Epistemic and Doxastic Contents

Abstract

Abstract The case for making belief states the primary focus of our analysis and for including impossible worlds in that analysis is outlined in this chapter. This allows the reader to deny various closure principles, although this won’t help defeat worries about external-world scepticism. The issue that concerns the authors most is the problem of bounded rationality: belief states seem to be closed under ‘easy’ trivial consequence, but not under full logical consequence, and yet the former implies the latter. The solution presented here is that some trivial closure principle must fail on a given belief state, yet it is indeterminate just where this occurs. Formal models of belief states along these lines are given and it is shown that they respect the indeterminacy-of-closure intuition. Finally, the chapter discusses how we might square this approach with the fact that some people seem to believe contradictions.