ABSTRACT

A question of recent interest in epistemology and philosophy of mind is that of how belief and credence relate to each other. A number of philosophers argue for a belief-first view of the relationship between belief and credence. On this view, what it is to have a credence just is to have a particular kind of belief—that is, a belief whose content involves probabilities or epistemic modals. Here, I argue against the belief-first view: specifically, I argue that it cannot account for agents who have credences in propositions that they barely comprehend. I conclude that, no matter how credences differ from beliefs, they do not differ in virtue of adding additional content to the believed proposition.

摘要

最近对认识论和心灵哲学感兴趣的一个问题是信念和信任如何相互关联。许多哲学家主张以信念为先的观点来看待信念与可信度之间的关系。根据这种观点，拥有一个信任就是拥有一种特定的信念——即一种内容涉及概率或认识模态的信念。在这里，我反对信念至上的观点：具体来说，我认为它不能解释那些对他们几乎不理解的命题有信任的代理人。我的结论是，无论可信度与信念有多大不同，它们在为所相信的命题添加额外内容方面并没有什么不同。