v. 42 n. 1 (2022)
Artigos

Bilateralism and Probabilism

PDF (English)
  • Mariela Rubin
Mariela Rubin
IIF -SADAF - CONICET / Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36446/af.2022.387

Publicado 2022-05-01

Creative Commons License

Este trabalho está licenciado sob uma licença Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Resumo

The aim of this paper is to provide a philosophical interpretation of bilateralism in terms of probabilism. In particular, to interpret the main concepts of bilateralism –acceptance, rejection and incoherence– in terms of the probabilistic notions of degree of belief and coherence. According to bilateralism, the meaning of logical connectives is determined by the acceptance and rejection conditions of the sentences in which they are involved, where acceptance and rejection cannot be reduced to one another. I will focus on a variant of bilateralism that understands logical consequence as the statement that it is incoherent to accept all the premises of a valid argument while rejecting all its conclusions. On the other hand, probabilism states that it is possible to interpret our degrees of belief in terms of probabilities. The aim of this work is then to interpret the concept of incoherence in terms of probability functions and determine when it is coherent to accept or to reject a proposition according to some threshold defined in terms of degrees of belief.
To achieve this goal, we need both an interpretation of the concept of incoherence coined by the bilateralists as well as an interpretation of acceptance and rejection. I will show that a good interpretation of coherence in probabilistic terms can already be found in the literature. Then, I will give an interpretation of acceptance and rejection in terms of degrees of belief. In particular, I will show that it is possible to interpret these concepts in accordance with Locke’s thesis, the thesis that states that there is some threshold r such that if you believe some sentence in degree equal or higher than r you should accept it, without falling into epistemic paradoxes.

PDF (English)

Referências

  1. Adams, E. (1996). A primer of probability logic. CSLI Publications.
  2. Carroll, L. (1895). What the tortoise said to Achilles. Mind, 104(416), 691-693. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/104.416.691 Reprinted in Woollcott, A. (Ed.) (1982), The Penguin Complete Lewis Carroll (pp. 1104-1108). Penguin.
  3. De Finetti, B. (1937). La prévision: ses lois logiques, ses sources subjectives. In Annales de l’Institut Henri Poincaré (vol. 7, pp. 1-68). Wiley.
  4. Dummett, M. (1991), The logical basis of metaphysics. Harvard University Press.
  5. Edgington, D. (1997). Vagueness by degrees. In Vagueness: A Reader. The MIT Press.
  6. Field, H. (2009). What is the normative role of logic? In Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 83, 251-268. Wiley Online Library.
  7. Field, H. (2015). What is logical validity. In C. R. Caret & O. T. Hjortland, Foundations of logical consequence (pp. 33-70). Oxford University Press.
  8. Hacking, I. (2001). Probability and inductive logic. Cambridge University Press.
  9. Hájek, A. (2008). Arguments for, or against, probabilism? The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 59(4), 793-819. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40072312
  10. Incurvati, L., & Schlöder, J. (2017). Weak rejection. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 95(4), 741-760.
  11. Joyce, J. (1998). A nonpragmatic vindication of probabilism. Philosophy of Science, 65(4), 575-603.
  12. Kyburg, H. (1961). Probability and the logic of rational belief. Wesleyan University Press.
  13. Leitgeb, H. (2014). The stability theory of belief. The Philosophical Review, 123(2), 131-171.
  14. Makinson, D. (1965). The paradox of the preface. Analysis, 25(6), 205-207.
  15. Murzi, J., & Steinberger, F. (2017). Inferentialism. In B. Hale (Ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language (pp. 197-224). Wiley Blackwell.
  16. Paris, J. B. (2001). A note on the Dutch Book method. In ISIPTA, 1, 301-306.
  17. Ramsey, F. (1926/2016). Truth and probability. In Readings in Formal Epistemology (pp. 21-45). Springer.
  18. Restall, G. (2005). Multiple conclusions. In P. Hájek, L. Valdes-Villanueva & D. Westerstahl (Eds.), Logic, methodology and philosophy of science: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress (pp. 189-205). King’s College.
  19. Ripley, D. (2015). Anything goes. Topoi, 34(1), 25-36.
  20. Rumfitt, I. (2000). Yes and no. Mind, 109(436), 781-823.
  21. Smiley, T. (1996). Rejection. Analysis, 56(1), 1-9.
  22. Staffel, J. (2016). Beliefs, buses and lotteries: Why rational belief can’t be stably high credence. Philosophical Studies, 173(7), 1721-1734.
  23. Williams, J. R. G. (2012). Generalized probabilism: Dutch books and accuracy domination. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 41(5), 811-840.
  24. Williams, R. (2016). Probability and nonclassical logic. In A. Hajek & Ch. Hitchcock (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of probability and philosophy. Oxford University Press.