Elliott, EJR orcid.org/0000-0002-4387-7967 (2017) Impossible Worlds and Partial Belief. Synthese. ISSN 0039-7857
Abstract
One response to the problems of logical omniscience is to extend the space of possible worlds to include impossible worlds. It is natural to think that essentially the same strategy can be applied to standard probabilistic models of partial belief, for which parallel problems also arise. In this paper, I note a difficulty with the inclusion of impossible worlds into probabilistic models. With only very weak assumptions about the space of worlds, most of the propositions which can be constructed from possible and impossible worlds are in an important sense inexpressible; whereas the probabilistic model seems committed to saying that agents in general have at least as many attitudes towards inexpressible propositions as they do towards expressible propositions. If it is reasonable to think that our attitudes are generally expressible, then a model with such commitments looks problematic.
Metadata
Authors/Creators: |
|
||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2017. This article is an open access publication. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. | ||||||
Keywords: | Impossible Worlds; Credence; partial belief; probability; logical omniscience | ||||||
Dates: |
|
||||||
Institution: | The University of Leeds | ||||||
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts (Leeds) > School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science (Leeds) > School of Philosophy (Leeds) | ||||||
Funding Information: |
|
||||||
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications | ||||||
Date Deposited: | 20 Oct 2017 14:26 | ||||||
Last Modified: | 28 Nov 2017 15:40 | ||||||
Status: | Published online | ||||||
Publisher: | Springer Verlag | ||||||
Identification Number: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1604-8 |