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H2020Individual fellowship2017–2019

Degrees of Belief · The Nature of Degrees of Belief

Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2017-02-01 → 2019-01-31
EU contribution
€183,455
Participants
1
Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST

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Results in brief

The Nature of Degrees of Belief

Ordinary humans have mental states capable of representing different ways the world might be; that is, they have representational content. Such states include our beliefs, which are a kind of all-or-nothing state: one either believes that P, or one does not. In recent decades, however, philosophers have increasingly emphasized that believing is not always an all-or-nothing matter—there are degrees of belief. For instance, one might be 99.99% confident that the sun will rise tomorrow, but only 80% confident that it will rain tomorrow. These are quantitative degrees of belief; they refer to specific levels of confidence, and are usually represented numerically. There are also qualitative degrees of belief. For example, one might be more confident that the sun will rise tomorrow than that it will rain tomorrow. Talk of degrees of belief allows us to describe in a more nuanced way how humans represent the world, allowing us to distinguish between the relative likelihoods that individuals attach to the different claims that they consider. Doing so is central for our best accounts of decision making, which form the basis of a very significant amount of contemporary philosophical, psychological, and economic theory. However, very little has been said about what degrees of belief are, exactly, nor how quantitative and qualitative degrees of belief relate to one another. Furthermore, to the extent that work has been done on this matter, the focus has been on the degrees of belief of unrealistically rational beings, quite unlike any ordinary human. This is unfortunate: without an adequate account of what degrees of belief are for ordinary agents, it is hard to settle many of the philosophical issues that decision theorists today engage upon. The project’s overall aim is to use newly developed formal results to construct a novel approach to understanding the degrees of belief of ordinary, non-ideal human beings. More specifically, the project aims to bring together two historically distinct strands of thinking on the nature of degrees of belief: those who seek to make central use of so-called ‘representation theorems’ in their account, and those who hold that degrees of belief are psychologically real.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

The ER (Edward Elliott) is an early career researcher. The focus of his research to this point has been the philosophy of mind (particularly issues relating to mental representation) and the mathematical foundations of decision theory. The research goal of the project is to develop a novel account of the nature of degrees of belief (explained below), which is capable of accommodating what we have learnt empirically about ordinary agents’ probabilistic reasoning and decision-making processes in recent decades. This project builds on the ER’s existing research expertise, but with the support of the host institution (University of Leeds) and the supervisor (Professor Robert Williams), the scope of his work will be extended into new areas. Engagement in these areas will progress the ER’s career and forge connections to the European philosophical community. By drawing together issues from the philosophy of mind and formal epistemology/decision theory with an eye to the empirical work relevant to these areas, this project will help to establish the ER’s position at the cutting edge of contemporary discussion.The research goal of the project is to develop a novel account of the nature and representational content of the degrees of belief of ordinary, non-ideal human beings. Specifically, the project will draw on recent work on the formal foundations of decision theory, as well as recent empirical evidence regarding decision-making and probabilistic reasoning, for the development and defense of a broadly functionalist account of degrees of belief. The account will centrally involve a novel perspective on the nature of degrees of belief and the relationships that hold between different kinds of degrees of belief. A centerpiece of the account will be a new decision-theoretic representation theorem (a mathematical proof that any subject satisfying certain conditions can be represented as if she has such-and-such degrees of belief).

Original text from CORDIS.

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Data: CORDIS, © European Union