Belief (SEP)

Bayes’ Theorem (SEP)

Bayes’ Theorem is a simple mathematical formula used for calculating conditional probabilities. It figures prominently in subjectivist or Bayesian approaches to epistemology, statistics, and inductive logic. Subjectivists, who maintain that rational belief is governed by the laws of probability, lean heavily on conditional probabilities in their theories of evidence and their models of empirical learning. Bayes’ Theorem is central to these enterprises both because it simplifies the calculation of conditional probabilities and because it clarifies significant features of subjectivist position. Indeed, the Theorem’s central insight — that a hypothesis is confirmed by any body of data that its truth renders probable — is the cornerstone of all subjectivist methodology.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bayes-theorem/

The Epistemic Basing Relation

The epistemic basing relation is the relation which holds between a reason and a belief if and only if the reason is a reason for which the belief is held. It is generally thought to be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a belief’s being justified that the belief be based on a reason. The basing relation is what distinguishes good reasons which a person possesses that contribute to the personal justification of a given belief from good reasons which the person possesses but that do not contribute to the personal justification of the belief.

Basing relations may be involved in both inferential and non-inferential justification. For example, one may hold that sensory states count as reasons, and thus require that a sensory belief be based on a reason if it is to be justified by that reason. In addition, one might understand at least some self-evident beliefs to be based on the meanings of the various terms of the sentence expressing the proposition believed. For example, one’s belief that all bachelors are unmarried men may be understood to be based on the meanings of ‘all’, ‘bachelors’, ‘are’, etc.

The basing relation is most frequently analyzed in terms of a reason’s causing a belief.^[1] In such analyses, the reason and the belief are understood to be mental states of a person. The cause may be a contributing cause or a sufficient cause. However, the basing relation has also been analyzed as an appropriate counterfactual cause of a belief and also as depending on an appropriate meta-belief to the effect that a reason is a good reason to hold the belief.

Analysis of the basing relation is relevant to a variety of fundamental epistemological issues. It is relevant to the nature of epistemic rationalization and to questions regarding the internalism/externalism debate. In addition, it has been argued that reliabilist theories of justification are incompatible with the correct analysis of the basing relation.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/basing-epistemic/

Bodily Awareness (SEP)

At the sensory level we continuously receive a flow of information about our own body through external and internal perceptions. Not only can we see our body and touch it, but we also have several inner receptors that convey information about the position of our limbs, the balance of our body, and its physiological condition. Unlike external perception, the inner sensory flow never stops and cannot be voluntarily controlled. Thus, an important amount of information is constantly available whether we want it or not, whether we pay attention to it or not. In that respect, our body qualifies as the object that we know best. Yet, despite numerous sources of information, the phenomenology of bodily awareness is limited. In painful and learning situations, our body appears at the core of our interest, but when we walk in the street, we are rarely aware of the precise position of our legs and of the contact of the floor on our feet. Schwitzgebel (2007), for instance, asked how frequently participants wearing a device beeping at random intervals had tactile experiences in their left foot just before the beeping sound. He found a high variability in the answers, but one participant reported tactile sensations only 16% of the time. Our conscious field is primarily occupied by our environment, instead of the bodily medium that allows us to perceive it and to move through it. Hence, the most permanent and preponderant object in life may also be the most elusive one (Leder 1990; Merleau-Ponty 1945; O’Shaughnessy 1980).

One may then question whether we are completely unaware of it. Except in rare illusory or pathological cases, we never feel fully disembodied. James (1890: 242), for instance, claims that we are constantly conscious of the presence of our body, although at the margin of the stream of our consciousness:

Our own bodily position, attitude, condition, is one of the things of which some awareness, however inattentive, invariably accompanies the knowledge of whatever else we know.

What is the content of this marginal body consciousness? James (1890: 242) alludes to a “feeling of the same old body always there” or a mere “feeling of warmth and intimacy” but can we go beyond this rough and metaphorical description?

