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It is argued, with Peirce and against Descartes, that current beliefs do not require justification; justification is only required when change in belief is on offer. Parmenidean epistemology is discussed in defence of the view that commitment to full belief cannot be escaped by a move to judgements of probability or some other index of uncertainty, and that full belief is corrigible. Types of change in states of full belief are distinguished, and it is maintained that without an account of justified expansions and, particularly, contractions there can be no justifiable changes in belief that take into account the desideratum of avoiding error at the next step (the AGM approach developed by Alchourrón, Gärdenfors and Makinson). The pragmatic theory to be defended, in which the justification of a change of belief attempts to show that the proposed change best promotes the goal of the enquiry in question, is set out. It is explained that the focus of the book will be on rationalizing choices between competing contraction strategies once the decision to contract – to relinquish old beliefs – has been made.

One problem that has been plaguing for the long term is the problem of choosing the levels of rational corpora. Since what goes into a corpus is what has a probability higher than the index of that corpus, that index has a bearing on what is in a corpus. We have two levels to deal with, since the focus is both with the evidential corpus and with the practical corpus. What principles can be used to select these levels? A practical way to approach this question is through the analysis of full belief or acceptance. Partial belief is distinguished in terms of a propensity to make, or fail to make, bets.

This chapter develops and defends the thesis that we can believe probabilistic contents. Probabilistic contents are not merely propositions about probabilities; rather, they are sets of probability spaces over propositions. For example, you have .6 credence that Jones smokes just in case you believe a certain set of probability spaces, namely those that assign .6 probability to Jones smoking. A central question of this chapter is why we should think that credences are beliefs in probabilistic contents, as opposed to attitudes of degreed belief in propositions. The answer is that the contents of belief are the objects that play various theoretical roles, such as explaining rational action, grounding relations of disagreement between subjects, and grounding relations of consistency and entailment between beliefs—and probabilistic contents do in fact play each of these roles.

This chapter defends a semantics for epistemic modals and probability operators. This semantics is probabilistic—that is, sentences containing these expressions have sets of probability spaces as their semantic values relative to a context. Existing non-truth-conditional semantic theories of epistemic modals face serious problems when it comes to interpreting nested modal constructions such as ‘it must be possible that Jones smokes’. The semantics in this chapter solves these problems, accounting for several significant features of nested epistemic vocabulary. The chapter ends by defending a probabilistic semantics for simple sentences that do not contain any epistemic vocabulary, and by using this semantics to illuminate the relationship between credence and full belief.

The chapter argues for the unity of John 11–12 in both literary and thematic terms. In literary terms the Lazarus story is intimately connected with John 12 through a number of motifs in 11:45–12:19 and a literary inclusio between 11:4 and 12:28. Thematically, the Lazarus story is not only about the raising of Lazarus, but also the (death and) resurrection of Jesus and that of believers. The precondition for the latter (possession of the pneuma in ‘full’ belief) is brought out in various places throughout the two chapters. The content of such ‘full’ belief is shown throughout the two chapters by what the various people involved do not understand. The reason for their failure is that they do not (yet) have the pneuma. The chapter also addresses the relationship between John 11–12 and three earlier passages: John 3, 5, and 8.

This chapter explains why epistemologists are interested in degrees of belief (also known as "credences"). It compares working with degrees of belief to working with full beliefs and confidence comparisons. The chapter introduces the basic principles of Bayesian epistemology, then describes the contents of the rest of the book.

The chapter argues that John 7–8 constitutes a coherent unit in both literary and thematic terms. There is a literary inclusio in two respects: secrecy versus openness and the charge of demon possession. The theme centres on a divided response to Jesus among ‘the Jews’ and the (epistemological) explanation for this division. In John 7 the theme of a division or schism among ‘the Jews’ is pervasively present. In John 8 the theme is kept alive (8:30), but the triad (of Jesus and two groups among ‘the Jews’) is reduced to a dya’. What explains the different reactions among ‘the Jews’ is whether people generally wish to ‘do God’s will’, which may lead to an initial form of belief. Those who do not achieve this belief belong to the devil. By contrast, full belief requires that one is in possession of Jesus’ pneuma.