis that there can be legitimate non-evidential reasons to believe. For Peirce, believing that something is the case implies, at least when believing takes a certain form, a kind of dogmatism incompatible with the proper conduct of inquiry towards truth. In this paper, I examine two ways in which Peirce argues for the 'no belief in science' thesis. I first discuss 'his claim that belief is incompatible with the 'Will to Learn'. Peirce argues that believing that pin such a way that one does not have any real doubts about whether pimplies that one has a dogmatic attitude vis-à-vis possible future evidence that not- p; I claim that this anticipates the line of reasoning that supports Kripke's 'paradox of dogmatism'. After having indicated how they can both be resisted, I examine a second way- which seems to have been overlooked in Peirce scholarship-in which the founder of pragmatism argues for the 'no belief in science' thesis. Peirce often relates this thesis to his view of abduction and the nature of explanatory hypotheses: the conclusion of an abductive inference is not, and should not be, the belief that a given explanatory hypothesis H is true, probably true, or likely to be true, but rather that H is such that it is a possible explanation of fact F. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many epistemologists have recently defended views on which all evidence is true or perceptual reasons are facts (including McDowell, Pritchard, Williamson, and Littlejohn). On such views a common account of basic perceptual reasons is that the fact that one sees that p is one's reason for believing that p (McDowell, Pritchard, Millar, Haddock). I argue that that account is wrong; rather, in the basic case the fact that p itself is one's reason for believing that p. I show that my proposal is better motivated, solves a fundamental objection that the received view faces, and illuminates the nature of reasons for belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that perception justifies belief about the external world in virtue of its phenomenal character together with its relations to the external world. But I argue that perceptual relations to the external world impact on the justifying role of perception only by virtue of their impact on its representational content. Epistemic level-bridging principles provide a principled rationale for avoiding more radically externalist theories of perceptual justification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to orthodoxy, perceptual beliefs are caused by perceptual experiences. The paper argues that this view makes it impossible to explain how experiences can be epistemically significant. A rival account, on which experiences in the 'good case' are ways of knowing, is set out and defended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceptions guide our actions and provide us with evidence of the world around us. Illusions and hallucinations can mislead us: they may prompt as to act in ways that do not mesh with the world around us and they may lead us to form false beliefs about that world. The capacity view provides an account of evidence that does justice to these two facts. It shows in virtue of what illusions and hallucinations mislead us and prompt us to act. Moreover, it shows in virtue of what we are in a better epistemic position when we perceive than when we hallucination. In this paper, I develop the capacity view, that is, the view that perceptual experience has epistemic force in virtue of the epistemic and metaphysical primacy of the perceptual capacities employed in perception. By grounding the epistemic force of experience in facts about the metaphysical structure of experience, the capacity view is not only an externalist view, but moreover a naturalistic view of the epistemology of perceptual experience. So it is an externalist and naturalistic alternative to reliabilism. I discuss the repercussions of this view for the justification of beliefs and the epistemic transparency of mental states, as well as, familiar problem cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is it that makes someone wise, or one person wiser than another? I argue that wisdom consists in knowledge of how to live well, and that this knowledge of how to live well is constituted by various further kinds of knowledge. One concern for this view is that knowledge is not needed for wisdom but rather some state short of knowledge, such as having rational or justified beliefs about various topics. Another concern is that the emphasis on knowing how to live well fails to do justice to the ancient tradition of ‘theoretical wisdom’. I address both of these concerns in filling out the account. