Rationality And Belief PDF Download
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Author | : Ralph Wedgwood |
Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | : 278 |
Release | : 2017 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : 0198802692 |
Download The Value of Rationality Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Ralph Wedgwood gives a general account of the concept of rationality. The Value of Rationality is designed as the first instalment of a trilogy - to be followed by accounts of the requirements of rationality that apply specifically to beliefs and choices. The central claim of the book is that rationality is a normative concept. This claim is defended against some recent objections. Normative concepts are to be explained in terms of values (not in terms of 'ought' or reasons). Rationality is itself a value: rational thinking is in a certain way better than irrational thinking. Specifically, rationality is an internalist concept: what it is rational for you to think now depends solely on what is now present in your mind. Nonetheless, rationality has an external goal - the goal of thinking correctly, or getting things right in one's thinking. The connection between thinking rationally and thinking correctly is probabilistic: if your thinking is irrational, that is in effect bad news about your thinking's degree of correctness. This account of rationality explains how we should set about giving a theory of what it is for beliefs and choices to be rational. Wedgwood thus unifies practical and theoretical rationality, and reveals the connections between formal accounts of rationality (such as those of formal epistemologists and decision theorists) and the more metaethics-inspired recent discussions of the normativity of rationality. He does so partly by drawing on recent work in the semantics of normative and modal terms (including deontic modals like 'ought').
Author | : Robert Audi |
Publisher | : OUP Oxford |
Total Pages | : 272 |
Release | : 2011-09-22 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : 0191619523 |
Download Rationality and Religious Commitment Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Rationality and Religious Commitment shows how religious commitment can be rational and describes the place of faith in the postmodern world. It portrays religious commitment as far more than accepting doctrines—it is viewed as a kind of life, not just as an embrace of tenets. Faith is conceived as a unique attitude. It is irreducible to belief but closely connected with both belief and conduct, and intimately related to life's moral, political, and aesthetic dimensions. Part One presents an account of rationality as a status attainable by mature religious people—even those with a strongly scientific habit of mind. Part Two describes what it means to have faith, how faith is connected with attitudes, emotions, and conduct, and how religious experience may support it. Part Three turns to religious commitment and moral obligation and to the relation between religion and politics. It shows how ethics and religion can be mutually supportive even though ethics provides standards of conduct independently of theology. It also depicts the integrated life possible for the religiously committed—a life with rewarding interactions between faith and reason, religion and science, and the aesthetic and the spiritual. The book concludes with two major accounts. One explains how moral wrongs and natural disasters are possible under God conceived as having the knowledge, power, and goodness that make such evils so difficult to understand. The other account explores the nature of persons, human and divine, and yields a conception that can sustain a rational theistic worldview even in the contemporary scientific age.
Author | : Robert Audi |
Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | : 297 |
Release | : 2015-07-01 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : 0190221852 |
Download Rational Belief Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Rational Belief provides conceptions of belief and knowledge, offers a theory of how they are grounded, and connects them with the will and thereby with action, moral responsibility, and intellectual virtue. A unifying element is a commitment to representing epistemology-which is centrally concerned with belief-as integrated with a plausible philosophy of mind that does justice both to the nature of belief and to the conditions for its formation and regulation. Part One centers on belief and its relation to the will. It explores our control of our beliefs, and it describes several forms belief may take and shows how beliefs are connected with the world outside the mind. Part Two concerns normative aspects of epistemology, explores the nature of intellectual virtue, and presents a theory of moral perception. The book also offers a theory of the grounds of both justification and knowledge and shows how these grounds bear on the self-evident. Rationality is distinguished from justification; each clarified in relation to the other; and the epistemological importance of the phenomenal-for instance, of intuitional experience and other "private" aspects of mental life-is explored. The final section addresses social epistemology. It offers a theory of testimony as essential in human knowledge and a related account of the rational resolution of disagreements.
Author | : David Christensen |
Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | : 200 |
Release | : 2004-11-04 |
Genre | : Mathematics |
ISBN | : 0199263256 |
Download Putting Logic in Its Place Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
What role, if any, does formal logic play in characterizing epistemically rational belief? Traditionally, belief is seen in a binary way - either one believes a proposition, or one doesn't. Given this picture, it is attractive to impose certain deductive constraints on rational belief: that one's beliefs be logically consistent, and that one believe the logical consequences of one's beliefs. A less popular picture sees belief as a graded phenomenon. This picture (explored more bydecision-theorists and philosophers of science thatn by mainstream epistemologists) invites the use of probabilistic coherence to constrain rational belief. But this latter project has often involved defining graded beliefs in terms of preferences, which may seem to change the subject away fromepistemic rationality.Putting Logic in its Place explores the relations between these two ways of seeing beliefs. It argues that the binary conception, although it fits nicely with much of our commonsense thought and talk about belief, cannot in the end support the traditional deductive constraints on rational belief. Binary beliefs that obeyed these constraints could not answer to anything like our intuitive notion of epistemic rationality, and would end up having to be divorced from central aspects of ourcognitive, practical, and emotional lives.But this does not mean that logic plays no role in rationality. Probabilistic coherence should be viewed as using standard logic to constrain rational graded belief. This probabilistic constraint helps explain the appeal of the traditional deductive constraints, and even underlies the force of rationally persuasive deductive arguments. Graded belief cannot be defined in terms of preferences. But probabilistic coherence may be defended without positing definitional connections between beliefsand preferences. Like the traditional deductive constraints, coherence is a logical ideal that humans cannot fully attain. Nevertheless, it furnishes a compelling way of understanding a key dimension of epistemic rationality.
