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Convergence in Radical Probabilism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Brian Skyrms
Brian Skyrms*
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
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Extract

The obvious move is to deny that the notion of knowledge has the importance generally attributed to it, and to try to make the concept of belief do the work that philosophers have assigned to the grander concept. I shall argue that this is the right move.

- Richard Jeffrey“Probable Knowledge”

Richard Jeffrey advocates fallibilism in the form of radical probabilism. Degrees of belief are the objects of prime interest to epistemology and it is rarely plausible that they should take the extreme form of certainty. In particular the creation of certainties by the process of belief change by conditionalization is not necessary:

… for a certain strict point of view, it is rarely or never that there is a proposition for which the direct effect of an observation will be to change the observer's degree of belief in that proposition to 1 … (Jeffrey 1968)

Type
Part XI. Probability and the Art of Judgment
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 349 - 353
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

This essay amplifies some remarks in Skyrms (1987), (1990). I would like to thank Bruce Bennett, for discussion.

References

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