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On the Role of the Research Agenda in Epistemic Change

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Author

Summary, in English

The standard way of representing an epistemic state in formal philosophy is in terms of a set of sentences, corresponding to the agent's beliefs, and an ordering of those sentences, reflecting how well entrenched they are in the agent's epistemic state. We argue that this wide-spread representational view-a view that we identify as a "Quinean dogma" - is incapable of making certain crucial distinctions. We propose, as a remedy, that any adequate representation of epistemic states must also include the agent's research agenda, i.e., the list of question that are open or closed at any given point in time. If the argument of the paper is sound, a person's questions and practical interests, on the one hand, and her beliefs and theoretical values, on the other, are more tightly interwoven than has previously been assumed to be the case in formal epistemology.

Publishing year

2006

Language

English

Pages

165-183

Publication/Series

Erkenntnis

Volume

65

Issue

2

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Springer

Topic

  • Philosophy

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1572-8420