Abstract
Van Fraassen's epistemology is forged from two commitments, one to a type of Bayesianism and the other to what he terms voluntarism. Van Fraassen holds that if one is going to follow a rule in belief-revision, it must be a Bayesian rule, but that one does not need to follow a rule in order to be rational. It is argued that van Fraassen's arguments for rejecting non-Bayesian rules is unsound, and that his voluntarism is subject to a fatal dilemma arising from the non-monotonic character of reasoning.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 325-348 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | Synthese |
| Volume | 98 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 1994 |