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Oxford Studies in Epistemology is a biennial publication offering a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this important field. Under the guidance of a distinguished editorial board composed of leading epistemologists in North America, Europe and Australasia, it publishes exemplary papers in epistemology, broadly construed. Topics within its purview include: (a) traditional epistemological questions concerning the nature of belief, justification, and knowledge, the status of skepticism, the nature of the a priori, etc.; (b) new developments in epistemology, including movements such as naturalized epistemology, feminist epistemology, social epistemology, and virtue epistemology, and approaches such as contextualism; (c) foundational questions in decision-theory; (d) confirmation theory and other branches of philosophy of science that bear on traditional issues in epistemology; (e) topics in the philosophy of perception relevant to epistemology; (f) topics in cognitive science, computer science, developmental, cognitive, and social psychology that bear directly on traditional epistemological questions; and (g) work that examines connections between epistemology and other branches of philosophy, including work on testimony, the ethics of belief, etc. Topics addressed in volume 6 include the nature of perceptual justification, intentionality, modal knowledge, credences, epistemic supererogation, epistemic and rational norms, expressivism, skepticism, and pragmatic encroachment. The various writers make use of a variety of different tools and insights, including those of formal epistemology and decision theory, as well as traditional philosophical analysis and argumentation.

Many theories and models from physics are probabilistic. This observation raises several philosophical questions: What are probabilities in physics? Do they reflect objective chances which exist independently of the human mind? Or do they only express subjective credences and thus capture our own uncertainty about the world? Finally, which metaphysical lessons, if at all, can one draw from the largely probabilistic character of physics? The chapters collected in this volume address these questions and provide a detailed philosophical appraisal of the status of probabilities in all of physics. Particular emphasis is laid upon statistical physics and quantum mechanics. Many chapters reflect a desire to understand probabilities from physics as objective chances. These chances are characterized, e.g., as time-averages, as probabilities from a best system in the terms of David Lewis, or using the Boltzmannian typicality approach. Other chapters are sympathetic to a Bayesian view of probabilities in physics. The chapters about quantum mechanics elucidate the peculiar characteristics of quantum correlations and discuss strategies to justify the Born Rule. Finally, the chapters of this volume demonstrate how closely interpretive issues about probabilities are entangled with other foundational problems of physics such as the Reversibility Paradox, the ontology of the quantum world and the question whether the world is deterministic.

Probability concepts permeate physics. This is obvious in statistical mechanics, in which probabilities appear explicitly. But even in cases when predictions are made with near-certainty, there is are implicit probabilistic assumptions in play, as it is assumed that molecular fluctuations can be neglected. How are we to understand these probabilistic concepts? This book offers a fresh look at these familiar topics, urging readers to see them in a new light. It argues that the traditional choices between probabilities as objective chances or degrees of belief is too limiting, and introduces a new concept, called epistemic chances, that combines physical and epistemic considerations. Thinking of probabilities in this way solves some of the puzzles associated with the use of probability and statistical mechanics. The book includes some history of discussions of probability, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and introductions to conceptual issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. It should be of interest to philosophers interested in probability, and to physicists and philosophers of physics interested in understanding how probabilistic concepts apply to the physical world.

Traditional philosophical discussions of knowledge have focused on the epistemic status of full beliefs. This book argues that in addition to full beliefs, credences can constitute knowledge. For instance, your .4 credence that it is raining outside can constitute knowledge, in just the same way that your full beliefs can. In addition, you can know that it might be raining, and that if it is raining then it is probably cloudy, where this knowledge is not knowledge of propositions, but of probabilistic contents. The notion of probabilistic content introduced in this book plays a central role not only in epistemology, but in the philosophy of mind and language as well. Just as tradition holds that you believe and assert propositions, you can believe and assert probabilistic contents. Accepting that we can believe, assert, and know probabilistic contents has significant consequences for many philosophical debates, including debates about the relationship between full belief and credence, the semantics of epistemic modals and conditionals, the contents of perceptual experience, peer disagreement, pragmatic encroachment, perceptual dogmatism, and transformative experience. In addition, accepting probabilistic knowledge can help us discredit negative evaluations of female speech, explain why merely statistical evidence is insufficient for legal proof, and identify epistemic norms violated by acts of racial profiling. Hence the central theses of this book not only help us better understand the nature of our own mental states, but also help us better understand the nature of our responsibilities to each other.

How should thinkers cope with uncertainty? What makes their degrees of belief rational, and how should they reason about uncertain matters? Recent research in epistemology has attempted to answer these questions by developing formal models of ideally rational credences. However, we know from psychological research that ideal rationality is unattainable for human thinkers. This raises the question of how rational ideals can apply to human thinkers. A popular reply is that the more a thinker’s imperfectly rational credences approximate compliance with norms of ideal rationality, the better. But what exactly does this mean? Why is it better to be less irrational, if we can’t ever be completely rational? And what does being closer to ideally rational amount to? If ideal models of rationality are supposed to help us understand the rationality of human, imperfect thinkers, we need answers to these questions. Unsettled Thoughts offers these answers: we can explain why it’s better to be less irrational, because less irrational degrees of belief are generally more accurate, and better at guiding our actions. Moreover, the way in which approximating ideal rationality is beneficial can be made formally precise by using a variety of distance measures that track the benefits of being more rational.

The book develops a unified approach to the rationality and metaphysics of belief and of confidence. As such it lies at the intersection of epistemology and the philosophy of mind. The primary aim of the work is to develop a graceful unified picture of the rational mind. The secondary aim is to show how formal and informal work on rational belief and confidence have a lot to learn from one another. The book explains everything used in its picture of the rational mind from scratch. It should thus be of use to everyone from advanced undergraduate to advanced researcher.

This book argues that objective chance, or probability, should not be understood as a metaphysical primitive, nor as a dispositional property of certain systems (“propensity”). Given that traditional accounts of objective probability in terms of frequencies are widely agreed to be also untenable, there is a clear need for a new account that can overcome the problems of older views. A Humean, reductive analysis of objective chance is offered, one partially based on the work of David Lewis, but diverging from Lewis’ approach in many respects. It is shown that “Humean objective chances” (HOCs) can fulfill the role that chances are supposed to play of being a guide to one’s subjective expectations. In a chapter coauthored by Roman Frigg, HOC is shown to make sense of physics’ uses of objective probabilities, both in statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics. And in the final chapter, the relationship between chance and causation is analyzed; it is argued that there is no direct connection between causation and objective chance, but that, instead, causation is related to subjective probability.

A set of interconnected chapters on topics in the theory of knowledge. Part 1 considers the concept of knowledge, its logical properties, and its relation to belief and partial belief, or credence. It includes a discussion of belief revision, two discussions of reflection principles, a chapter about the status of self-locating knowledge and belief, a chapter about the evaluation of normative principles of inductive reasoning, and a development and defense of a contextualist account of knowledge. Part 2 is concerned with conditional propositions, and conditional reasoning, with chapters on the logic and formal semantics of conditionals, a discussion of the relation between indicative and subjunctive conditionals and of the question whether indicative conditionals express propositions, a chapter considering the relation between counterfactual propositions and objective chance, a critique of an attempt to give a metaphysical reduction of counterfactual propositions to nonconditional matters of fact, and a discussion of dispositional properties, and of a dispositional theory of chance.