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Deductive Cogency, Understanding, and Acceptance
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File | Description | Size | Format | |
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ABDC-Draft-11-PenultimateCorrected.pdf | 443.77 KB |
Author(s)
Date Issued
July 2018
Date Available
11T02:00:16Z March 2018
Abstract
Deductive Cogency holds that the set of propositions towards which one has, or is prepared to have, a given type of propositional attitude should be consistent and closed under logical consequence. While there are many propositional attitudes that are not subject to this requirement, e.g. hoping and imagining, it is at least prima facie plausible that Deductive Cogency applies to the doxastic attitude involved in propositional knowledge, viz. (outright) belief. However, this thought is undermined by the well-known preface paradox, leading a number of philosophers to conclude that Deductive Cogency has at best a very limited role to play in our epistemic lives. I argue here that Deductive Cogency is still an important epistemic requirement, albeit not as a requirement on belief. Instead, building on a distinction between belief and acceptance introduced by Jonathan Cohen and recent developments in the epistemology of understanding, I propose that Deductive Cogency applies to the attitude of treating propositions as given in the context of attempting to understand a given phenomenon. I then argue that this simultaneously accounts for the plausibility of the considerations in favor of Deductive Cogency and avoids the problematic consequences of the preface paradox.
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REPRO
Type of Material
Journal Article
Publisher
Springer
Journal
Synthese
Volume
195
Issue
7
Start Page
3121
End Page
3141
Copyright (Published Version)
2017 Springer
Language
English
Status of Item
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0039-7857
This item is made available under a Creative Commons License
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