Unsettled Thoughts: A Theory of Degrees of Rationality
Unsettled Thoughts: A Theory of Degrees of Rationality
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
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Abstract
How should thinkers cope with uncertainty? What makes their degrees of belief rational, and how should they reason about uncertain matters? Recent research in epistemology has attempted to answer these questions by developing formal models of ideally rational credences. However, we know from psychological research that ideal rationality is unattainable for human thinkers. This raises the question of how rational ideals can apply to human thinkers. A popular reply is that the more a thinker’s imperfectly rational credences approximate compliance with norms of ideal rationality, the better. But what exactly does this mean? Why is it better to be less irrational, if we can’t ever be completely rational? And what does being closer to ideally rational amount to? If ideal models of rationality are supposed to help us understand the rationality of human, imperfect thinkers, we need answers to these questions. Unsettled Thoughts offers these answers: we can explain why it’s better to be less irrational, because less irrational degrees of belief are generally more accurate, and better at guiding our actions. Moreover, the way in which approximating ideal rationality is beneficial can be made formally precise by using a variety of distance measures that track the benefits of being more rational.
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Front Matter
- 1 Introduction
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2
De-Idealizing Bayesianism
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3
Approximation Measures
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4
Why Approximate Coherence? The Dutch Book Justification
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5
Why Approximate Coherence? The Accuracy Justification
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6
Approximating Ideal Rationality with Multiple Norms
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7
Evaluating Credence Change
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8
A Small Piece of the Puzzle
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9
How Do Beliefs Simplify Reasoning?
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10
Matters to Be Settled
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End Matter
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