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Addresses central questions concerning conditionals by combining the methods of formal epistemology with those of cognitive psychology.
Sarah Moss argues that in addition to full beliefs, credences can constitute knowledge. She introduces the notion of probabilistic content and shows how it plays a central role not only in epistemology, but in the philosophy of mind and language. Just you can believe and assert propositions, you can believe and assert probabilistic contents.
Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability comprises fifteen original essays on themes from the work of Dorothy Edgington, the first woman to hold a chair in philosophy at Oxford. Eminent contributors from philosophy and linguistics discuss a range of topics including conditionals, vagueness, knowledge, reasoning, and probability.
A unified treatment of conditionals based on epistemological principles rather than the semantical principles in vogue over recent decades. This book by distinguished philosopher Nicholas Rescher seeks to clarify the idea of what a conditional says by elucidating the information that is normally transmitted by its utterance. The result is a unified treatment of conditionals based on epistemological principles rather than the semantical principles in vogue over recent decades. This approach, argues Rescher, makes it easier to understand how conditionals actually function in our thought and discourse. In its concern with what language theorists call pragmatics—the study of the norms and principles governing our use of language in conveying information—Conditionals steps beyond the limits of logic as traditionally understood and moves into the realm claimed by theorists of artificial intelligence as they try to simulate our actual information-processing practices. The book's treatment of counterfactuals essentially revives an epistemological approach proposed by F. P. Ramsey in the 1920s and developed by Rescher himself in the 1960s but since overshadowed by the now-dominant possible-worlds approach. Rescher argues that the increasingly evident liabilities of the possible-worlds strategy make a reappraisal of the older style of analysis both timely and desirable. As the book makes clear, an epistemological approach demonstrates that counterfactual reasoning, unlike inductive inference, is not a matter of abstract reasoning alone but one of good judgment and common sense.
What does 'if' mean? Timothy Williamson presents a controversial new approach to understanding conditional thinking, which is central to human cognitive life. He argues that in using 'if' we rely on psychological heuristics, fast and frugal methods which can lead us to trust faulty data and prematurely reject simple theories.
The author, one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of conditional sentences, distils many years' work and teaching into 'A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals', an authoritative treatment of the subject.
What does 'if' mean? It is one of the most commonly used words in the English language, in itself a sign to the importance of conditional thinking to human cognitive life. We make conditional statements, ask conditional questions, and issue conditional orders. We need to think and talk conditionally for many purposes, from everyday decision-making to mathematical proof. Yet the meaning of conditionals has been debated for thousands of years. Suppose and Tell brings together ideas from philosophy, linguistics, and psychology to present a controversial new approach to understanding conditionals. It argues that in using 'if' we rely on psychological heuristics, methods which are fast and frugal and mostly, but not always, reliable. As a result philosophers and linguists have been led astray in theorizing about conditionals through trusting faulty data generated by such methods and prematurely rejecting simple theories on the basis of merely apparent counterexamples. Williamson shows how one such simple theory of conditionals can explain the data, and draws wider implications for the nature of meaning and its non-transparency to native speakers, vagueness in thought and language, and the need for semantics to attend to the unreliable heuristics underlying our judgments.
This book explores a topic that has recently become the subject of increased philosophical interest: how can imagination be put to epistemic use? Though imagination has long been invoked in contexts of modal knowledge, in recent years philosophers have begun to explore its capacity to play an epistemic role in a variety of other contexts as well. In this collection, the contributors address an assortment of issues relating to epistemic uses of imagination, and in particular, they take up the ways in which our imaginings must be constrained so as to justify beliefs and give rise to knowledge. These constraints are explored across several different contexts in which imagination is appealed to for justification, namely reasoning, modality and modal knowledge, thought experiments, and knowledge of self and others. Taken as a whole, the contributions in this volume break new ground in explicating when and how imagination can be epistemically useful. Epistemic Uses of Imagination will be of interest to scholars and advanced students who are working on imagination, as well as those working more broadly in epistemology, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Imagination will remain a mystery--we will not be able to explain imagination--until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or process--one with its own inscrutable principles of operation. Explaining Imagination upends that view, showing how, on closer inspection, the imaginings at work in hypothetical reasoning, pretense, the enjoyment of fiction, and creativity are reducible to other familiar mental states--judgments, beliefs, desires, and decisions among them. Crisscrossing contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and aesthetics, Explaining Imagination argues that a clearer understanding of imagination is already well within reach.