Abstract
Contemporary epistemology owes much to Chishoim’s efforts to develop a unified theory of perceiving, knowing and believing, and his work has given considerable impetus to investigations of the connections among such locutions as ‘acceptable’, ‘evident’ and ‘probable’. Chisholm has suggested that it is reasonable for a person to believe or accept any proposition that is more probable than not in relation to the totality of what he or she knows,1 and many philosophers have agreed with him in this. Indeed, a number of them have wanted to base a theory of rational acceptance on some fairly well-established confirmation theory, and clearly it would be extremely useful for both epistemology and philosophy of science if there were some reasonably straightforward correlation between probability or confirmation and rational acceptance. There are times when we wish to say that evidence warrants accepting certain sentences as true, where these sentences are not deductive consequences of the evidence, and not merely that the evidence confirms the sentences or makes them probable, perhaps to some degree or other.
The author wishes to express gratitude to the Canada Council for support of research related to this paper. John Heintz, J. J. Macintosh and Robert Ware read an earlier draft and made helpful comments.
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Notes
R. M. Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, Prentice-Hall, 1966, p. 19. See also his Perceiving, Cornell University Press, 1957, Chapters 1 and 2.
See, for example, R. M. Chisholm, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study,16; C. G. Hempel, ‘Deductive-Nomological vs. Statistical Explanation’, in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science,Vol. III, ed. by Feigl and Maxwell, Minneapolis, 1962, pp. 163–166; K. Lehrer, ‘Knowledge and Probability’, The Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964), 368–372; I. Levi, ‘Deductive Cogency in Inductive Inference’, The Journal of Philosophy 62 (1964), 68–77; F. Schick, ‘Three Logics of Belief’, in M. Swain, ed., Induction, Acceptance, and Rational Belief,Dordrecht-Holland, pp. 6–26; and R. C. Sleigh, Jr., ‘A Note on Some Epistemic Principles of Chisholm and Martin’, The Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964), 216–218. Much of the first three sections of the paper surveys results already available in the literature. This is done with a view to eliciting some connections and drawing parallels that have not, so far as I know, been explicitly pointed out. The proof given in the text is essentially Lehrer’s, in the article cited above.
H. Kyburg, ‘A Further Note on Rationality and Consistency’, The Journal of Philosophy 60 (1963), 463.
This paradox of belief may be viewed as a generalization of the paradox of the preface, discussed by A. N. Prior in A Budget of Paradoxes, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971, pp. 84–89. Prior attributes formulation of the paradox to D. C. Makinson, Analysis 25 (1964), 205–7.
This condition was originally stated by H. Smokier in ‘The Equivalence Condition’, American Philosophical Quarterly 4, (1967), 300–307. One can easily show that certain initially plausible conditions taken together lead to a violation of NC. The clearest example is probably the combination of special consequence, converse consequence and entailment conditions. Consider H1. It is a consequence of, and so, by the converse consequence and entailment conditions, confirms Hi.H2. But, given the special consequence condition, and also given that H2 is likewise a consequence of H1.H2, we have the result that Hi confirms H2, no matter what the content of Hi or H2 may be. For further discussion of some of these conditions see below, and also my ‘Goodman, Wallace, and the Equivalence Condition’, The Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967), 271–280, and ‘Confirmation and Adequacy Conditions’, Philosophy of Science 38 (1971), 361–368.
C. G. Hempel, ‘Studies in the Logic of Confirmation’, Mind 54 (1945), 1–26 and 97–121; reprinted in Hempel’s Aspects of Scientific Explanation,New York, 1965, pp. 3–46. All other references to this article are to this reprinting.
R. Carnap, Logical Foundations of Probability, 2nd edn., Chicago, 1962, pp. 476–78 (hereafter LFOP); see also K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, New York, 1961, p. 374.
See N. Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast, third edn, Indianapolis, 1973, Chapter 4.
See M. Hanen, ‘Confirmation and Adequacy Conditions’, Philosophy of Science 38 (1971), 361–368.
An exception may be the Equivalence Condition, which is valid for Carnap’s explicatum. But see J. Wallace, ‘Goodman, Logic, Induction’, The Journal of Philosophy 63 (1966), 310–328, Goodman’s ‘Comments’, same journal, 331, and my ‘Goodman, Wallace, and the Equivalence Condition’, cited in n.15. I shall have something to say about some general considerations relevant to this problem later.
The notion of ‘the contrary of a hypothesis’ employed here is the one explained by Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast,Chapter 1, fn. 2 and 9. See also I. Scheffler, The Anatomy of Inquiry,New York, 1963, pp. 286–91.
See R. Eberle, D. Kaplan, and R. Montague, ‘Hempel and Oppenheim on Explanation’, Philosophy of Science 28 (1961), 418–28; D. Kaplan, ‘Explanation Revisited’, same journal and volume, 429–36; and J. Kim. ‘Discussion: On the Logical Conditions of Deductive Explanation’, same journal 30 (1963), 286–91.
I use to stand for ‘inductively supports’. The example is Salmon’s in his ‘Consistency, Transitivity and Inductive Support’, Ratio 7 (1965), 165–9.
W. Salmon, Statistical Explanation and Statistical Relevance, Pittsburgh 1971, p. 56.
R. B. Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation, Cambridge University Press, 1953. The relevant section is reprinted in B. Brody (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Science, Prentice Hall, 1970, p. 62.
M. Martin, ‘Confirmation and Explanation’, Analysis 32 (1972), 167–9.
G. Harman, ‘Induction’, in M. Swain (ed.) Induction, Acceptance, and Rational Belief See also A. Goldman, ‘A Causal Theory of Knowing’, The Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967), 357–72. Not all Gettier-type examples involve overt or conscious reasoning, but Harman has argued quite persuasively (in the article cited, and in his Thought,Princeton University Press, 1973) that inference is nonetheless present. The following is Harman’s version of a typical Gettier-type example, the example actually owing to Lehrer
Some arguments against acceptance rules can be found in Y. Bar-Hillel, ‘The Ac- ceptance Syndrome’, in L Lakatos (ed.), The Problem of Inductive Logic, North Holland, Amsterdam, 1968; R. Carnap, ‘Replies and Systematic Expositions’, in P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, Open Court, 1963; and R. Jeffrey, ‘Valuation and Acceptance of Scientific Hypotheses’, Philosophy of Science 23, 237–46. Contrary views are expressed by H. Kyburg, ‘The Rule of Detachment in Inductive Logic’, in L Lakatos, The Problem of Inductive Logic, pp. 98–119, and I. Levi, Gambling With Truth, Knopf, New York, 1967. For a Bayesian view, see L. J. Savage, The Foundations of Statistics, Wiley, New York, 1954, and for the Neyman-Pearson approach a good source is J. Neyman and E. S. Pearson, Joint Statistical Papers, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1967. Hugues LeBlanc and Ron Giere have convinced me that philosophers need to pay more attention to this latter approach.
An example might be the rule proposed by R. Schwartz, I. Scheffler, and N. Goodman in ‘An Improvement in the Theory of Projectibility’, The Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970), 605–8.
R. Hilpinen, Rules of Acceptance and Inductive Logic, Amsterdam, 1968.
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Hanen, M. (1975). Confirmation, Explanation and Acceptance. In: Lehrer, K. (eds) Analysis and Metaphysics. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9098-8_6
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