Keefe, R. (2017) Degrees of belief, expected and actual. Synthese, 194 (10). pp. 3789-3800. ISSN 1573-0964
Abstract
A framework of degrees of belief, or credences, is often advocated to model our uncertainty about how things are or will turn out. It has also been employed in relation to the kind of uncertainty or indefiniteness that arises due to vagueness, such as when we consider “a is F” in a case where a is borderline F. How should we understand degrees of belief when we take into account both these phenomena? Can the right kind of theory of the semantics of vagueness help us answer this? Nicholas J.J. Smith defends a unified account, according to which “degree of belief is expected truth-value”; this builds on his Degree Theory of vagueness that offers an account of the semantics and logic of vagueness in terms of degrees of truth. I argue that his account fails. Degree theories of vagueness do not help us understand degrees of belief and, I argue, we shouldn’t expect a theory of vagueness to yield a detailed uniform story about this. The route from the semantics to psychological states needn’t be straightforward or uniform even before we attempt to combine vagueness with probabilistic uncertainty.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) |
Keywords: | Degrees of belief; Degree theories of vagueness; Credence; Vagueness; Uncertainty; Supervaluationism; N. J. J. Smith |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > Department of Philosophy (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 09 Mar 2016 10:31 |
Last Modified: | 13 Nov 2017 12:13 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1049-5 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Verlag |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s11229-016-1049-5 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:96210 |