Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

What should a joint theory of rational belief and rational degrees of
belief look like? While the former concept will contribute principles
of doxastic logic, the latter will contribute principles of subjective
probability theory, but how can we make sense of their interaction?
And how can we avoid the Lottery paradox and related paradoxes in
any such theory? I will present three different approaches of how to
answer these questions: the first one is an explication of what I call
the Humean thesis of belief; the second one is a combination of
doxastic logic with the right-to-left direction of what is called the
Lockean thesis on belief in the literature; the third one puts together
AGM belief revision and the left-to-right direction of the Lockean
thesis (formulated for conditional belief). As it happens, all of them
will ultimately justify one and the same joint theory of belief and
degrees of belief according to which belief corresponds to stably
high degree of belief. (Actually, there is a fourth “accuracy”
approach from which once again the same theory of belief follows,
but we will not have time to deal with this.)