Norms and Nature of Acceptance

• Applicants: Dr. Alexander Dinges; Professor Dr. Moritz Schulz
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 505996029

We all believe many things, for instance, that Berlin is the capital of Germany or that ospreys are a type of bird. We also are more or less confidence in things, that is, we have so-called credences. For instance, we are more confident that 2 + 2 = 4 than we are confident that the stock markets will rise next year. Many authors assign these two states various cognitive roles. Beliefs, for instance, supposedly help us simplify our reasoning while credences ground decision-making under uncertainty. In this project, we explore whether beliefs and credences are as important as they are standardly taken to be. We develop a notion of acceptance as distinct from belief, where accepting a proposition roughly means taking a proposition for granted independently of whether one actually believes it. Our hypothesis will be that such states of acceptance play many of the roles credences and beliefs supposedly play and that acknowledging this helps to resolve various long-standing problems. The idea of distinguishing different kinds of assent such as belief and acceptance goes back to antiquity (see e.g. Frede 2009), and it has been discussed ever since (see e.g. Cohen 1992). The explanatory potential of states of acceptance remains undervalued still, and our project aims to set this straight.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants