Alexander Pruss's Blog

Consider this thesis, which both Augustine and Aquinas would accept: Value supervenes on being (VSB): How valuable reality is is determine...

Suppose Alice believes p . Does it follow that Alice disbelieves not- p ? Or would she have to believe not-not- p to disbelieve not- p ? (...

Suppose there is metaphysical vagueness, say that it’s metaphysically vague whether Bob is bald. God cannot believe that Bob is bald, since ...

Reductive doxastic moral relativism is the view that an action type’s being morally wrong is nothing but an individual or society’s belief ...

Fix a proposition p , and let T ( r ) and F ( r ) be the utilities of assigning credence r to p when p is true and false, respectively. ...

In a recent post , I noted that it is possible to cook up a Bayesian setup where you don’t meet some threshold, say for belief or knowledge,...

Here is an odd thesis: Whenever you gain a true belief, you gain a false belief. This follows from: Whenever you gain a belief, you ga...

Consider this toy story about belief. It’s inconvenient to store probabilities in our minds. So instead of storing the probability of a prop...

We have beliefs. A belief is a mental state with the proper function of reflecting reality. Our mental states are biological states. (Fol...

One of the big puzzles about divine simplicity which I have been exploring is that of God’s knowledge of contingent facts. A sloppy way to p...

Two soccer teams are facing off, with a billion fans watching on TV. Brazil has a score of 2 and Belgium has a score of 0, and there are 15 ...

I think the hardest problem for divine simplicity is the problem of God’s contingent beliefs. In our world, God believes there are horses. I...

Here is a difficulty for the doctrine of the Trinity that I don’t remember coming across before: The Father and the Son have the numerical...

Normally, our overt behavior has the presumption of moral permissibility: an action is morally permissible unless there is some specific rea...

For years, I’ve been inclining towards the view that belief is just high credence, but this morning the following argument is swaying me awa...

Suppose that to believe a proposition is to have a credence in that proposition above some (perhaps contextual) threshold p b where p b is...

Suppose that a credence greater than 95% suffices to count as a belief, and that you are a rational agent who tossed ten fair coins but did ...

Following up on my posts ( this and this ) regarding puzzles generated by moral uncertainty, here is another curious case. Dr. Alice Kowal...

Consider this argument: It is permissible to lie to prevent great evils. Not believing in God is a great evil. So, it is permissible to ...

Here is a quick argument that a group can believe something no individual does. You hire a team of three consultants to tell you whether a p...