Zendejas Medina, Pablo
(2022)
Idealizations in Epistemology.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
Much of contemporary epistemology works with a strong set of idealizing assumptions about the capacities and mental states of the agents to which its norms are meant to apply. While these assumptions have proved very fruitful, most reasoners will often find themselves in situations where they do not hold. This dissertation studies epistemic rationality as it applies to such agents. The first main chapter develops a theory of rational reasoning for agents who only reason with a subset of their attitudes at any given time. I show that, with the right assumptions, one can recover a restricted version of the principle that one may infer what one's premises support, although there are also clear exceptions to this principle. The next chapter addresses the question of how to update on evidence when one does not know what one's evidence is, and shows that two standard arguments for Bayesian conditionalization can be generalized to this setting. Agents who are not able to introspect their own evidence should thus reason just like agents who can. In the last chapter I address the question of why it is rational to gather evidence, but for agents who only have qualitative attitudes, rather than credences. I show that, when such agents care only about the accuracy of their qualitative attitudes, the claim that it is always rational to gather evidence is equivalent to two well-known principles of belief revision, which I argue bolsters both sides of the equivalence. In the process of doing so, I show that my framework provides a principled solution to two versions of the Dogmatism Paradox -- an argument to the effect that there's no reason to inquire further when one has already formed a belief.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
|
| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
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| ETD Committee: |
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| Date: |
13 August 2022 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
20 July 2022 |
| Approval Date: |
19 November 2024 |
| Submission Date: |
29 July 2022 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Number of Pages: |
136 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Philosophy |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
epistemology, decision theory, rationality, fragmentation, evidence-gathering, Bayesianism, belief revision, inference |
| Date Deposited: |
19 Nov 2024 16:37 |
| Last Modified: |
20 Nov 2024 17:00 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/43418 |
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