Linguistique de l’écrit

Revue internationale en libre accès

Revue | Volume | Article

234334

Assertion, belief, and context

Roger Clarke

pp. 4951-4977

Résumé

This paper argues for a treatment of belief as essentially sensitive to certain features of context. The first part gives an argument that we must take belief to be context-sensitive in the same way that assertion is, if we are to preserve appealing principles tying belief to sincere assertion. In particular, whether an agent counts as believing that p in a context depends on the space of alternative possibilities the agent is considering in that context. One and the same doxastic state may amount to belief that p in one context but not another. The second part of the paper gives a formal treatment of doxastic states, according to which belief is context-sensitive along just these lines. The model is applied to characterize (but not to refute) skeptical arguments.

Détails de la publication

Publié dans:

Cossara Stefano, Rauzy Jean-Baptiste, Zhang Xiaoxing (2018) Cartesian epistemology. Synthese 195 (11).

Pages: 4951-4977

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-017-1437-5

Citation complète:

Clarke Roger, 2018, Assertion, belief, and context. Synthese 195 (11), Cartesian epistemology, 4951-4977. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1437-5.