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Reducing belief simpliciter to degrees of belief. (English) Zbl 1320.03048

Summary: Is it possible to give an explicit definition of belief (simpliciter) in terms of subjective probability, such that believed propositions are guaranteed to have a sufficiently high probability, and yet it is neither the case that belief is stripped of any of its usual logical properties, nor is it the case that believed propositions are bound to have probability 1? We prove the answer is ‘yes’, and that given some plausible logical postulates on belief that involve a contextual “cautiousness” threshold, there is but one way of determining the extension of the concept of belief that does the job. The qualitative concept of belief is not to be eliminated from scientific or philosophical discourse, rather, by reducing qualitative belief to assignments of resiliently high degrees of belief and a “cautiousness” threshold, qualitative and quantitative belief turn out to be governed by one unified theory that offers the prospects of a huge range of applications. Within that theory, logic and probability theory are not opposed to each other but go hand in hand.

MSC:

03B42 Logics of knowledge and belief (including belief change)
03A10 Logic in the philosophy of science
03A05 Philosophical and critical aspects of logic and foundations
68T27 Logic in artificial intelligence
60A05 Axioms; other general questions in probability
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