Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T14:45:35.525Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Credence: A Belief-First Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2020

Andrew Moon  and
Elizabeth Jackson Open the ORCID record for Elizabeth Jackson [Opens in a new window]
Andrew Moon*
Affiliation:
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA
Elizabeth Jackson
Affiliation:
School of Philosophy, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Department of Philosophy, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada
*
*Corresponding author. Email: andrewmoon616@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper explains and defends a belief-first view of the relationship between belief and credence. On this view, credences are a species of beliefs, and the degree of credence is determined by the content of what is believed. We begin by developing what we take to be the most plausible belief-first view. Then, we offer several arguments for it. Finally, we show how it can resist objections that have been raised to belief-first views. We conclude that the belief-first view is more plausible than many have previously supposed.

Keywords

Credencebeliefconfidenceepistemic probabilityepistemic modalsanimal concepts
Type
Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 50 , Issue 5 , July 2020 , pp. 652 - 669
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adler, J. 2002. Belief’s Own Ethics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andrews, K. 2015. The Animal Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal Cognition. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Andrews, K. 2016. “Animal Cognition.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2016), edited by Zalta, Edward N.. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/cognition-animal.Google Scholar
Archer, S. 2018. “Why ‘Believes’ Is Not a Vague Predicate.” Philosophical Studies 175: 3029–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Balci, F., Freestone, D., and Gallistel, C. R.. 2009. “Risk Assessment in Man and Mouse.” The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 6 (7):2459–63.Google Scholar
Beck, J. 2012. “Do Animals Engage in Conceptual Thought?” Philosophy Compass 4: 756–67.Google Scholar
Bouvens, L., and Hawthorne, J.. 1999. “The Preface, the Lottery, and the Logic of Belief.” Mind 108: 241–64.Google Scholar
Buchak, L. 2015. “Belief, Credence and Norms.” Philosophical Studies 169: 285–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carruthers, P. 2006. The Architecture of the Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carter, J. A., Jarvis, B., and Rubin, K.. 2016. “Belief without Credence.” Synthese 193: 2323–51.Google Scholar
Christensen, D. 2004. Putting Logic in Its Place. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Churchland, P. M. 1981. “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes.” The Journal of Philosophy 78: 67–90.Google Scholar
Clarke, R. 2013. “Belief Is Credence One (in Context).” Philosophers’ Imprint 13: 1–18.Google Scholar
Collins, J. Forthcoming. “Simple Belief.” Synthese.Google Scholar
Crabill, J. 2013. “Suppose Yalcin Is Wrong about Epistemic Modals.” Philosophical Studies 162: 625–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crary, A. 2012. “Dogs and Concepts.” Philosophy 87 (2): 215–73.Google Scholar
Davidson, D. 1982. “Rational Animals.” Dialectica 36: 318–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeRose, K. 1991. “Epistemic Possibilities.” The Philosophical Review 100: 581–605.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dogramaci, S. 2018. “Rational Credence through Reasoning.” Philosophers’ Imprint 18: 1–25.Google Scholar
Dogramaci, S. 2016. “Knowing Our Degrees of Belief.” Episteme 13: 269–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dorr, C., and Hawthorne, J.. 2013. “Embedding Epistemic Modals.” Mind 122: 867–914.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dorst, K. 2019. “Lockeans Maximize Expected Accuracy.” Mind 128: 175–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dougherty, T., and Rysiew, P.. 2009. “Fallibilism and Concessive Knowledge Attributions.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78: 123–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Douven, I., and Williamson, T.. 2006. “Generalizing the Lottery Paradox.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (4): 755–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dummett, M. 2010. The Nature and Future of Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Easwaran, K. 2015. “Formal Epistemology.” The Journal of Philosophical Logic 44: 651–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Easwaran, K. 2016. “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bayesian Probabilities.” Noûs 50 (4): 1–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elga, A. 2010. “Subjective Probabilities Should Be Sharp.” Philosophers’ Imprint 10: 1–11.Google Scholar
Foley, R. 1993. Working without a Net: A Study of Egocentric Epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Foley, R. 2009. “Introduction, .” In Degrees of Belief: An Anthology, edited by Huber, Franz and Schmidt-Petri, Christoph, 1–33. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Frankish, K. 2004. Mind and Supermind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frankish, K. 2009. “Partial Belief and Flat-Out Belief.” In Degrees of Belief, edited by Huber, Franz and Schmidt-Petri, Christoph, 75–96. New York: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedman, J. 2013. “Rational Agnosticism and Degrees of Belief.” In Oxford Studies in Epistemology 4, edited by Gendler, Tamar Szabó and Hawthorne, John, 57–81. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ganson, D. 2008. “Evidentialism and Pragmatic Constraints on Outright Belief.” Philosophical Studies 193: 441–58.Google Scholar
