“Opinions, Modes of Presentation, and Aggregation”
Epistemology attempts to understand the constraints that rationality imposes upon our opinions. But what are opinions, and how do they differ from various other psychological conditions? In the present paper, I develop and defend an answer to this question in terms of the distinctive structure of commitments involved in opinions. That answer has several controversial consequences: first, that beliefs, judgments, credences, states of comparative confidence and reactive attitudes are all species of the genus opinion; second, that rationality requires an agent’s opinions at a moment to be consistent, and closed under both conjunction and entailment; and third, that the lottery and preface considerations that are so commonly thought to tell against the preceding consequence are confused.
Ram Neta is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
