Minimal Rationality and the Web of Questions

2025-01-31 · 5 citations

Abstract This chapter proposes a new account of bounded or minimal doxastic rationality, based on the notion that beliefs are answers to questions. The core idea is that minimally rational beliefs are linked through the thematic connections between them, rather than entailment relations. Minimally rational beliefs are not deductively closed, but they are closed under parthood (where a part is an entailment that answers a smaller question). And instead of avoiding all inconsistency, minimally rational believers only avoid blatant inconsistencies (where some beliefs are blatantly inconsistent when they contradict one another on a particular question). Rather than cohering into a single overall world view, beliefs are more loosely connected in what is best described as a web of questions. This view of minimally rational belief naturally gives rise to an account of deductive inquiry on which deductive reasoning is a matter of posing new questions.

Reason and Inquiry: The Erotetic Theory, by Philipp Koralus

Mind · 2023-11-24

Journal Article Reason and Inquiry: The Erotetic Theory, by Philipp Koralus Get access Reason and Inquiry: The Erotetic Theory, by Philipp Koralus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. xii + 354. Daniel Hoek Daniel Hoek Virginia Tech, United States dhoek@vt.edu https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5331-2409 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Mind, fzad062, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzad062 Published: 24 November 2023

Correction to: Million dollar questions: why deliberation is more than information pooling

Social Choice and Welfare · 2022-04-27

Journal of Philosophy

VTechWorks (Virginia Tech) · 2022-01-16

Choices confront us with questions. How we act depends on our answers to those questions. So the way our beliefs guide our choices is not just a function of their informational content, but also depends systematically on the questions those beliefs address. This paper gives a precise account of the interplay between choices, questions and beliefs, and harnesses this account to obtain a principled approach to the problem of deduction. The result is a novel theory of belief-guided action that explains and predicts the decisions of agents who, like ourselves, fail to be logically omniscient: that is, of agents whose beliefs may not be deductively closed, or even consistent.

Questions in Action

The Journal of Philosophy · 2022 · 36 citations

• Computer Science
• Epistemology
• Psychology

Choices confront us with questions. How we act depends on our answers to those questions. So the way our beliefs guide our choices is not just a function of their informational content, but also depends systematically on the questions those beliefs address. This paper gives a precise account of the interplay between choices, questions and beliefs, and harnesses this account to obtain a principled approach to the problem of deduction. The result is a novel theory of belief-guided action that explains and predicts the decisions of agents who, like ourselves, fail to be logically omniscient: that is, of agents whose beliefs may not be deductively closed, or even consistent.

Million dollar questions: why deliberation is more than information pooling

Social Choice and Welfare · 2022 · 4 citations

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Epistemology

Abstract Models of collective deliberation often assume that the chief aim of a deliberative exchange is the sharing of information. In this paper, we argue that an equally important role of deliberation is to draw participants’ attention to pertinent questions, which can aid the assembly and processing of distributed information by drawing deliberators’ attention to new issues. The assumption of logical omniscience renders classical models of agents' informational states unsuitable for modelling this role of deliberation. Building on recent insights from psychology, linguistics and philosophy about the role of questions in speech and thought, we propose a different model in which beliefs are treated as answers directed at specific questions. Here, questions are formally represented as partitions of the space of possibilities and individuals’ information states as sets of questions and corresponding partial answers to them. The state of conversation is then characterised by individuals’ information together with the questions under discussion, which can be steered by various deliberative inputs. Using this model, deliberation is then shown to shape collective decisions in ways that classical models cannot capture, allowing for novel explanations of how group consensus is achieved.

Forced Changes Only: A New Take on the Law of Inertia

Philosophy of Science · 2022-02-10 · 6 citations

Abstract Newton’s First Law of Motion is typically understood to govern only the motion of force-free bodies. This paper argues on textual and conceptual grounds that the law is in fact a stronger, more general principle. The First Law limits the extent to which any body can change its state of motion—even if that body is subject to impressed forces. The misunderstanding can be traced back to an error in the first English translation of Newton’s Principia , which was published a few years after Newton’s death.

Forced Changes Only: A New Take on the Law of Inertia

PhilSci-Archive (University of Pittsburgh) · 2021-12-04

Newton's First Law of Motion is typically understood to govern only the motion of force-free bodies. This paper argues on textual and conceptual grounds that it is in fact a stronger, more general principle. The First Law limits the extent to which any body can change its state of motion -- even if that body is subject to impressed forces. The misunderstanding can be traced back to an error in the first English translation of Newton's Principia, which was published a few years after Newton's death.

Øystein vs Archimedes: A Note on Linnebo’s Infinite Balance

Erkenntnis · 2021-05-26 · 1 citations

Chance and the Continuum Hypothesis

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · 2020 · 5 citations

• Computer Science
• Mathematics
• Mathematical economics

Abstract This paper presents and defends an argument that the continuum hypothesis is false, based on considerations about objective chance and an old theorem due to Banach and Kuratowski. More specifically, I argue that the probabilistic inductive methods standardly used in science presuppose that every proposition about the outcome of a chancy process has a certain chance between 0 and 1. I also argue in favour of the standard view that chances are countably additive. Since it is possible to randomly pick out a point on a continuum, for instance using a roulette wheel or by flipping a countable infinity of fair coins, it follows, given the axioms of ZFC, that there are many different cardinalities between countable infinity and the cardinality of the continuum.