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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2010
Consider the frame
S believes that—.
Fill it with a conditional, say
If you eat an Apple, you'll drink a Coke.
what makes the result true? More generally, what facts are marked by instances of
S believes (A→C)?
In a sense the answer is obious: beliefs are so marked. Yet that bromide leads directly to competing schools of thought. And the reason is simple.
Common-sense thinks of belief two ways. Sometimes it sees it as a three-part affair. When so viewed either you believe, disbelieve, or suspend judgment. This take on belief is coarse-grained. It says belief has three flavours: acceptance, rejection, neither. But it's not the only way common-sense thinks of belief. Sometimes it's more subtle: ‘How strong is your faith?’ can be apposite between believers. That signals an important fact. Ordinary practice also treats belief as a fine-grained affair. It speaks of levels of confidence. It admits degrees of belief. It contains a fine-grained take as well. There are two ways belief is seen in everyday life. One is coarse-grained. The other is fine-grained.
1 ‘Belief Revision and the Ramsey Test for Conditionals’, The Philosophical Review (1986).
2 ‘Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities’, The Philosophical Review (1976).
3 ‘Two recent theories of conditionals’, in Ifs, edited by Harper et al., Reidel (1980).
4 Within coarse-grained epistemology see Hansson's, SvenA Textbook of Belief Dynamics, Kluwer Academic Publishers (1999)Google Scholar and its references. Within fine-grained epistemology see Alan Hájek and Ned Hall's ‘The Hypothesis of the Conditional Construal of Conditional Probability’ and its references, in Probability and Conditionals, edited by Eells, ellery and Skyrms, Brian, Cambridge University Press (1994.Google Scholar
5 A phrase drawn from Hartry Field's ‘Disquotational Truth and Factually Defective Discourse’, The Philosophical Review (1994).
6 ‘Probabilities of Conditionals’ Foundations of Probability Theory, Statistical Inference, and Statistical Theories of Science (1976).