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bodily-awareness/

Personal Autonomy

Autonomous agents are self-governing agents. But what is a self-governing agent? Governing oneself is no guarantee that one will have a greater range of options in the future, or the sort of opportunities one most wants to have. Since, moreover, a person can govern herself without being able to appreciate the difference between right and wrong, it seems that an autonomous agent can do something wrong without being to blame for her action. What, then, are the necessary and sufficient features of this self-relation? Philosophers have offered a wide range of competing answers to this question.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/personal-autonomy/

Authority (SEP)

Large social groups face many grave problems, such as violence, injustice, disorder, public bads, and war, that require a coordinated collective response. Because disagreement about the nature of and solutions to these problems is pervasive, mounting any such response is difficult in the absence of an authority empowered to issue and enforce coordinating directives. The basic question of political authority asks whether anyone has the right to impose such directives, and if so, under what conditions.

Some anarchist philosophers have thought that political authority is neither necessary nor sufficient for solving the social problems above. Indeed, some think that political authority is counterproductive because it debars better strategies for solving them (e.g. Marx and Engels 1846 [1972: 146–202] and Huemer 2012). This entry surveys the main frameworks that philosophers have developed in defense of a positive, non-anarchistic answer to the basic question of political authority. To this end, we discuss different concepts of the political authority’s right to impose directives on others (part 1) as well as different conceptions of who has the right and how it is grounded (part 2). In a supplement on legitimate political authority in international institutions, we highlight distinctive issues that arise when the basic question of political authority is posed at levels beyond the nation-state.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authority/

Attention

Attention is involved in the selective directedness of our mental lives. The nature of this selectivity is one of the principal points of disagreement between the existing theories of attention. Some of the most influential of those theories treat the selectivity of attention as resulting from limitations in the brain’s capacity to process the complex properties of multiple perceivable stimuli. Others take that selectivity to be the result of limitations in the thinking subject’s capacity to consciously entertain multiple trains of thought. A third group attempt to account for attention’s selectivity in ways that need not make any reference to limitations of capacity. These latter theories relate the selectivity of attention to the selectivity required to maintain a single coherent course of action, to the weighting of sensory information in accordance with its expected precision, or to competition between mutually inhibitory streams of processing.

Instances of attention differ along several dimensions. In some of its instances attention is a perceptual phenomenon; in some it is a phenomenon related to action; and in others it is a purely intellectual matter of giving thought to some question. In some instances the selectivity of attention is voluntary. In others it is driven, independently of the subject’s volition, by the high salience of attention-grabbing items in the perceptual field. The difficulty of giving a unified theory of attention that applies to all of these instances makes attention a topic of philosophical interest in its own right.

Attention is also a topic of philosophical interest because of its apparent relations to a number of other philosophically puzzling phenomena. There are empirical and theoretical considerations suggesting that attention is closely related to consciousness, and there are controversies over whether this relationship is one of necessity, or sufficiency (or both or neither). There are also controversies—thought to be important to the viability of representationism about consciousness—over the ways in which the phenomenal character of a conscious experience can be modulated by attention. Different considerations link attention to demonstrative reference, to the experience of emotion, to the development of an understanding of other minds, and to the exercise of the will. Some work in the tradition of virtue ethics takes attention to be morally important, since there are at least some virtues that require one to attend appropriately. Attention has also been given a prominent role in some theories about the epistemic significance of emotional and perceptual experiences, and in some discussions of the epistemic peculiarities of self-attributed mental states.

The controversies concerning attention’s relations to these other phenomena often include debates about the philosophical significance of theories that have been developed through the empirical study of attention at the neuropsychological and cognitive levels. Attention’s cultural and economic aspects have also come to be a point of philosophical interest, with some theorists suggesting that the social and political significance of new media is primarily a consequence of the novel ways in which those media engage and compete for the attention that we individually and collectively pay.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/attention/