Abstract
Sometimes the cognitive part of the human mind is modelled in a simplified way by degrees of belief. E.g., in philosophy of science and in formal epistemology agents are often identified by their credences in a set of claims. This line of dealing with the individual mind is currently expanded to groups by attempts of finding adequate ways of pooling individual degrees of belief into an overall group credence or, more abstractly speaking, into a collective mind. In this paper, we model religious people’s minds as such a collective mind. Religious people are therein identified with a set of degrees of beliefs containing religious and secular credences. E.g., within a religious context a person may be sure that some statement is true, whereas the same person lacks non-religious support for such a credence and hence may doubt the truth of that statement within a secular context. We will also present two results on the adequacy of this model.
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Acknowledgements
For valuable discussions I would like to thank Marco Benasso, Georg Gasser, Adam Green, Lukas Kraus, Winfried Löffler, Otto Muck, Bruno Niederbacher, and Paul Weingartner. This research was supported by a Marietta Blau grant of the OeAD and grant #15572 of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Feldbacher-Escamilla, C.J. Can religious and secular belief be rationally combined?. Int J Philos Relig 82, 299–319 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-017-9613-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-017-9613-6