Abstract
Van Fraassen's epistemology is forged from two commitments, one to a type of Bayesianism and the other to what he terms voluntarism. Van Fraassen holds that if one is going to follow a rule in belief-revision, it must be a Bayesian rule, but that one does not need to follow a rule in order to be rational. It is argued that van Fraassen's arguments for rejecting non-Bayesian rules is unsound, and that his voluntarism is subject to a fatal dilemma arising from the non-monotonic character of reasoning.
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Kvanvig, J.L. A critique of van Fraassen's voluntaristic epistemology. Synthese 98, 325–348 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01063946
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01063946