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Reasons for belief
\"Philosophers have long been concerned about what we know and how we know it. Increasingly, however, a related question has gained prominence in philosophical discussion: what should we believe and why? This volume brings together twelve new essays that address different aspects of this question. The essays examine foundational questions about reasons for belief, and use new research on reasons for belief to address traditional epistemological concerns such as knowledge, justification and perceptually acquired beliefs. This book will be of interest to philosophers working on epistemology, theoretical reason, rationality, perception and ethics. It will also be of interest to cognitive scientists and psychologists who wish to gain deeper insight into normative questions about belief and knowledge\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Mindful Economics: The Production, Consumption, and Value of Beliefs
In this paper, we provide a perspective into the main ideas and findings emerging from the growing literature on motivated beliefs and reasoning. This perspective emphasizes that beliefs often fulfill important psychological and functional needs of the individual. Economically relevant examples include confidence in ones' abilities, moral self-esteem, hope and anxiety reduction, social identity, political ideology, and religious faith. People thus hold certain beliefs in part because they attach value to them, as a result of some (usually implicit) tradeoff between accuracy and desirability. In a sense, we propose to treat beliefs as regular economic goods and assets—which people consume, invest in, reap returns from, and produce, using the informational inputs they receive or have access to. Such beliefs will be resistant to many forms of evidence, with individuals displaying non-Bayesian behaviors such as not wanting to know, wishful thinking, and reality denial.
Journal Article
Belief change : introduction and overview
This book explains how the logic of theory change employs formal models in the investigation of changes in belief states and databases. The topics covered include equivalent characterizations of AGM operations, extended representations of the belief states, change operators not included in the original framework, iterated change, applications of the model, its connections with other formal frameworks, and criticism of the model.
Book
An effective conflict management method based on belief similarity measure and entropy for multi-sensor data fusion
Multi-sensor data fusion has received substantial attention thanks to its ability to integrate information from distinct sources efficiently. Nevertheless, the information collected from multi-sensors may be uncertain and imprecise, even conflicting in real applications. As a distinguished theory to handle uncertain and imprecise information, belief functions theory (BFT) is prevalent in the various fields of multi-sensor data fusion. Unfortunately, counter-intuitive behaviors may generate once facing highly conflicting pieces of evidence. To deal with the above-mentioned issue, in this paper, we study a novel belief Sørensen coefficient (BSC) to measure the conflict between the pieces of evidence based on BFT. On the top of BSC, we propose a new belief conflict coefficient, and prove some important properties, namely, non-negativity, symmetry, non-degeneracy, bounded, extreme consistency and insensitivity to refinement. In parallel, some numerical examples are employed to demonstrate the superiority of the belief conflict coefficient in quantifying the degree of conflict between the pieces of evidence. Finally, we design a new multi-sensor data fusion method based on the proposed BSC and the improved belief entropy, and verify the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method with respect to other methods through several application cases.
Journal Article
The Mechanics of Motivated Reasoning
Whenever we see voters explain away their preferred candidate's weaknesses, dieters assert that a couple scoops of ice cream won't really hurt their weight loss goals, or parents maintain that their children are unusually gifted, we are reminded that people's preferences can affect their beliefs. This idea is captured in the common saying, “People believe what they want to believe.” But people don't simply believe what they want to believe. Psychological research makes it clear that “motivated beliefs” are guided by motivated reasoning—reasoning in the service of some self-interest, to be sure, but reasoning nonetheless. People generally reason their way to conclusions they favor, with their preferences influencing the way evidence is gathered, arguments are processed, and memories of past experience are recalled. Each of these processes can be affected in subtle ways by people's motivations, leading to biased beliefs that feel objective. In this symposium introduction, we set the stage for discussion of motivated beliefs in the papers that follow by providing more detail about the underlying psychological processes that guide motivated reasoning.
Journal Article
Determinants of College Major Choice: Identification using an Information Experiment
This article studies the determinants of college major choice using an experimentally generated panel of beliefs, obtained by providing students with information on the true population distribution of various major-specific characteristics. Students logically revise their beliefs in response to the information, and their subjective beliefs about future major choice are associated with beliefs about their own earnings and ability. We estimate a rich model of college major choice using the panel of beliefs data. While expected earnings and perceived ability are a significant determinant of major choice, heterogeneous tastes are the dominant factor in the choice of major. Analyses that ignore the correlation in tastes with earnings expectations inflate the role of earnings in college major choices. We conclude by computing the welfare gains from the information experiment and find positive average welfare gains.
Journal Article