No Credences in Active Reasoning

The Argument From Alternative Neglect

Bibliographic Data

ID21364167
AuthorsCristina Ballarini (Department of Philosophy New York University New York New York USA, corresponding author)
Year2026
Publication date2026-02-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueNoûs (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0029-4624 • E-ISSN: 1468-0068
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/nous.70037
OpenAlexW7127636178
LanguageEN
References cited74

I argue that credences do not participate in an epistemically central kind of mental process—active (i.e., deliberate, person‐level) reasoning. My argument hinges on the empirical finding that human thinkers tend to “neglect alternatives” when deliberately reasoning with uncertainty: in cases where thinkers recognize that their uncertainty is distributed over various possibilities, they tend to engage in downstream reasoning that attends to just one possibility at a time. A model on which thinkers reason with beliefs about probabilities better accounts for the empirical results. I conclude that beliefs play an epistemically important role in human minds that credences do not. Besides motivating a new kind of dualism about belief and credence, my argument additionally suggests a way of characterizing the functional difference between credences and beliefs about probability

Argument (complex analysis) · Dualism · Empirical evidence · Empirical research · Neglect · Variety (cybernetics) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Philosophical Ethics and Theory

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