A critique of van Fraassen's voluntaristic epistemology

Jonathan Kvanvig

pp. 325-348

in: Synthese 98 (2), 1994.

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.

Cited authors

van Fraassen Bas C