Contents
26 found
Order:
  1. More trouble for regular probabilitites.Matthew W. Parker - 2012
    In standard probability theory, probability zero is not the same as impossibility. But many have suggested that only impossible events should have probability zero. This can be arranged if we allow infinitesimal probabilities, but infinitesimals do not solve all of the problems. We will see that regular probabilities are not invariant over rigid transformations, even for simple, bounded, countable, constructive, and disjoint sets. Hence, regular chances cannot be determined by space-time invariant physical laws, and regular credences cannot satisfy seemingly reasonable (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  2. Center indifference and skepticism.David Builes - 2024 - Noûs 58 (3):778-798.
    Many philosophers have been attracted to a restricted version of the principle of indifference in the case of self‐locating belief. Roughly speaking, this principle states that, within any given possible world, one should be indifferent between different hypotheses concerning who one is within that possible world, so long as those hypotheses are compatible with one's evidence. My first goal is to defend a more precise version of this principle. After responding to several existing criticisms of such a principle, I argue (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  3. Bertrand’s Paradox and the Principle of Indifference.Nicholas Shackel - 2024 - Abingdon: Routledge.
    Events between which we have no epistemic reason to discriminate have equal epistemic probabilities. Bertrand’s chord paradox, however, appears to show this to be false, and thereby poses a general threat to probabilities for continuum sized state spaces. Articulating the nature of such spaces involves some deep mathematics and that is perhaps why the recent literature on Bertrand’s Paradox has been almost entirely from mathematicians and physicists, who have often deployed elegant mathematics of considerable sophistication. At the same time, the (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  4. Brentano’s Solution To Bertrand’s Paradox.Nicholas Shackel - 2024 - Revue Roumaine de Philosophie 68 (1):161-168.
    Brentano never published on Bertrand’s paradox but claimed to have a solution. Adrian Maître has recovered from the Franz Brentano Archive Brentano’s remarks on his solution. They do not give us a worked demonstration of his solution but only an incomplete and in places obscure justification of it. Here I attempt to identify his solution, to explain what seem to me the clearly discernible parts of his justification and to discuss the extent to which the justification succeeds in the light (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  5. The Meta-Reversibility Objection.Meacham Christopher - 2023 - In Barry Loewer, Brad Weslake & Eric B. Winsberg (eds.), The Probability Map of the Universe: Essays on David Albert’s _Time and Chance_. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
    One popular approach to statistical mechanics understands statistical mechanical probabilities as measures of rational indifference. Naive formulations of this ``indifference approach'' face reversibility worries - while they yield the right prescriptions regarding future events, they yield the wrong prescriptions regarding past events. This paper begins by showing how the indifference approach can overcome the standard reversibility worries by appealing to the Past Hypothesis. But, the paper argues, positing a Past Hypothesis doesn't free the indifference approach from all reversibility worries. For (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  6. Comparative Opinion Loss.Benjamin Eva & Reuben Stern - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (3):613-637.
    It is a consequence of the theory of imprecise credences that there exist situations in which rational agents inevitably become less opinionated toward some propositions as they gather more evidence. The fact that an agent's imprecise credal state can dilate in this way is often treated as a strike against the imprecise approach to inductive inference. Here, we show that dilation is not a mere artifact of this approach by demonstrating that opinion loss is countenanced as rational by a substantially (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  7. Indifference to Anti-Humean Chances.J. Dmitri Gallow - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (5):485-501.
    An indifference principle says that your credences should be distributed uniformly over each of the possibilities you recognise. A chance deference principle says that your credences should be aligned with the chances. My thesis is that, if we are anti-Humeans about chance, then these two principles are incompatible. Anti-Humeans think that it is possible for the actual frequencies to depart from the chances. So long as you recognise possibilities like this, you cannot both spread your credences evenly and defer to (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  8. Decisions under Ignorance and the Individuation of States of Nature.Johan E. Gustafsson - 2022 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 11 (2):86-92.
    How do you make decisions under ignorance? That is, how do you decide when you lack subjective probabilities for some of your options’ possible outcomes? One answer is that you follow the Laplace Rule: you assign an equal probability to each state of nature for which you lack a subjective probability (that is, you use the Principle of Indifference) and then you maximize expected utility. The most influential objection to the Laplace Rule is that it is sensitive to the individuation (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  9. The structure of epistemic probabilities.Nevin Climenhaga - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (11):3213-3242.
