Belief and Credence: A Defense of the Vague Reduction

An epistemological issue garnering increasingly more interest is the relation between the doxastic taxonomies of traditional and formal epistemology, and especially the relation between rational, outright belief and credence. Proposed solutions to this issue fall into one of three classes, viz. eliminativism, non-reductionism, and reductionism. In this thesis, I introduce and subsequently defend my own variation of the traditional reductionist view, which I call the Vague Reduction. To do so, I consider a score of eliminativist and non-reductionist objections to reductionism, and argue that they all fail; the upshot is that eliminativism is deemed untenable, non-reductionism unfounded, and traditional reductionist views implausible. In turn, I suggest that the Vague Reduction naturally recommends itself as an attractive and viable theory governing the relation between rational belief and credence.