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A popular view maintains that supposition is a kind of cognitive mental state, very similar to belief in essential respects. Call this view 'cognitivism about supposition'. There are at least three grades of cognitivism, construing supposition as (i) a belief, (ii) belief-like imagination or (iii) a species of belief-like imagination. I shall argue against all three grades of cognitivism and claim that supposition is a sui generis form of imagination essentially dissimilar to belief. Since for good reasons (i) is not supported in the literature, I shall dwell on (ii) and (iii). Without further explanation supposition has been very often merely postulated as being nothing but belief-like imagination-that is, (ii). I shall show that at least two considerations undermine (ii). First, supposition and belief-like imagination are governed by different norms, more precisely the former is freer than the latter and requires minimal or no mental effort. Second, contrary to belief-like imagination, supposition is 'cold', in that it is typically dissociated from emotional reactions. Proponents of (iii) face the pressure of explaining these differences between supposition and belief-like imagination too. I shall argue that they have not sufficiently motivated the claim that supposition is belief-like. In particular they fail to accommodate precisely the dimensions of supposition pertaining to its normativity and emotionality. I shall close with a sketch of a new account of supposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since van Fraassen first put forward the suggestive idea that many philosophical positions should be construed as 'stances' rather than factual beliefs, there have been various attempts to spell out precisely what a philosophical stance might be, and on what basis one should be adopted. In this paper I defend a particular account of stances, the view that they are pragmatically justified perspectives or ways of seeing the world, and compare it to some other accounts that have been offered. In Sect. 2 I consider van Fraassen's argument for construing empiricism as a stance, and look at some responses to it. In Sect. 3 I outline my conception of stances as perspectives or ways of seeing, and explain how stances so understood may be justified. I illustrate this conception by way of a discussion of the model pluralist position with respect to the units of selection debate in biology, and suggest that on the model pluralist view different perspectives on the units of selection, such as the gene's eye view, are in fact van Fraassian stances. In Sect. 4 I discuss the view put forward by Teller and Chakravartty among others that stances should be understood as epistemic policies, and argue that it is consistent with the conception of stances as perspectives. In the final section I criticise Rowbottom's attempt to assimilate stances to Kuhnian paradigms. I argue that he has overlooked some important disanalogies between stances and paradigms, so that the comparison obscures more than it reveals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers typically rely on intuitions when providing a semantics for counterfactual conditionals. However, intuitions regarding counterfactual conditionals are notoriously shaky. The aim of this paper is to provide a principled account of the semantics of counterfactual conditionals. This principled account is provided by what I dub the Royal Rule, a deterministic analogue of the Principal Principle relating chance and credence. The Royal Rule says that an ideal doxastic agent's initial grade of disbelief in a proposition $$A$$ , given that the counterfactual distance in a given context to the closest $$A$$ -worlds equals $$n$$ , and no further information that is not admissible in this context, should equal $$n$$ . Under the two assumptions that the presuppositions of a given context are admissible in this context, and that the theory of deterministic alethic or metaphysical modality is admissible in any context, it follows that the counterfactual distance distribution in a given context has the structure of a ranking function. The basic conditional logic V is shown to be sound and complete with respect to the resulting rank-theoretic semantics of counterfactuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to success semantics, a belief's content is that which guarantees the success of the actions that the belief, in combination with the relevant desires, would cause. One worry with the view is that it seems to apply only to full beliefs and fares poorly in dealing with partial beliefs. For example, if Ida's partial belief that p is of strength 0.5, she may act in a way that would fulfill her desires if p were in fact false--assuming that she desires money, she may well accept a bet that pays her $500 if not-p and costs her nothing otherwise. In response to the worry, defenders of success semantics hold that the content of a partial belief is simply that which guarantees the success of the actions it would cause were it a full belief. But, as I'll argue in this paper, such a response is unsatisfactory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about the condition required for an appropriate and educative response to student displays of emotion. Topic discussed include the kinds of things teachers should consider when they encounter their emotional students, how student emotional displays intrude into the realm of education, and is the need for teachers to take seriously their students' emotions and response in an educative way.

