Suspending belief in credal accounts

Noûs 58 (1):3-25 (2024)
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Abstract

Traditionally epistemologists have taken doxastic states to come in three varieties—belief, disbelief, and suspension. Recently many epistemologists have taken our doxastic condition to be usefully represented by credences—quantified degrees of belief. Moreover, some have thought that this new credal picture is sufficient to account for everything we want to explain with the old traditional picture. Therefore, belief, disbelief, and suspension must map onto the new picture somehow. In this paper I challenge that possibility. Approaching the question from the angle of suspension, I argue that all possible credal accounts face serious challenges. They either (i) falsify central claims that uphold the credal picture itself or (ii) do not permit suspension in cases where it is permissible or (iii) rule out the possibility of plainly possible confidence comparisons.

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Andrew del Rio
George Fox University

References found in this work

Quotation.Herman Cappelen, Ernest Lepore & Matthew McKeever - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Knowledge and lotteries.John Hawthorne - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Change in View: Principles of Reasoning.Gilbert Harman - 1986 - Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.

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