Join BookitisSave favorites, build lists, and follow creators.

Between Probability and Certainty

Work detail

Bookitis Pick
Cover for Between Probability and Certainty
BP
Image source: Open Library
Martin Smith1 editions

Martin Smith explores a question central to philosophy - namely, what does it take for a belief to be justified or rational? According to a widespread view, whether one has justification for believing a proposition is determined by how probable that proposition is given one's evidence. In the present book this view is rejected and replaced with another: in order for one to have justification for believing a proposition, one's evidence must normically support it - roughly, one's evidence must make the falsity of that proposition abnormal in the sense of calling for special, independent explanation. This conception of justification bears upon a range of topics in epistemology and beyond, including the relation between justification and knowledge, the force of statistical evidence, the problem of scepticism, the lottery and preface paradoxes, the viability of multiple premise closure, the internalist/externalist debate, the psychology of human reasoning, and the relation between belief and degrees of belief. Ultimately, this way of looking at justification guides us to a new, unfamiliar picture of how we should respond to our evidence and manage our own fallibility. This picture is developed here.

Overview

Shared work-level identity and catalog context.

1 credited authorSearch language english

Bookitis keeps work pages focused on the shared book identity and the editions that actually belong to it. Unrelated books should not appear here as primary content.

Contributors

People credited with this work in the active catalog.

  • Martin Smith

    Author profile in the active Bookitis catalog

    Open Author

Editions

Publication-specific versions linked to this work only.