Abstract
This is an old dispute in Western philosophy about whether the human mind is active or passive in the process of acquiring knowledge concerning the facts and laws of nature. According to Descartes, we articulate such knowledge in voluntary judgements whereby we either assent to or dissent from some relevant mental representation.1 Thus each item of conscious knowledge is gained through an act of free will. But according to Hume we learn about nature via the formation of beliefs and, on his view, a person’s beliefs are not controllable by willpower.2 In other words on Hume’s view our knowledge of nature is not acquired by voluntary acts of cognitive judgment, as Descartes held, but by the involuntary growth of cognitive feelings.
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Notes
See R. Descartes, The Philosophical Works 144–57 (E. Haldane and G. Ross trans. 1911 ).
D. Hume, A Treatise Of Human Nature 624 (L. Selby-Bigge ed. 1888 ).
B. Pascal, Pensées 95 (J. Warrington trans. 1960 ).
See, e.g., A.I. Goldman, Epistemology And Cognition 324 (1986); Maher, “The Irrelevance of Belief to Rational Action”, 24 Erkenntnis 363 (1986).
A longer but as yet partial discussion of the belief/acceptance issue is to be found in Cohen, `Belief and Acceptance“, 98 Mind 367 (1989). A fuller treatment will appear in L.J. Cohen, An Essay On Belief And Acceptance (forthcoming 1992 ).
See, e.g., D. Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes”, in Essays on Actions And Events 3, 3–4 (1982).
App. Cas. 26, 30 ( P.C. 1968 ) ( Jamaica).
K.B. 82, 89 (1949).
C.L.R. 336 (Austl. 1938).
Id. at 361.
See J. Langbein, Prosecuting Crime In The Renaissance: England, Germany, France 188 (1974).
See A.A.S. Zuckerman, The Principles Of Criminal Evidence 32–40 1989 )
See Director of Pub. Prosecutions v. Hester, [1972] 3 All E.R. 1056; see also A.A.S. Zuckerman, supra note 12, at 44.
Cohen, supra note 5, at 385–86.
See F.P. Ramsey, “Truth and Probability”, In The Foundations Of Mathematics And Other Logical Essays 156, 174 (1931); de Finetti, “Foresight: Its Logical Laws, Its Subjective Sources”, In Studies In Subjective Probability 93 (H. Kyburg and H. Smokier ed. 1964 ).
F.P. Ramsey, supra note 15, at 174
Id. at 169.
de Finetti, supra note 15.
See, e.g., C. Howson and P. Urbach, Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach 57 (1989).
See, e.g., “Kaye, The Laws of Probability and the Law of the Land”, 47 U. CHI. L. REV. 34, 44 (1979).
F.P. Ramsey, supra note 15, at 173.
Id. at 183.
See supra text accompanying note 14.
See, e.g., M. Hesse, The Structure Of Scientific Inference 103–50 (1974)
See van Fraassen, “Belief and the Will”, 81 J. Phil 235, 235–36 (1984).
See F.P. Ramsey, supra note 15.
See L.J. Cohen, An Introduction To The Philosophy Of Induction And Probability (1989).
See L.I. Cohen, The Probable And The Provable 49–120 (1977).
I am grateful to Dr. A.A.S. Zuckerman for some very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Cohen, L.J. (2002). Should a Jury Say What it Believes or What it Accepts?. In: Knowledge and Language. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 227. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2020-5_19
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