Lunch Talk in Philosophy: Borut Trpin, “Affirming Beliefs”

The Institute of Philosophy hosts Borut Trpin for a talk on April 30th, at 11:40-13:10, in room G301, Gimli, the University of Iceland. The talk is entitled „ Affirming Beliefs“. The talk will be in English and is open to all.

Abstract

We believe more or less strongly in the propositions we entertain. This phenomenon is captured by the notion of partial belief and the associated Bayesian theory. But is there also a meaningful notion of full belief? And if so, what role does it play in cognition? In this paper, we argue that full belief is not a propositional attitude. Instead, we propose that a full belief affirms a partial belief, or, in a slogan, “a full belief is a testimony to oneself”. To make this proposal more precise and to explore its consequences, we construct a Bayesian model. We show how our proposal can deal with several problems faced by traditional theories of full belief, and then defend it against some objections. The talk is based on joint work with Stephan Hartmann.

A short biography of the speaker

Borut Trpin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich and a principal investigator on the project Scientific Discovery and Scientific Justification: A Coherentist Perspective at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Maribor.  Before that, he obtained a PhD degree (2018) in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Philosophy (KGW) at the University of Salzburg. He is a founding member of the East European Network for Philosophy of Science and an associate editor of Acta Analytica.