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This is a single volume reference guide to the latest work and
potential future directions in Philosophical Logic, written by an
international team of leading scholars. "The Continuum Companion to
Philosophical Logic" offers the definitive guide to a key area of
contemporary philosophy. The book covers all the fundamental areas
of philosophical logic - topics that have continued to attract
interest historically as well as topics that have emerged more
recently as active areas of research. Seventeen specially
commissioned essays from an international team of experts reveal
where important work continues to be done in the area and, most
valuably, the exciting new directions the field is taking. The
Companion explores issues pertaining to classical logic and its
rivals, extensional and intensional extensions of classical logic,
semantics for parts of natural language, and the application of
logic in the theory of rationality. Crucially the emphasis is on
the role that logic plays in understanding philosophical problems.
Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including an A
to Z of key terms and concepts, a detailed list of resources, a
bibliography and a companion website, this is the essential
reference tool for anyone working in contemporary philosophical
logic. "The Continuum Companions" series is a major series of
single volume companions to key research fields in the humanities
aimed at postgraduate students, scholars and libraries. Each
companion offers a comprehensive reference resource giving an
overview of key topics, research areas, new directions and a
manageable guide to beginning or developing research in the field.
A distinctive feature of the series is that each companion provides
practical guidance on advanced study and research in the field,
including research methods and subject-specific resources.
What we value, like, endorse, want, and prefer changes over the
course of our lives, sometimes as a result of decisions we
make-such as when we choose to become a parent or move to a new
country-and sometimes as a result of forces beyond our control-such
as when our political views change as we grow older. This poses a
problem for any theory of how we ought to make decisions. Which
values and preferences should we appeal to when we are making our
decisions? Our current values? Our past ones? Our future ones? Or
some amalgamation of all them? But if that, which amalgamation? In
Choosing for Changing Selves, Richard Pettigrew presents a theory
of rational decision making for agents who recognise that their
values will change over time and whose decisions will affect those
future times.
Our beliefs come in degrees. I'm 70% confident it will rain
tomorrow, and 0.001% sure my lottery ticket will win. What's more,
we think these degrees of belief should abide by certain principles
if they are to be rational. For instance, you shouldn't believe
that a person's taller than 6ft more strongly than you believe that
they're taller than 5ft, since the former entails the latter. In
Dutch Book arguments, we try to establish the principles of
rationality for degrees of belief by appealing to their role in
guiding decisions. In particular, we show that degrees of belief
that don't satisfy the principles will always guide action in some
way that is bad or undesirable. In this Element, we present Dutch
Book arguments for the principles of Probabilism,
Conditionalization, and the Reflection Principle, among others, and
we formulate and consider the most serious objections to them.
The university system is no longer fit for purpose. UK higher
education was designed for much smaller numbers of students and a
very different labour market. Students display worrying levels of
mental health issues, exacerbated by unprecedented levels of debt,
and the dubious privilege of competing for poorly-paid graduate
internships. Meanwhile who goes to university is still too often
determined by place of birth, gender, class or ethnicity. Who are
universities for? argues for a large-scale shake up of how we
organise higher education, how we combine it with work, and how it
fits into our lives. It includes radical proposals for reform of
the curriculum and how we admit students to higher education, with
part-time study (currently in crisis in England) becoming the norm.
A short, polemical but also deeply practical book, Who are
universities for? offers concrete solutions to the problems facing
UK higher education and a way forward for universities to become
more inclusive and more responsive to local and global challenges.
Richard Pettigrew offers an extended investigation into a
particular way of justifying the rational principles that govern
our credences (or degrees of belief). The main principles that he
justifies are the central tenets of Bayesian epistemology, though
many other related principles are discussed along the way. These
are: Probabilism, the claims that credences should obey the laws of
probability; the Principal Principle, which says how credences in
hypotheses about the objective chances should relate to credences
in other propositions; the Principle of Indifference, which says
that, in the absence of evidence, we should distribute our
credences equally over all possibilities we entertain; and
Conditionalization, the Bayesian account of how we should plan to
respond when we receive new evidence. Ultimately, then, this book
is a study in the foundations of Bayesianism. To justify these
principles, Pettigrew looks to decision theory. He treats an
agent's credences as if they were a choice she makes between
different options, gives an account of the purely epistemic utility
enjoyed by different sets of credences, and then appeals to the
principles of decision theory to show that, when epistemic utility
is measured in this way, the credences that violate the principles
listed above are ruled out as irrational. The account of epistemic
utility set out here is the veritist's: the sole fundamental source
of epistemic utility for credences is their accuracy. Thus,
Pettigrew conducts an investigation in the version of Iepistemic
utility theory known as accuracy-first epistemology. The book can
also be read as an extended reply on behalf of the veritist to the
evidentialist's objection that veritism cannot account for certain
evidential principles of credal rationality, such as the Principal
Principle, the Principle of Indifference, and Conditionalization.
Richard Pettigrew offers an extended investigation into a
particular way of justifying the rational principles that govern
our credences (or degrees of belief). The main principles that he
justifies are the central tenets of Bayesian epistemology, though
many other related principles are discussed along the way. These
are: Probabilism, the claims that credences should obey the laws of
probability; the Principal Principle, which says how credences in
hypotheses about the objective chances should relate to credences
in other propositions; the Principle of Indifference, which says
that, in the absence of evidence, we should distribute our
credences equally over all possibilities we entertain; and
Conditionalization, the Bayesian account of how we should plan to
respond when we receive new evidence. Ultimately, then, this book
is a study in the foundations of Bayesianism. To justify these
principles, Pettigrew looks to decision theory. He treats an
agent's credences as if they were a choice she makes between
different options, gives an account of the purely epistemic utility
enjoyed by different sets of credences, and then appeals to the
principles of decision theory to show that, when epistemic utility
is measured in this way, the credences that violate the principles
listed above are ruled out as irrational. The account of epistemic
utility set out here is the veritist's: the sole fundamental source
of epistemic utility for credences is their accuracy. Thus,
Pettigrew conducts an investigation in the version of epistemic
utility theory known as accuracy-first epistemology. The book can
also be read as an extended reply on behalf of the veritist to the
evidentialist's objection that veritism cannot account for certain
evidential principles of credal rationality, such as the Principal
Principle, the Principle of Indifference, and Conditionalization.
How much does rationality constrain what we should believe on the
basis of our evidence? According to this book, not very much. For
most people and most bodies of evidence, there is a wide range of
beliefs that rationality permits them to have in response to that
evidence. The argument, which takes inspiration from William James'
ideas in 'The Will to Believe', proceeds from two premises. The
first is a theory about the basis of epistemic rationality. It's
called epistemic utility theory, and it says that what it is
epistemically rational for you to believe is what it would be
rational for you to choose if you were given the chance to pick
your beliefs and, when picking them, you were to care only about
their epistemic value. So, to say which beliefs are permitted, we
must say how to measure epistemic value, and which decision rule to
use when picking your beliefs. The second premise is a claim about
attitudes to epistemic risk, and it says that rationality permits
many different such attitudes. These attitudes can show up in
epistemic utility theory in two ways: in the way you measure
epistemic value; and in the decision rule you use to pick beliefs.
This book explores the latter. The result is permissivism about
epistemic rationality: different attitudes to epistemic risk lead
to different choices of prior beliefs; given most bodies of
evidence, different priors lead to different posteriors; and even
once we fix your attitudes to epistemic risk, if they are at all
risk-inclined, there is a range of different priors and therefore
different posteriors they permit.
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