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This book develops and defends a theory of responsible belief. The author argues that we lack control over our beliefs, but that we can nonetheless influence them. It is because we have intellectual obligations to influence our beliefs that we are responsible for them.
Responsible Belief tackles the problem of fixing the tenacity of believers in forming, holding, and modifying beliefs. In conversation with the history of philosophy and religion, the author attempts to expose and refute some aspects of the dominant epistemological framework for engaging belief fixation and improvement. In contrast to this framework, Dr. Frazier provides a model of a responsible believing agent rooted in an ethic of the intellectual virtue tradition. In dialogue with Aristotle, he proposes three principal virtues, which he calls the generative, the transmissive, and the metamorphic. The author's alternative framework includes an examination of the role that intellectual passions play in the melioration of belief. Responsible Belief considers whether Doestoevsky's claim that "Beauty will save the world" has a place in discussions of belief formation and revision and offers an account of its vitality in addressing the concerns raised in the book.
Knowledge, from Plato onwards, has been considered in relation to justified belief. Current debate has centred around the nature of the justification and whether justified belief can be considered an internal or extenal matter. Epistemological internalists argue that the subject must be able to reflect upon a belief to complete the process of justification. The externalists, on the other hand, claim that it is only necessary to consider whether the belief is reliably formed, and argue that the ability to know by reflection is not required for a justified belief. In the historical section of this book the three most important epistemologists, Plato, Descartes and Hume, as well as the ancient epistemologies of the stoics, Academics and Pyrhonians, are considered. In reconsidering the history of epistemology the author is led to argue against hte view that internalism is historically dominant. His critique of internalism is then developed into a sustained argument against many of its forms, and he goes onto defend an externalist, reliabilist epistemology.
Infinitism is an ancient view in epistemology about the structure of knowledge and epistemic justification, according to which there are no foundational reasons for belief. The view has never been popular, and is often associated with skepticism, but after languishing for centuries it has recently begun a resurgence. Ad Infinitum presents new work on the topic by leading epistemologists. They shed new light on infinitism's distinctive strengths and weaknesses, and address questions, new and old, about its account of justification, reasoning, epistemic responsibility, disagreement, and trust, among other important issues. The volume clarifies the relationship between infinitism and other epistemological views, such as skepticism, coherentism, foundationalism and contextualism, and it offers novel perspectives on the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics of regresses and reasons.
Can reason and religion get together? Should believers think? Can thinking people believe? Does religion have to make sense? Does careful thinking help or hinder religious experience? People have wrestled with such questions for hundreds of years, and they are just as perplexing today as ever. Reason & the Contours of Faith explores the wide-ranging issues these questions raise, from biblical interpretation and proofs for God's existence to the nature of religious conversion. Its central purpose is to find an alternative to both fideism, the idea that reason has nothing to do with faith, and rationalism, the conviction that reason has everything to do with it. Part One, "Reason and the Contents of Faith," argues that reason contributes in important but limited ways to our understanding of religion. Part Two, "Reason and the Experience of Faith," shows that reason can support religious commitment, but never produces it.
Believing the wrong thing can have drastic consequences. The question of when a person is not only ill-guided, but genuinely at fault for holding a particular belief goes to the root of our understanding of such notions as criminal negligence and moral responsibility. This book explores the conditions under which someone may be deemed blameworthy for holding a particular belief, drawing on contemporary epistemology, ethics and legal scholarship.
Work on the norms of belief in epistemology regularly starts with two touchstone essays: W.K. Clifford's "The Ethics of Belief" and William James's "The Will to Believe." Discussing the central themes from these seminal essays, Evidentialism and the Will to Believe explores the history of the ideas governing evidentialism. As well as Clifford's argument from the examples of the shipowner, the consequences of credulity and his defence against skepticism, this book tackles James's conditions for a genuine option and the structure of the will to believe case as a counter-example to Clifford's evidentialism. Exploring the question of whether James's case successfully counters Clifford's evidentialist rule for belief, this study captures the debate between those who hold that one should proportion belief to evidence and those who hold that the evidentialist norm is too restrictive. More than a sustained explication of the essays, it also surveys recent epistemological arguments to evidentialism. But it is by bringing Clifford and James into fruitful conversation for the first time that this study presents a clearer history of the issues and provides an important reconstruction of the notion of evidence in contemporary epistemology.
This SpringerBrief proposes a trust model motivated by virtue epistemology, addressing the need for a more efficient and flexible trust model for wireless next generation networks. This theory of trust simplifies the computation and communication overhead of strictly cognitive-computational models of trust. Both the advantages and the challenges of virtue-based trust models are discussed. This brief offers new research and a general theory of rationality that enables users to interpret trust and reason as complementary mechanisms that guide our rational conduct at two different epistemic levels. The presented model of human social interaction is designed for the highly dynamic and unstructured environment of the mobile Internet and wireless next generation networks. Wireless Next Generation Networks: A Virtue-Based Trust Model targets network engineers, cognitive scientists, AI researchers, philosophers, and social scientists. Advanced-level students studying computer science, electrical engineering and social science will also find the interdisciplinary perspective useful.
In this book, Richard Foley defends an epistemology that takes seriously the perspectives of individual thinkers. He argues that having rational opinions is a matter of meeting our own internal standards rather than standards that are somehow imposed upon us from the outside. It is a matter of making ourselves invulnerable to intellectual self-criticism. Foley also shows how the theory of rational belief is part of a general theory of rationality. He thus avoids treating the rationality of belief as a fundamentally different kind of phenomenon from the rationality of decision or action. His approach generates promising suggestions about a wide range of issues, e.g., the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic reasons for belief; the question of what aspects of the Cartesian project are still worth doing; the significance of simplicity and other theoretical virtues; the relevance of skeptical hypotheses; the difference between a theory of rational belief and a theory of knowledge; the difference between a theory of rational belief and a theory of rational degrees of belief; and the limits of idealization in epistemology. The book runs counter to a tendency in contemporary epistemology to discount the perspectives of individual thinkers. Endorsing a radically subjective conception of rational belief, Working Without A Net will interest students of philosophy, epistemology, and rationality.