Change in View: Principles of Reasoning

by Gilbert Harman

Book Overview

Change in View offers an entirely original approach to the philosophical study of reasoning by identifying principles of reasoning with principles for revising one's beliefs and intentions and not with principles of logic. This crucial observation leads to a number of important and interesting consequences that impinge on psychology and artificial intelligence as well as on various branches of philosophy, from epistemology to ethics and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262580918
• ISBN13: 9780262580915
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 164 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Worth reading, but there are good alternatives...

Change in View is generally recorded as the exemplary expression of the explanatory coherence theory of justification. It is a fine book, though perhaps other explanatory coherentist texts are more worthy of this title. In terms of clarity and effectiveness of writing, I prefer Lycan's Judgement and Justification; rigor, Jay Rosenberg's One World and Our Knowledge of It; applicability to science, Paul Thagard's Conceptual Revolutions. Harman is a first rate philosopher, though perhaps the least engaging writer of those just mentioned, all of whom are also first rate philosophers. If Harman's book has an advantage over these other texts, it is perhaps that it manages to be slightly more rigorous than Lycan's book, but more accessible than Rosenberg's. In general, I would recommend any of these books only to those fairly well-read in epistemology.