The Fixation of Belief and its Undoing: Changing Beliefs through Inquiry

by Isaac Levi

Isaac Levi's new book is concerned with how one can justify changing one's beliefs. The discussion is deeply informed by the belief-doubt model advocated by C. S. Peirce and John Dewey, of which the book provides a substantial analysis. Professor Levi then addresses the conceptual framework of potential changes available to an inquirer. A structural approach to propositional attitudes is proposed which rejects the conventional view that a propositional attitude involves a relation between an agent and either a linguistic entity or some other intentional object such as a proposition or set of possible worlds. The last two chapters offer an account of change in states of full belief understood as changes in commitments rather than changes in performance; one chapter deals with adding new information to a belief state, the other with giving up information. The book builds upon topics discussed in some of Levi's earlier work. It will be of particular interest to discussion theorists, epistemologists, philosophers of science, computer scientists, and cognitive psychologists.

Genres: Philosophy

208 pages, Hardcover

First published October 25, 1991

Reviews

[Edmundo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very challenging. But a beautiful work of pragmatic philosophy in the vein of Peirce's belief-doubt model. Levi's secular realism strikes me as a particularly helpful attitude in light of more anti-realist type of pragmatism. Otherwise, a work filled with impressive formalism, a very effective model of belief revision, a masterful display of the fact that we do not need foundations. He weaves reliabilism into the system as well, making it appealing to an epistemologist. Is better to read once you have other belief revision systems in mind (like Gärdenfors' Knowledge in Flux, for example). It's a very exciting and difficult book, in any case, I will have to return to it when I have learned more about the topic.