Empires of belief : why we need more scepticism and doubt in the twenty-first century / Stuart Sim.
Stuart Sim
BookThe fundamental question of the ethics of belief is "What ought one to believe?" According to the traditional view of evidentialism, the strength of one's beliefs should be proportionate to the evidence. Conventional ways of defending and challenging evidentialism rely on the idea that what one ought to believe is a matter of what it is rational, prudent, ethical, or personally fulfilling to believe. Common to all these approaches is that they look outside of belief itself to determine what one ought to believe. In this book Jonathan Adler offers a strengthened version of evidentialism, arguing that the ethics of belief should be rooted in the concept of belief--that evidentialism is belief's own ethics. A key observation is that it is not merely that one ought not, but that one cannot, believe, for example, that the number of stars is even. The "cannot" represents a conceptual barrier, not just an inability. Therefore belief in defiance of one's evidence (or evidentialism) is impossible. Adler addresses such questions as irrational beliefs, reasonableness, control over beliefs, and whether justifying beliefs requires a foundation. Although he treats the ethics of belief as a central topic in epistemology, his ideas also bear on rationality, argument and pragmatics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and social cognitive psychology.
Title |
Belief's own ethics / Jonathan E. Adler. |
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Publisher |
Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press |
Creation Date |
©2002 |
Notes |
"A Bradford book." Includes bibliographical references (p. [331]-347) and index. English |
Content |
1. Getting Off the Wrong Track. I. The Intrinsic Ethics of Belief. II. Extrinsic Ethics of Belief -- 2. Can One Will to Believe? -- 3. Normative Epistemology: The Deceptively Large Scope of the Incoherence Test -- 4. Evading Evidentialism and Exploiting "Possibility": Strategies of Ignorance, Isolation, and Inflation. I. Arguments from Ignorance. II. Isolation and Testability. III. Inflation as Distraction -- 5. Testimony: Background Reasons to Accept the Word of Others -- 6. Tacit Confirmation and the Regress -- 7. Three Paradoxes of Belief -- 8. Constraints on Us to Fully Believe -- 9. Interlude -- Transparency, Full Belief, Accommodation -- 10. The Compatibility of Full Belief and Doubt. |
Extent |
1 online resource (xv, 357 p. ) |
Language |
English |
Copyright Date |
©2002 |
National Library system number |
997010702836105171 |
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