Can Religious Beliefs be Justified Pragmatically?

One cannot prove the truth of theological statement, but perhaps one can justify believing them because of the good consequences of doing so. It is irrational to believe statements of which there are good reasons to think false, but those of which there is some, albeit inconclusive, evidence can be believed for pragmatic reasons. However, in the interest of simplicity, it must not be possible to achieve those good consequences without such faith. John Bishop and others have argued that one need only assume theological statements to be true to enjoy the good consequences of a religious life, but in fact, faith is needed for most of these consequences to be achieved.

A logical expression of reasoning

A non-monotonic logic, the Logic of Plausible Reasoning (LPR), capable of coping with the demands of what we call complex reasoning, is introduced. It is argued that creative complex reasoning is the way of reasoning required in many instances of scientific thought, professional practice and common life decision taking. For managing the simultaneous consideration of multiple scenarios inherent in these activities, two new modalities, weak and strong plausibility, are introduced as part of the Logic of Plausible Deduction (LPD), a deductive logic specially designed to serve as the monotonic support for LPR. Axiomatics and semantics for LPD, together with a completeness proof, are provided. Once LPD has been given, LPR may be defined via a concept of extension over LPD. Although the construction of LPR extensions is first presented in standard style, for the sake of comparison with existing non-monotonic formalisms, alternative more elegant and intuitive ways for constructing non-monotonic LPR extensions are also given and proofs of their equivalence are presented.     

Anti-luck epistemology

In this paper, I do three things. First, I offer an overview of an anti-luck epistemology, as set out in my book, Epistemic Luck (Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005). Second, I attempt to meet some of the main criticisms that one might level against the key theses that I propose in this work. And finally, third, I sketch some of the ways in which the strategy of anti-luck epistemology can be developed in new directions.     

“Escape from Freedom”: Authoritarianism-related traits,political ideology,personality, and belief in free will/determinism

Philosophers have long speculated that authoritarianism and belief in determinism are functionally related. To evaluate this hypothesis, we assessed whether authoritarianism and allied personality and political variables predict varieties of belief in determinism in three community samples (N₁ = 566 to 20,010; N₂ = 500; N₃ = 419). Authoritarianism and allied variables manifested moderate to large positive correlations with both fatalistic and genetic determinism beliefs. Controlling for political conservatism did not meaningfully attenuate these relations. Further, openness was negatively related to fatalistic determinism beliefs and agreeableness was negatively related to genetic determinism beliefs. Taken together, our findings clarify the nature of relations between authoritarianism and general personality, on the one hand, and free will/determinism beliefs, on the other, and suggest intriguing intersections between worldviews and personality traits.     

The epistemically virtuous clinician

Today, modern Western medicine is facing a quality-of-care crisis that is undermining the patient–physician relationship. In this paper, a notion of the epistemically virtuous clinician is proposed in terms of both the reliabilist and responsibilist versions of virtue epistemology, in order to help address this crisis. To that end, a clinical case study from the literature is first reconstructed. The reliabilist intellectual virtues, including the perceptual and conceptual virtues, are then discussed and applied to the case study. Next, a similar method is employed to examine the responsibilist intellectual virtues, including curiosity, courage, honesty, and humility, and to apply them to the case study. To round out the discussion, the love of knowledge and both theoretical and practical wisdom are explored and applied to the case study. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of how the notion of an epistemically virtuous clinician addresses the quality-of-care crisis, in terms of the connection between ethical and intellectual virtues, and of the notion’s implications for medical education.

Knowing full well: the normativity of beliefs as performances

Belief is considered a kind of performance, which attains one level of success if it is true (or accurate), a second level if competent (or adroit), and a third if true because competent (or apt). Knowledge on one level (the animal level) is apt belief. The epistemic normativity constitutive of such knowledge is thus a kind of performance normativity. A problem is posed for this account by the fact that suspension of belief seems to fall under the same sort of epistemic normativity as does belief itself, yet to suspend is of course precisely not to perform, certainly not with the aim of truth. The paper takes up this problem, and proposes a solution that distinguishes levels of performance norrmativity, including a first order where execution competence is in play, and a second order where the performer must assess the risks attendant on issuing a first-order performance. This imports a level of reflective knowledge that ascends above the animal level.

Weighing the aim of belief

The theory of belief, according to which believing that p essentially involves having as an aim or purpose to believe that p truly, has recently been criticised on the grounds that the putative aim of belief does not interact with the wider aims of believers in the ways we should expect of genuine aims. I argue that this objection to the aim theory fails. When we consider a wider range of deliberative contexts concerning beliefs, it becomes obvious that the aim of belief can interact with and be weighed against the wider aims of agents in the ways required for it to be a genuine aim.     

The philosophical novelty of computer simulation methods

Reasons are given to justify the claim that computer simulations and computational science constitute a distinctively new set of scientific methods and that these methods introduce new issues in the philosophy of science. These issues are both epistemological and methodological in kind.