Putting the pragmatics of belief to work

Abstract

In earlier work, I argued that pragmatic considerations similar to those that Grice has shown to pertain to assertability pertain also to the epistemic notion of acceptability; in addition to the pragmatics of assertion, there is what I called “the pragmatics of belief.” In this paper, the pragmatics of belief is applied to a puzzle related to the so-called Lottery Paradox and is shown to help resolve that puzzle.