    The epistemic probability of A given B is the degree to which B evidentially supports A, or makes A plausible. This paper is a first step in answering the question of what determines the values of epistemic probabilities. I break this question into two parts: the structural question and the substantive question. Just as an object’s weight is determined by its mass and gravitational acceleration, some probabilities are determined by other, more basic ones. The structural question asks what probabilities are (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  10. Principles of Indifference.Benjamin Eva - 2019 - Journal of Philosophy 116 (7):390-411.
    The principle of indifference states that in the absence of any relevant evidence, a rational agent will distribute their credence equally among all the possible outcomes under consideration. Despite its intuitive plausibility, PI famously falls prey to paradox, and so is widely rejected as a principle of ideal rationality. In this article, I present a novel rehabilitation of PI in terms of the epistemology of comparative confidence judgments. In particular, I consider two natural comparative reformulations of PI and argue that (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  11. Are non-accidental regularities a cosmic coincidence? Revisiting a central threat to Humean laws.Aldo Filomeno - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5205-5227.
    If the laws of nature are as the Humean believes, it is an unexplained cosmic coincidence that the actual Humean mosaic is as extremely regular as it is. This is a strong and well-known objection to the Humean account of laws. Yet, as reasonable as this objection may seem, it is nowadays sometimes dismissed. The reason: its unjustified implicit assignment of equiprobability to each possible Humean mosaic; that is, its assumption of the principle of indifference, which has been attacked on (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  12. Self-locating Priors and Cosmological Measures.Frank Arntzenius & Cian Dorr - 2017 - In Khalil Chamcham, John Barrow, Simon Saunders & Joe Silk (eds.), The Philosophy of Cosmology. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. pp. 396-428.
    We develop a Bayesian framework for thinking about the way evidence about the here and now can bear on hypotheses about the qualitative character of the world as a whole, including hypotheses according to which the total population of the world is infinite. We show how this framework makes sense of the practice cosmologists have recently adopted in their reasoning about such hypotheses.
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  13. The Principle of Indifference and Inductive Scepticism.Robert Smithson - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (1):253-272.
    Many theorists have proposed that we can use the principle of indifference to defeat the inductive sceptic. But any such theorist must confront the objection that different ways of applying the principle of indifference lead to incompatible probability assignments. Huemer offers the explanatory priority proviso as a strategy for overcoming this objection. With this proposal, Huemer claims that we can defend induction in a way that is not question-begging against the sceptic. But in this article, I argue that the opposite (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  14. Direct Inference from Imprecise Frequencies.Paul D. Thorn - 2017 - In Michela Massimi, Jan-Willem Romeijn & Gerhard Schurz (eds.), EPSA15 Selected Papers: The 5th conference of the European Philosophy of Science Association in Düsseldorf. Cham: Springer. pp. 347-358.
    It is well known that there are, at least, two sorts of cases where one should not prefer a direct inference based on a narrower reference class, in particular: cases where the narrower reference class is gerrymandered, and cases where one lacks an evidential basis for forming a precise-valued frequency judgment for the narrower reference class. I here propose (1) that the preceding exceptions exhaust the circumstances where one should not prefer direct inference based on a narrower reference class, and (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  15. God's Dice.Vasil Penchev - 2015 - In S. Oms, J. Martínez, M. García-Carpintero & J. Díez (eds.), Actas: VIII Conference of the Spanish Society for Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Sciences. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona. pp. 297-303.
    Einstein wrote his famous sentence "God does not play dice with the universe" in a letter to Max Born in 1920. All experiments have confirmed that quantum mechanics is neither wrong nor “incomplete”. One can says that God does play dice with the universe. Let quantum mechanics be granted as the rules generalizing all results of playing some imaginary God’s dice. If that is the case, one can ask how God’s dice should look like. God’s dice turns out to be (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  16. Another Argument Against Uniqueness.Thomas Raleigh - 2015 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (267):327-346.
    I present an argument against the thesis of Uniqueness and in favour of Permissivism. Counterexamples to Uniqueness are provided, based on ‘Safespot’ propositions – i.e. a proposition that is guaranteed to be true provided the subject adopts a certain attitude towards it. The argument relies on a plausible principle: (roughly stated) If S knows that her believing p would be a true belief, then it is rationally permitted for S to believe p. One motivation for denying this principle – viz. (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  17. Evidential Incomparability and the Principle of Indifference.Martin Smith - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (3):605-616.
    The _Principle of Indifference_ was once regarded as a linchpin of probabilistic reasoning, but has now fallen into disrepute as a result of the so-called _problem of multiple of partitions_. In ‘Evidential symmetry and mushy credence’ Roger White suggests that we have been too quick to jettison this principle and argues that the problem of multiple partitions rests on a mistake. In this paper I will criticise White’s attempt to revive POI. In so doing, I will argue that what underlies (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  18. The Principle of Indifference and Imprecise Probability.Susanna Rinard - 2014 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 3 (2):110-114.