Author | : Andrés Perea |
Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | : 581 |
Release | : 2012-06-07 |
Genre | : Business & Economics |
ISBN | : 1107008913 |
Download Epistemic Game Theory Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
The first textbook to explain the principles of epistemic game theory.
Author | : Alex Gregory |
Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | : 236 |
Release | : 2021 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : 019884817X |
Download Desire as Belief Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
What is it to want something? Or, as philosophers might ask, what is a desire?The idea that we explain and evaluate actions with essential reference to what people want is compelling, as it speaks to common-sense ideas that our wants lie at the heart of our decision-making. Yet our wants seem to have a competitor: our beliefs about what we ought to do. Such normative beliefsalone may often suffice to explain our actions. To try and resolve this tension, this book defends "desire as belief", the view that desires are just a special subset of our normative beliefs. This view entitles us to accept orthodox models of human motivation and rationality that explain thosethings with reference to desire, while also making room for our normative beliefs to play a role in those domains. This view also tells us to diverge from the orthodox view on which desires themselves can never be right or wrong. Rather, according to desire-as-belief, our desires can themselves beassessed for their accuracy, and they are wrong when they misrepresent normative features of the world. Hume says that it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of your finger, but he is wrong: it is foolish to prefer the destruction of the wholeworld to the scratching of your finger, precisely because this preference misrepresents the relative worth of these things. This book mounts an engaging and comprehensive defence of these ideas.
Author | : Thomas D. Senor |
Publisher | : Cornell University Press |
Total Pages | : 305 |
Release | : 2019-05-15 |
Genre | : Religion |
ISBN | : 1501744836 |
Download The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
A veritable who's who in the field of contemporary philosophy of religion here considers various issues in the epistemology of religious beliefs. The writings of William P. Alston, the leading figure in the revival of the Anglo-American philosophy of religion, provide the focus of these essays, all but two previously unpublished. Philosophers of religion, meta-physicians, epistemologists, and theologians will find in this volume some of the most important work available in the theory of knowledge and the epistemic status of religious belief.
Author | : Alvin Plantinga |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 334 |
Release | : 1983 |
Genre | : Philosophy |
ISBN | : |
Download Faith and Rationality Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
A collection of essays by contemporary Calvinist philosophers of religion that examine the epistemology of religious belief between Reformed and Roman Catholic philosophers.
Author | : Jerome I. Gellman |
Publisher | : Cornell University Press |
Total Pages | : 236 |
Release | : 1997 |
Genre | : Experience (Religion) |
ISBN | : 9780801433207 |
Download Experience of God and the Rationality of Theistic Belief Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Jerome I. Gellman observes that the mystic experience of God's presence, a sense of having direct contact with the divine, often compels belief in God's existence. On the basis of widely accepted principles connecting appearance with reality, Gellman contends, the claims people make of having experienced God show that belief in God is strongly rational, meaning that such claims are sufficient in number and variety to support a line of reasoning making it rational to believe that God exists and irrational to deny God's existence. Gellman considers challenges to his thinking based on epistemological grounds and challenges growing out of the diversity of religious experiences across the range of world religions. He thoroughly evaluates reductionist explanations of apparent experiences of God and finds them incapable of invalidating his view. Finally, he directs his attention to the two most compelling arguments against the existence of God: the charge that the idea of a perfect being is logically incoherent, and the threat to theism based on the existence of evil, in both its logical and probabilistic forms. Until and unless stronger objections come along, he concludes, personal experiences of God constitute sufficient evidence of God's existence.
Author | : Sarah Coakley |
Publisher | : John Wiley & Sons |
Total Pages | : 328 |
Release | : 2012-07-20 |
Genre | : Religion |
ISBN | : 1118321685 |
Download Faith, Rationality and the Passions Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Faith, Rationality and the Passions presents a fresh and original examination of the relation of religious faith, philosophical rationality and the passions. Contributions see leading scholars refute the widely-held belief that religious Enlightenment forced passion and reason apart. Leading Philosophical experts offer new research on the relation of faith, reason and the passions in classic and Enlightenment figures Overturns the widely-held presumption that the Enlightenment was responsible for creating a gulf between reason and passion Presents original and innovative research on the importance of the late-19th century creation of the category of ‘emotion’, and its striking difference from classic ideas of passion Brings together secular science and philosophy of emotion with philosophical theology to seek a new integration of belief, emotion and reason