The dominant view in the cognitive science of religion (the ‘Standard Model’) is that religious belief and behaviour are not adaptive traits but rather incidental byproducts of the cognitive architecture of mind. Because evidence for the Standard Model is inconclusive, the case for it depends crucially on its alleged methodological superiority to selectionist alternatives. However, we show that the Standard Model has both methodological and evidential disadvantages when compared with selectionist alternatives. We also consider a pluralistic approach, which holds that religion or various aspects of religion originated as byproducts of evolved cognitive structures but were subsequently co-opted for adaptive purposes. We argue that when properly formulated, the pluralistic approach also has certain advantages over the Standard Model. 1 Religion as Evolutionary Explanandum2 The Standard Model of the Origin and Evolution of Religion3 Elaborating on the Standard Model: Modules and Spandrels4 A Methodological Comparison of Functional and Byproduct Explanation5 Selectionist Alternatives to the Standard Model 5.1 Religion as an adaptation with a genetic basis 5.2 Religion as an adaptation of cultural groups 5.3 A pluralist view6 Conclusion [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

abstract Let us by 'first-order beliefs' mean beliefs about the world, such as the belief that it will rain tomorrow, and by 'second-order beliefs' let us mean beliefs about the reliability of first-order, belief-forming processes. In formal epistemology, coherence has been studied, with much ingenuity and precision, for sets of first-order beliefs. However, to the best of our knowledge, sets including second-order beliefs have not yet received serious attention in that literature. In informal epistemology, by contrast, sets of the latter kind play an important role in some respectable coherence theories of knowledge and justification. In this paper, we extend the formal treatment of coherence to second-order beliefs. Our main conclusion is that while extending the framework to second-order beliefs sheds doubt on the generality of the notorious impossibility results for coherentism, another problem crops up that might be no less damaging to the coherentist project: facts of coherence turn out to be epistemically accessible only to agents who have a good deal of insight into matters external to their own belief states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

abstract Some recent work in formal epistemology shows that 'witness agreement' by itself implies neither an increase in the probability of truth nor a high probability of truth-the witnesses need to have some 'individual credibility.' It can seem that, from this formal epistemological result, it follows that coherentist justification (i.e., doxastic coherence) is not truth-conducive. I argue that this does not follow. Central to my argument is the thesis that, though coherentists deny that there can be noninferential justification, coherentists do not deny that there can be individual credibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Advocates of the use of intuitions in philosophy argue that they are treated as evidence because they are evidential. Their opponents agree that they are treated as evidence, but argue that they should not be so used, since they are the wrong kinds of things. In contrast to both, we argue that, despite appearances, intuitions are not treated as evidence in philosophy whether or not they should be. Our positive account is that intuitions are a subclass of inclinations to believe. Our thesis explains why intuitions play a role in persuasion and inquiry, without conceding that they are evidential. The account also makes predictions about the structure of intuitions that are confirmed by independent arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper defends the view that there is a constitutive relation between believing something and believing that one believes it. This view is supported by the incoherence of affirming something while denying that one believes it, and by the role awareness of the contents one’s belief system plays in the rational regulation of that system. Not all standing beliefs are accompanied by higher-order beliefs that self-ascribe them; those that are so accompanied are ones that are “available” in the sense that their subjects are poised to assent to their contents, to use them as premises in reasoning, and to be guided by them in their behavior. The account is compatible with the possibility of negative self-deception—mistakenly believing that one does not believe something—but the closest thing to positive self-deception it allows is believing falsely that a belief with a certain content is one’s dominant belief on a certain matter through failure to realize that one has a stronger belief that contradicts it. The view has implications about Moore’s paradox that contradict widely held views. On this view self-ascriptions of beliefs can be warranted and grounded on reasons—but the reasons are not phenomenally conscious mental states (as held by Christopher Peacocke) but rather available beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.— Quine (1969) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The man who changes his mind, in response to evidence of the truth of a proposition, does not act upon himself; nor does he bring about an effect.— Hampshire (1965, 100) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses aspects on the conflicts between the concepts of neuroscience and philosophy. It presents questions on how those who recognize the philosophical beliefs would accept that the concept is a false one. It also states that the success of any neuroscientific argument will depend on the success of a philosophical analysis of the concept. Moreover, it explores the possibility that some neuroscientific evidences could rule out the concept of self and free will. It mentions the study of Kaposy wherein instances on what the people must or "ought" to believe are cited. It also notes a study by Richard Feldman in which he argued that normative "oughts" relates to the promotion of a value. It says that these conflicts would become a great value if resolved in a principled manner.