Gertler, B. 2011. Self-Knowledge. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Gould, J. L., and Gould, C. G.. 1995. The Honey Bee. 2nd ed. New York: W. H. Freeman.Google Scholar
Greco, D. 2015. “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Probability 1.” Philosophical Perspectives 29: 179–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harman, G. 1986. Change in View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Harman, G. 2008. “A Change in View: Principles of Reasoning.” In Reasoning: Studies of Human Inference and its Foundations, edited by Adler, Jonathan and Rips, Lance, 35–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawthorne, James. 2009. “The Lockean Thesis and the Logic of Belief.” Degrees of Belief: An Anthology, edited by Huber, Franz and Schmidt-Petri, Christoph, 49–74. New York: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawthorne, John, and Stanley, J.. 2008. Knowledge and Action. Journal of Philosophy, 105 (10): 571–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holton, R. 2008. “Partial Belief, Partial Intention.” Mind 117: 27–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holton, R. 2014. “Intention as a Model for Belief.” In Rational and Social Agency: Essays on the Philosophy of Michael Bratman, edited by Vargas, Manuel and Yaffe, Gideon, 12–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horgan, T. 2017. “Troubles for Bayesian Formal Epistemology.” Res Philosophica 94 (2): 23–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huemer, M. 2007. “Epistemic Possibility.” Synthese 156: 119–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, E. 2018. “A Defense of Belief-Credence Dualism.” In The Proceedings of the Fifth Conference of the Brazilian Society of Analytic Philosophy, edited by Ourique, João Luis Pereira, 77–78. Pelotas, Brazil: Série Dissertatio de Filosofia.Google Scholar
Jackson, E. 2019a. “Belief and Credence: Why the Attitude-Type Matters.” Philosophical Studies 176 (9): 2477–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, E. 2019b. “How Belief-Credence Dualism Explains Away Pragmatic Encroachment.” The Philosophical Quarterly 69 (276): 511–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, E. Forthcoming. “Belief, Credence, and Evidence.” Synthese.Google Scholar
Jeffrey, R. 1970. “Dracula Meets Wolfman: Acceptance vs. Partial Belief.” In Induction, Acceptance, and Rational Belief, edited by Swain, Marshall, 157–85. Dordrecht, Nether.: Reidel.Google Scholar
Jeffrey, R. 1985. “Animal Rationality.” In Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, edited by LePore, E. and McLaughlin, B. P.. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Joyce, J. M. 2002. “Levi on Causal Decision Theory and the Possibility of Predicting One’s Own Actions.” Philosophical Studies 110: 69–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaplan, M. 1996. Decision Theory as Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kauss, D. Forthcoming. “Credence as Doxastic Tendency.” Synthese.Google Scholar
Kheifets, A., and Gallistel, C. F.. 2012. “Mice Take Calculated Risks.” The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109 (22): 8776–79.Google ScholarPubMed
Kratzer, A. 1977. “What ‘Must’ and ‘Can’ Must and Can Mean.” Linguistics and Philosophy 1: 337–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lance, M. N. 1995. “Subjective Probability and Acceptance.” Philosophical Studies 77 (1): 147–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, M. 2017. “Credence and Correctness: In Defense of Credal Reductivism.” Philosophical Papers 46 (2): 273–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leitgeb, H. 2013. Reducing Belief Simpliciter to Degrees of Belief. Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 164 (12): 1338–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lennertz, B. Forthcoming. “Noncognitivism and the Frege-Geach Problem in Formal Epistemology.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.Google Scholar
Levi, I. 1991. The Fixation of Belief and Its Undoing: Changing Beliefs through Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, D. 1980. “A Subjectivist’s Guide to Objective Chance.” In Studies in Inductive Logic and Probability, edited by Jeffrey, R. C.. Berkeley, CA: University of Berkeley Press.Google Scholar
Littlejohn, C. 2015. “Who Cares about What You Accurately Believe?” Philosophical Perspectives 29 (1): 217–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lin, H. 2013. “Foundations of Everyday Practical Reasoning.” Journal of Philosophical Logic 42: 831–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lurz, R., ed. 2009. The Philosophy of Animal Minds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lurz, R. 2019. “Animal Minds.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://www.iep.utm.edu/ani-mind.Google Scholar
