Credences are Beliefs about Probabilities: A Defense from Triviality

It is often claimed that credences are not reducible to ordinary beliefs about probabilities. Such a reduction appears to be decisively ruled out by certain sorts of triviality results–analogous to those often discussed in the literature on conditionals. I show why these results do not, in fact, rul...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Erkenntnis 2024-03, Vol.89 (3), p.1235-1255
Main Author: Lennertz, Benjamin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Belief & doubt
Credibility
Education
Epistemology
Ethics
Logic
Ontology
Original Research
Philosophy
Probability
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:It is often claimed that credences are not reducible to ordinary beliefs about probabilities. Such a reduction appears to be decisively ruled out by certain sorts of triviality results–analogous to those often discussed in the literature on conditionals. I show why these results do not, in fact, rule out the view. They merely give us a constraint on what such a reduction could look like. In particular they show that there is no single proposition belief in which suffices for having a particular credence, regardless of one’s evidence. But if we allow such propositions to vary with evidence–as we should–then the results do not rule out a reduction. So, at least on this count, credences might very well just be beliefs about probabilities.
ISSN:0165-0106
1572-8420
DOI:10.1007/s10670-022-00581-3