Delusion is one of the most puzzling doxastic phenomena: on the one hand, the subject appears irrational, holding a delusion despite counterevidence; on the other hand, the subject appears otherwise rational, apportioning their non-delusional beliefs to the evidence. Leading theories of delusion, despite their strengths, still face notable limitations. This article argues that they may benefit from a new empiricist approach. Drawing on insights from Hobbes and Locke, it proposes that the subject may have a distinctive kind of compelling experience that is phenomenologically analogous to, and can effectively be more compelling than, the Cartesian ‘clear experience’. How the experience may, in various ways and to varying degrees, compel domain-specific irrational belief in the face of counterevidence will be articulated.
Doxastic deliberation about how to doxastically relate to a given proposition p is said to be transparent, in that the central deliberative question of ‘Whether to believe p?’ is equivalent to ‘Whether p?’. I discuss four challenges to this thesis based on non-evidential epistemic reasons, deliberative dilemmas, self-effecting attitudes, and permissivist pragmatism. By employing recent insights from both the theory of epistemic normativity and the literature on practical deliberation, I argue that each of these puzzles can be squared with a properly limited and constrained version of the transparency thesis. Ultimately, I show that the claim that doxastic deliberation is after settling ‘Whether p?’ can only be understood as an approximation of a sub-question of the initial normative deliberative question concerning a very specific set of attitudinal options. Nevertheless, the resulting theory retains the core motivation and upshots of the transparency thesis: one is still able to explain why the deliberative norms of doxastic deliberation appear to be, for the most part, epistemic norms.
The article compares two ways to think about the implicit structure of systems studied in pure mathematics. The first approach specifies implicit structure in terms of formal languages, relying on a model-theoretic notion of definability. The second approach defines the notion in terms of invariance criteria. The structural features of a given system are often considered to be properties which are invariant under specific transformations of the system. In the paper, I analyze these two approaches to implicit structure in terms of invariance and definability conditions by drawing to the field of finite geometry. I then explore their formal relationship in the framework of relational algebra, based on the concepts of Galois closures and Krasner algebras. Finally, I examine the equivalence of mathematical systems with respect to their implicit structure in terms of the model-theoretic notion of bi-interpretability.
This paper attempts to dissolve the Gettier problem by employing the notion of background information developed within Bayesian confirmation theory. The paper ultimately defends the traditional Justified True Belief (JTB) analysis of knowledge. The central argument of the paper is that all Gettier cases, as well as several counterexamples to the No False Grounds (NFG) condition, invariably involve falsehood: either the hypothesis itself is false or the justificatory grounds are false, thereby undermining justification. However, in order to identify the precise proposition functioning as the hypothesis or as an evidential statement, and in order to evaluate its truth value, we require a conceptual category called background information. I argue that the failure to specify background information precisely is what prevents epistemologists from identifying the relevant falsehood operative in Gettier cases, whether it concerns a false hypothesis or false justificatory grounds. In many Gettier cases, we fail to recognize that the justified hypothesis is false because two distinct propositions are involved, even though they are expressed by the same sentence. The proposition that is justified is not the same proposition that ultimately turns out to be true. This implicit shift from one proposition to another frequently goes unnoticed because epistemological discussions have largely underestimated the role of background information in determining the proposition expressed by a statement. Every statement, whether explicitly or implicitly, is associated with background information, and changes in the associated background information may alter the proposition expressed by the statement itself. In addition to the notion of background information, the paper also employs the idea of the logical structure of propositions in order to diagnose and dissolve Gettier cases.
The aim of this article is to show how infinitariness prowls when metainferences are called into action to solve Carnap’s categoricity problem. We first present the challenge for propositional classical logic, and show whether it could be solved by using three different definitions of metainferential validity. We then discuss some conceptions of metainferences and show some facts about finitary and infinitary metainferential relations, concerning those three definitions. Further, we explore the prospects of retaining finitariness at the expense of weakening the semantics with a third truth value. Finally, we briefly consider the possibility of once more enriching the structure of the theory by taking inferences to be three-sided.
