A critique of van Fraassen's voluntaristic epistemology

  • Jonathan L. Kvanvig

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

19 Scopus citations

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 languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)325-348
Number of pages24
JournalSynthese
Volume98
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 1994

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