The essays in this book, published here as a collection for the first time, are unified by the thesis that freedom, rationality, social consensus, and knowledge depend on thoughts about thoughts, that is, on metamental operations. These provide for our optionality, plasticity, and most of all for the evaluation and control of lower-level information. The collection argues that the human mind is essentially a metamind.
Table of contents:
Introduction; An empirical disproof of determinism?; A possible worlds analysis of freedom; Preferences, conditionals, and freedom; Induction, rational acceptance, and minimally inconsistent sets; Induction, evidence, and conceptual change; Reason and consistency; Consensual rationality and scientific revolution; Coherence and the hierarchy of method; The knowledge cycle; The coherence theory of knowledge; Metaknowledge: Undefeated justification; Metamind: Belief, consciousness, and intentionality; Index.
Table of contents:
Introduction; An empirical disproof of determinism?; A possible worlds analysis of freedom; Preferences, conditionals, and freedom; Induction, rational acceptance, and minimally inconsistent sets; Induction, evidence, and conceptual change; Reason and consistency; Consensual rationality and scientific revolution; Coherence and the hierarchy of method; The knowledge cycle; The coherence theory of knowledge; Metaknowledge: Undefeated justification; Metamind: Belief, consciousness, and intentionality; Index.