"Private," Hobbes writes in Leviathan , regarding the nature of beliefs, "is in secret free." These words are, I think, absolutely correct, and pertinent in the context of your excellent question, regarding whether agents have a right to hold whatever beliefs they wish, and whether other agents--and maybe even the state--have a right to correct those false beliefs. Hobbes's point is that the state need not concern itself with agents' beliefs, provided that those beliefs are not made publicly manifest; similarly, insofar as agents' beliefs do not interfere with the lives of others, then the state, and indeed, most other agents, have no right to try to change those beliefs. I am inclined to think that this point is broadly correct, since I'm inclined to favor minimal state interference with individuals. There is a question, however, whether agents have an epistemic duty to try to achieve true beliefs. This topic was the subject of an exchange between William James and W. K. Clifford, in which...

I presume that in asking whether certainty suggests or indicates truth, you mean whether an agent's certainty about some proposition is a mark of its being true. If this is correct, then in order to answer the question, one needs to get clear about the kind of certainty at issue. It certainly does not seem to be the case that an agent's psychological certainty , or confidence, in some proposition, is a mark of its truth, since one can be confident about the truth of some proposition that isn't true. If the proposition, by contrast, is certain--if, for example, the proposition is a necessary truth, or a proposition that is the object of what Descartes in the Meditations calls the 'natural light', or reason, and hence can be said to be metaphysically certain, then the certainty of the proposition would indeed be a mark of its truth. It seems to me, however, that the propositions that we, as epistemic agents, are most interested in aren't metaphysically certain--_pace_ Descartes, I fear that we...

In order to determine what role, if any, religion generally should play in knowledge about "how things are or came to be," it is essential first to know just what 'things' are at issue. For example, it seems to me that if the 'things' in question are truths about morality, then religion generally may well have a role to play; by contrast, it seems to me that if the 'things' in question are truths about the nature of the physical world, say, then it's not clear to me that religion has any role whatsoever to play in helping us to gain knowledge of such truths. (I write here not from any particular standpoint on the issue: indeed, even the great seventeenth-century French philosopher and theologian Nicolas Malebranche, who famously believed in the truth of occasionalism, the view that God is the only real cause in the universe, and, hence that all changes in the universe were effected by God's causal power, did not think that appeals to God were relevant in the context of giving scientific explanations. ...

t does not seem to me that appeals to this principle are based on induction--although there may well be cases in which the appeal is so based, and, consequently, I think that case studies of the extent to which this principle is applied, and when it is applied, on what basis, would be very interesting and most illuminating. It seems to me to that appeals to this sort of principle rest on one of a variety of methodological--or one might even say, metaphysical, presuppositions, of which I give a couple of examples: (i) a principle of epistemic parsimony or conservatism, that one should not multiply theoretical entities unnecessarily (sometimes called 'Ockham's razor') and that, consequently, one should prefer simpler to more complicated explanations when all else is equal; (ii) perhaps in conjunction with (i)--although they need not be conjoined--an assumption that the phenomenon in question ought to be simple, because the phenomenon is an instantiation, say, of a divine plan (cf. Einstein, "God does...

Here's one way to respond. If one were to suppose, with Kant, that human dignity is intinsically valuable, and that lying to another--even if that lie would promote the other's happiness, say by sparing that person a harsh and painful truth--does not respect that person' dignity, by failing to--in Kant' terminology--treat that person as an end-in-itself worthy of respect--then one might therefore conclude that one has a duty to tell others the truth, and, since, again according to Kant, duty does not admit of exceptions, one cannot compromise that duty in any cae whatsoever, regardless of the consequences of so doing. Of course, this response presupposes some very strong claims about the nature of human beings and the significance of duty. Implicit, too, is the assumption that morality is more intrinsically valuable than happiness. This is not to say that Kant, or a Kantian, wouldn't recognize the significance of promoting the happiness of others--if I remember correctly, Kant does so, explicitly,...