Lyons, J. 2016. “Unconscious Evidence.” Philosophical Issues 26: 243–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maher, P. 1993. Betting on Theories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merricks, T. 2015. Propositions. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, D. 1966. “A Paradox of Information.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 17: 59–61.Google Scholar
Moon, A. 2017. “Beliefs Do Not Come in Degrees.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47: 760–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moon, A. 2018. “The Nature of Doubt and a New Puzzle about Belief, Doubt, and Confidence.” Synthese 195: 1827–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moon, A. 2019. “A New Puzzle about Belief and Credence.” The Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (2): 272–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moss, S. 2013. “Epistemology Formalized.” The Philosophical Review 122 (1): 1–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moss, S. 2018. Probabilistic Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Otte, R. 2006. “Counterfactuals and Epistemic Probability.” Synthese 152 (1): 81–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pettigrew, R. 2015. “Accuracy and the Credence-Belief Connection.” Philosophers’ Imprint 15 (16): 1-20.Google Scholar
Plantinga, A. 1993a. Warrant: The Current Debate. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plantinga, A. 1993b. Warrant and Proper Function. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pollock, J. 1983. “Epistemology and Probability.” Synthese 55 (2): 231–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ramsey, F. 1931. Truth and Probability. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner.Google Scholar
Ross, J., and Schroeder, M.. 2014. “Belief, Credence and Pragmatic Encroachment.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88: 259–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rothschild, D. 2012. “Expressing Credences.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112: 99–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schiffer, S. 2003. The Things We Mean. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schnieder, B. 2010. “Expressivism Concerning Epistemic Modals.” The Philosophical Quarterly 60: 601–15.Google Scholar
Schwitzgebel, E. 2008. “The Unreliability of Naive Introspection.” Philosophical Review 117: 245–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silk, A. 2017. “How to Embed an Epistemic Modal: Attitude Problems and Other Defects of Character.” Philosophical Studies 174: 1773–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, M. 2010. “A Generalized Lottery Paradox for Infinite Probability Spaces.” The British Journal for Philosophy of Science 61: 821–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smithies, D. 2012. “The Normative Role of Knowledge.” Noûs 46 (2): 265–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smithies, D. 2019. The Epistemic Role of Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sosa, E. 2011. Knowing Full Well. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Staffel, J. 2013. “Can There be Reasoning with Degrees of Belief?” Synthese 190: 3535–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Staffel, J. 2017. “Accuracy for Believers.” Episteme 14 (1): 39–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Staffel, J. 2019. “How Do Beliefs Simplify Reasoning?” Noûs 53 (4): 937–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stanley, J. 2005. “Fallibilism and Concessive Knowledge Attributions.” Analysis 65: 126–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stich, S. 1979. “Do Animals Have Beliefs?” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 57: 15–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stich, S. 1996. Deconstructing the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sturgeon, S. 2008. “Reason and the Grain of Belief.” Noûs 42: 139–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sturgeon, S. 2010. “Confidence and Coarse-Grained Attitudes.” In Oxford Studies in Epistemology, edited by Gendler, Tamar and Hawthorne, John, 126–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sturgeon, S. 2020. The Rational Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swanson, E. 2011. “How Not to Theorize about the Language of Subjective Uncertainty.” In Epistemic Modality, edited by Egan, A. and Weatherson, B., 249–69. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tautz, J., Zhang, S. W., Spaethe, J., Brockmann, A., Si, A., and Srinivasan, M. V. 2004. “Honeybee Odometry: Performance in Varying Natural Terrain.” PLoS Biology 2: 915–23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Weatherson, B. 2005. “Can We Do Without Pragmatic Encroachment?” Philosophical Perspectives 19: 417–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wedgwood, R. 2012. “Outright Belief.” Dialectica 66: 309–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weisberg, J. 2013. “Knowledge in Action.” Philosopher’s Imprint 13 (22): 1–23.Google Scholar
Weisberg, J. Forthcoming. “Belief in Psyontology.” Philosophers’ Imprint.Google Scholar
White, R. 2010. “Evidential Symmetry and Mushy Credence.” In Oxford Studies in Epistemology, edited by Gendler, T. and Hawthorne, John, 161–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Williamson, T. 2000. Knowledge and Its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Yalcin, S. 2011. “Nonfactualism about Epistemic Modality.” In Epistemic Modality, edited by Egan, A. and Weatherson, B., 295–332. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar