Paper Info
Title
Reducing belief simpliciter to degrees of belief.
Abstract
Is it possible to give an explicit definition of belief (simpliciter) in terms of subjective probability, such that believed propositions are guaranteed to have a sufficiently high probability, and yet it is neither the case that belief is stripped of any of its usual logical properties, nor is it the case that believed propositions are bound to have probability 1? We prove the answer is ‘yes’, and that given some plausible logical postulates on belief that involve a contextual “cautiousness” threshold, there is but one way of determining the extension of the concept of belief that does the job. The qualitative concept of belief is not to be eliminated from scientific or philosophical discourse, rather, by reducing qualitative belief to assignments of resiliently high degrees of belief and a “cautiousness” threshold, qualitative and quantitative belief turn out to be governed by one unified theory that offers the prospects of a huge range of applications. Within that theory, logic and probability theory are not opposed to each other but go hand in hand.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1016/j.apal.2013.06.015
Annals of Pure and Applied Logic
Keywords
Field
DocType
03A10,03A05,68T27,60A05
Discrete mathematics,Formal epistemology,Belief structure,Artificial intelligence,Unified field theory,Epistemology,Probability theory,Qualitative Concept,Belief bias,Doxastic logic,Mathematics,Belief revision
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
164
12
0168-0072
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
13
1.45
15
Authors
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hannes Leitgeb111519.26