Elliott, E orcid.org/0000-0002-4387-7967 (2019) Impossible worlds and partial belief. Synthese, 196 (8). pp. 3433-3458. ISSN 0039-7857
Abstract
One response to the problem of logical omniscience in standard possible worlds models of belief is to extend the space of worlds so as to include impossible worlds. It is natural to think that essentially the same strategy can be applied to 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. Under 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; leaving the probabilistic model 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.
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Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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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; partial belief; Credence; logical omniscience; Probabilistic coherence |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science (Leeds) > School of Philosophy (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number EU - European Union 312938 EU - European Union GA 703959 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 20 Oct 2017 14:26 |
Last Modified: | 23 Jun 2023 22:37 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Verlag |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s11229-017-1604-8 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:122882 |
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