PHIL 2240 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Blaise Pascal, Rationality, Internalism And Externalism
10 Oct 2018
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Rationality independent of justification (prima facie reasons we think there related) Epistemic rationality: form of rationality which is aimed at the goal of true belief. Pascals wager: if god does not exist, one will lose nothing by beleiveing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing- blaise pascal. We don"t want as many true belief"s as possible, memorizing the phone book is useless and weird. So to not believe anything and we know that"s also weird, so we would have little true belief"s if any. So we need to balance these extremes, but this is hard to do. But we want knowledge not just random true belief"s. So phone book dude isn"t epistemologically rational, because important truths are better than non-important ones, learning about physics will lead you to more true beliefs while the phone book just gives you true names, numbers and addresses. So beliefs are different from actions, not in our control.
