Tamaz Tokhadze

Radical Permissivism holds that, in almost all evidential situations, a wide range of credences towards a proposition can be equally rational. This view allows for the rational permissibility of beliefs that intuitively seem highly irrational—such as Clifford's shipowner's risky belief that his ship is seaworthy, or a conspiracy theorist's outlandish beliefs about childhood vaccination. These beliefs, in turn, can justify actions with serious harmful consequences for others. Granted such permissivism, can we explain why an agent should not act on their seemingly irrational belief when their actions affect others? Recently, Pettigrew (2022) proposed a strategy to address this issue, arguing that when an action affects others, a decision‐maker should consider not only their own but also others' epistemic risk attitudes. After explicating this strategy, I level two general arguments against it: that it (i) fails to provide the required safeguards against actions with serious moral consequences, and (ii) does not extend to non‐human animals who lack epistemic risk attitudes. I conclude that a more moderate epistemology is needed to account for the connection between epistemic rationality and morality.

This paper defends a novel sceptical response to the fine‐tuning argument for the existence of God (FTA). According to this response, even if FTA can establish, what I call, the confirmation proposition: ‘fine‐tuning confirms the God hypothesis’, there is no reason to think that a strengthening of FTA can establish the evidence‐favouring proposition: ‘fine‐tuning favours the God hypothesis over its competitors’. My argument is that, any criteria for the explanation of fine‐tuning that permit us to take the God hypothesis seriously ought to make us sceptical that fine‐tuning favours the God hypothesis over its competitors. As taking the God hypothesis seriously requires us to give a fair hearing to all sorts of non‐theistic explanations, including the so‐called weird sorts of atheism.

Formal theories of belief-credence interaction that satisfy the standard logical requirements on belief, such as conjunctive closure, face the problem of partition-sensitivity. According to these theories, a rational agent can believe X relative to one partitioning of possibilities, but the same belief may not be rational relative to some other partitioning, even when the agent’s evidence remains the same. Focusing on Leitgeb’s stability theory (Leitgeb, The stability of belief: How rational belief coheres with probability, Oxford University Press, 2017), which exemplifies this problem, this paper aims to go beyond the simple partition-sensitivity of such theories. To address this and related problems, I connect the issues surrounding belief-credence interaction with Bayesian network theory and the notion of epistemic basing. The view that I defend and explicate is that rational belief corresponds to stably high probability within a network of interconnected propositions, where the network is structured by the relation of direct explanatory priority. As I argue, this view provides solutions to important problems regarding partition-sensitivity, specifically the problems involving irrelevant propositions and large partitions. In the final section, I extend the proposed theory and articulate the network-based notion of robustness of belief, which differentiates lottery-type beliefs from more ordinary beliefs.

Evidential support is often equated with confirmation, where evidence supports hypothesis H if and only if it increases the probability of H. This article argues against this received view. As the author shows, support is a comparative notion in the sense that increase-in-probability is not. A piece of evidence can confirm H, but it can confirm alternatives to H to the same or greater degree; and in such cases, it is at best misleading to conclude that the evidence supports H. The author puts forward an alternative view that defines support in terms of measures of degree of confirmation. The proposed view is both sufficiently comparative and able to accommodate the increase-in-probability aspect of support. The author concludes that the proposed measure-theoretic approach to support provides a superior alternative to the standard confirmatory approach.

This dissertation proposes and defends a hybrid view I call Hybrid Impermissivism, which combines the following two theses: Moderate Uniqueness and Credal Permissivism. Moderate Uniqueness says that no evidence could justify both believing a proposition and its negation. However, on Moderate Uniqueness, evidence could justify both believing and suspending judgement on a proposition (hence the adjective “Moderate”). And Credal Permissivism says that more than one credal attitude could be justified on the evidence. Hybrid Impermissisim is developed into a precise theory by using normative bridge principles on how rational belief and credence ought to interact. My overall conclusion is that Hybrid Impermissivism is a coherent, plausible, and conciliatory position and provides a correct characterisation of the requirements of evidence on doxastic attitudes

Likelihoodism is the view that the degree of evidential support should be analysed and measured in terms of likelihoods alone. The paper considers and responds to a popular criticism that a likelihoodist framework is too restrictive to guide belief. First, I show that the most detailed and rigorous version of this criticism, as put forward by Gandenberger (2016), is unsuccessful. Second, I provide a positive argument that a broadly likelihoodist framework can accommodate guidance for comparative belief, even when objectively well-grounded prior probabilities are not available. As I show, the shift from non-relational to comparative probabilities opens up a new space for addressing the belief guidance problem for likelihoodism.

Uniqueness is the view that a body of evidence justifies a unique doxastic attitude toward any given proposition. Contemporary defenses and criticisms of Uniqueness are generally indifferent to whether we formulate the view in terms of the coarse-grained attitude of belief or the fine-grained attitude of credence. This paper articulates and discusses a hybrid view I call Hybrid Impermissivism that endorses Uniqueness about belief but rejects Uniqueness about credence. While Hybrid Impermissivism is an attractive position in several respects, I show that it faces a special problem, the diachronic coordination problem, which has to do with coordinating an agent’s beliefs and credences over time. I argue that the problem is fatal for Hybrid Impermissivism. I also formulate a logically weaker version of Hybrid Impermissivism which avoids the diachronic coordination problem, but under substantive assumptions about rational credence.

Extreme Permissivism is the view that a body of evidence could rationally permit both the attitude of belief and disbelief towards a proposition. This paper puts forward a new argument against Extreme Permissivism, which improves on a similar style of argument due to Roger White (2005, 2014). White’s argument is built around the principle that the support relation between evidence and a hypothesis is objective: so that if evidence E makes it rational for an agent to believe a hypothesis H, then E makes it rational to believe H, for all agents. In this paper, I construct a new argument against Extreme Permissivism that appeals to a logically weaker, less demanding view about evidential support, Relational Objectivity: whether a body of evidence E is more likely if H is true than if H is false is an objective matter and does not depend on how any agent interprets the relationship between E and H. Relational Objectivity is solely concerned with the conditional probabilities called likelihoods and does not put substantive constraints on an agent’s prior and posterior credences. For this reason, the presented argument avoids the standard permissivist criticism levelled against White’s argument.

In this paper, I argue that Steadfast Views of peer disagreement – a family of views according to which standing firm in the face of peer disagreement can be rationally permissible -- are incoherent. First, I articulate two constraints that any Steadfast Views of disagreement should endorse: (i) Steadfastness’s Core (ii) The Deference Principle. I show that (i) and (ii) are inconsistent: they cannot both be true. My argument, briefly put, is that one cannot rationally treat one’s peer’s opinion as unconditionally relevant to a hypothesis, H, but conditional on the supposition of a disagreement, irrelevant to H. Because Steadfast Views endorse a set of mutually inconsistent propositions, I conclude that Steadfast Views are incoherent.