According to the information-theoretic account of belief and knowledge (Stampe 1977, Dretske 1981, Stalnaker 1984, Millikan 1989) (i) an agent A believes that p only if it is in a belief state that carries the information that p, and (ii) A knows that p only if A believes that p and conditions are optimal. Arguably, if belief and knowledge are to be understood in terms of information-carrying, the same is true of credence and evidential probability. Yet, hardly any information-theoretic account of them is present in the literature (Tang (2014) discusses a view different from the one to be proposed here, finding it wanting). The present paper’s first aim is to fill this gap by proposing an information-theoretic account of credences based on a generalization of Dretske’s conception of information-carrying, and to further supplement the information-theoretic account with a precisification of the notion of epistemic obligation. The paper’s second aim is to present, on the basis of the proposed extension of the information-theoretic account, a possible worlds’ model of the interaction between belief, knowledge, credence, evidential probability and epistemic normativity, and to extract some of its consequences.
Comunicação Internacional
Information, Credences and Epistemic Normativity
Organização:
IUHPST/DLMPST
School of Economics, University of Buenos Aires
24 / 07 / 2023
Resumo: