André Neiva

It is rational for the agent to be epistemically autonomous and deferent. However, these epistemic attitudes seem to be intrinsically incompatible. This conflict is particularly critical in the case of scientific denialism, characterised by the deliberate denial of consensual scientific claims. The goal of this paper is to show that epistemic autonomy and deference are fully compatible and mutually exercisable epistemic attitudes, in such a way that the autonomous agent should defer to scientific consensus. We argue that it is rational for the epistemically autonomous agent to defer to scientific consensus because of the existence of a higher-order evidence regarding the trustworthiness of this consensus. The fundamental error of the denialist is to fail to recognise the evidence of trustworthiness in virtue of which one should defer to the scientific claim. The proper understanding of the relation between epistemic autonomy and deference is a fundamental step in proving the irrationality of scientific denialism and, subsequently, attacking it.

A economia está no centro do debate sobre as transformações que a sociedade vem enfrentando e sobre a nova realidade que está sendo gestada. A Filosofia não pode – e não deve – se esquivar de questões incontornáveis, tais como a crescente desigualdade de renda entre os mais ricos e os mais pobres, as mudanças climáticas decorrentes das nossas práticas de produção e consumo, bem como a crise que o nosso sistema econômico produz nas modernas democracias representativas. Ensaios de Filosofia da Economia está estruturado em dez capítulos que percorrem, direta ou indiretamente, inúmeras questões relativas aos fundamentos ontológicos, metodológicos, epistêmicos e sociais da economia. Alguns capítulos apresentam discussões mais avançadas ou desenvolvem argumentos sobre temas muito específicos de interesse dos filósofos da economia; outros oferecem uma boa introdução a temas que podem ser úteis aos iniciantes e leitores curiosos. Os capítulos podem ser lidos de forma independente na ordem que o leitor preferir. O objetivo da obra é oferecer uma visão panorâmica de um conjunto suficientemente amplo de temas, de modo a difundir a Filosofia da Economia em língua portuguesa tanto nos cursos de graduação quanto nos de pós-graduação.

In this paper, I examine Pascal's Wager as a decision problem where the uncertainty is massive, that is, as a decision under ignorance. I first present several reasons to support this interpretation. Then, I argue that wagering for God is the optimal act in a broad range of cases, according to two well-known criteria for decision-making: the Minimax Regret rule and the Hurwicz criterion. Given a Pascalian standard matrix, I also show that a tie between wagering for God and wagering against God is only possible under very narrow conditions when applying the Hurwicz criterion. Finally, I discuss three objections to these two versions of the Wager. The most pressing challenge comes from the Many-Gods objection. I conclude that this objection is even more challenging whenever one faces a situation of massive uncertainty about God's existence. I argue that addressing it requires a more detailed examination of the benefits of adopting a religious life compared to those of choosing non-theism, or an additional criterion that can break the tie between these options.

Unlike other classical arguments for the existence of God, Pascal’s Wager provides a pragmatic rationale for theistic belief. Its most popular version says that it is rationally mandatory to choose a way of life that seeks to cultivate belief in God because this is the option of maximum expected utility. Despite its initial attractiveness, this long-standing argument has been subject to various criticisms by many philosophers. What is less discussed, however, is the rationality of this choice in situations where the decision-makers are confronted with greater uncertainty. In this paper, I examine the imprecise version of Pascal’s Wager: those scenarios where an agent’s credence that God exists is imprecise or vague rather than precise. After introducing some technical background on imprecise probabilities, I apply five different principles for decision-making to two cases of state uncertainty. In the final part of the paper, I argue that it is not rationally permitted to include zero as the lower probability of God’s existence. Although the conditions for what makes an act uniquely optimal vary significantly across those principles, I also show how the option of wagering for God can defeat any mixed strategy under two distinct interpretations of salvation.

Epistemic justification has been widely accepted as both a gradational and relational notion. Given those properties, a natural thought is to take degrees of epistemic justification to be probabilities. In this paper, we present a simple Bayesian framework for justification. In the first part, after putting the model in an evidentialist form, we distinguish different senses of “being evidence for” and “confirming”. Next, we argue that this conception should accommodate the two relevant kinds of qualitative confirmation or evidential support. In the second part of the paper, we discuss the claim that this view is unable to satisfy the modified version of the conjunction closure for beliefs in probabilistically independent propositions. We defend that the underlying assumption on which this objection depends leads to an improper reading of the concept of epistemic probability. After providing a better interpretation of it, we put forward a rationale, which is based on the notion of conditional uncertainty, in support of a more plausible and restricted version of the closure of justification under conjunction.