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Reasonable beliefs

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Abstract

The theory of inductive inference developed by I. Levi in Gambling with Truth has two important limitations. In the first place, it makes acceptability of hypotheses ‘question-dependent: any statement of the form ‘It is reasonable to believe a hypothesis h on evidence e’ has to be expanded so as to include a reference to some specific question which h is supposed to answer, or, alternatively, to a set of possible answers which is associated with that question. Secondly, Levi's account is insensitive to modal distinctions: no difference is made between what is merely reasonable to believe and what is unreasonable not to believe. The aim of this paper is to construct a theory which utilizes Levi's main proposals and, at the same time, avoids the above-mentioned limitations.

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Bibliography

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  2. Hintikka, Jaakko, ‘A Two-Dimensional Continuum of Inductive Methods’ in Aspects of Inductive Logic (ed. by J. Hintikka and P. Suppes), Amsterdam 1966, pp. 113–132.

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  5. Swain, Marshall, ‘The Consistency of Rational Belief’ in Induction, Acceptance, and Rational Belief (ed. by M. Swain), Dordrecht 1970.

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Rabinowicz, W. Reasonable beliefs. Theor Decis 10, 61–81 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00126331

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00126331

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