    Sometimes different partitions of the same space each seem to divide that space into propositions that call for equal epistemic treatment. Famously, equal treatment in the form of equal point-valued credence leads to incoherence. Some have argued that equal treatment in the form of equal interval-valued credence solves the puzzle. This paper shows that, once we rule out intervals with extreme endpoints, this proposal also leads to incoherence.
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  19. Reasons for (prior) belief in Bayesian epistemology.Franz Dietrich & Christian List - 2013 - Synthese 190 (5):781-786.
    Bayesian epistemology tells us with great precision how we should move from prior to posterior beliefs in light of new evidence or information, but says little about where our prior beliefs come from. It offers few resources to describe some prior beliefs as rational or well-justified, and others as irrational or unreasonable. A different strand of epistemology takes the central epistemological question to be not how to change one’s beliefs in light of new evidence, but what reasons justify a given (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  20. Confirmation in a Branching World: The Everett Interpretation and Sleeping Beauty.Darren Bradley - 2011 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (2):323-342.
    Sometimes we learn what the world is like, and sometimes we learn where in the world we are. Are there any interesting differences between the two kinds of cases? The main aim of this article is to argue that learning where we are in the world brings into view the same kind of observation selection effects that operate when sampling from a population. I will first explain what observation selection effects are ( Section 1 ) and how they are relevant (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  21. Sleeping beauty and the dynamics of de se beliefs.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 138 (2):245-269.
    This paper examines three accounts of the sleeping beauty case: an account proposed by Adam Elga, an account proposed by David Lewis, and a third account defended in this paper. It provides two reasons for preferring the third account. First, this account does a good job of capturing the temporal continuity of our beliefs, while the accounts favored by Elga and Lewis do not. Second, Elga’s and Lewis’ treatments of the sleeping beauty case lead to highly counterintuitive consequences. The proposed (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   89 citations  
  22. Bertrand’s Paradox and the Principle of Indifference.Nicholas Shackel - 2007 - Philosophy of Science 74 (2):150-175.
    The principle of indifference is supposed to suffice for the rational assignation of probabilities to possibilities. Bertrand advances a probability problem, now known as his paradox, to which the principle is supposed to apply; yet, just because the problem is ill‐posed in a technical sense, applying it leads to a contradiction. Examining an ambiguity in the notion of an ill‐posed problem shows that there are precisely two strategies for resolving the paradox: the distinction strategy and the well‐posing strategy. The main (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   32 citations  
  23. Should we respond to evil with indifference?Brian Weatherson - 2005 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (3):613–635.
    In a recent article, Adam Elga outlines a strategy for “Defeating Dr Evil with Self-Locating Belief”. The strategy relies on an indifference principle that is not up to the task. In general, there are two things to dislike about indifference principles: adopting one normally means confusing risk for uncertainty, and they tend to lead to incoherent views in some ‘paradoxical’ situations. I argue that both kinds of objection can be levelled against Elga’s indifference principle. There are also some difficulties with (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   32 citations  
  24. Countable additivity and the de finetti lottery.Paul Bartha - 2004 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (2):301-321.
    De Finetti would claim that we can make sense of a draw in which each positive integer has equal probability of winning. This requires a uniform probability distribution over the natural numbers, violating countable additivity. Countable additivity thus appears not to be a fundamental constraint on subjective probability. It does, however, seem mandated by Dutch Book arguments similar to those that support the other axioms of the probability calculus as compulsory for subjective interpretations. These two lines of reasoning can be (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  25. Are you a Sim?Brian Weatherson - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (212):425–431.
    Nick Bostrom argues that if we accept some plausible assumptions about how the future will unfold, we should believe we are probably not humans. The argument appeals crucially to an indifference principle whose precise content is a little unclear. I set out four possible interpretations of the principle, none of which can be used to support Bostrom’s argument. On the first two interpretations the principle is false, on the third it does not entail the conclusion, and on the fourth it (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  26. Resurrecting logical probability.James Franklin - 2001 - Erkenntnis 55 (2):277-305.
    The logical interpretation of probability, or "objective Bayesianism'' – the theory that (some) probabilities are strictly logical degrees of partial implication – is defended. The main argument against it is that it requires the assignment of prior probabilities, and that any attempt to determine them by symmetry via a "principle of insufficient reason" inevitably leads to paradox. Three replies are advanced: that priors are imprecise or of little weight, so that disagreement about them does not matter, within limits; that it (...)
    Remove from this list   Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   27 citations