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Distorted reflection

Philosophical Review 118 (1):59-85 (2009)

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  1. Rational Polarization.Kevin Dorst - 2023 - Philosophical Review 132 (3):355-458.
    Predictable polarization is everywhere: we can often predict how people’s opinions, including our own, will shift over time. Extant theories either neglect the fact that we can predict our own polarization, or explain it through irrational mechanisms. They needn’t. Empirical studies suggest that polarization is predictable when evidence is ambiguous, that is, when the rational response is not obvious. I show how Bayesians should model such ambiguity and then prove that—assuming rational updates are those which obey the value of evidence—ambiguity (...)
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  • (1 other version)Permission to Believe: Why Permissivism Is True and What It Tells Us About Irrelevant Influences on Belief.Miriam Schoenfield - 2012 - Noûs 48 (2):193-218.
    In this paper, I begin by defending permissivism: the claim that, sometimes, there is more than one way to rationally respond to a given body of evidence. Then I argue that, if we accept permissivism, certain worries that arise as a result of learning that our beliefs were caused by the communities we grew up in, the schools we went to, or other irrelevant influences dissipate. The basic strategy is as follows: First, I try to pinpoint what makes irrelevant influences (...)
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  • Uniqueness and Metaepistemology.Daniel Greco & Brian Hedden - 2016 - Journal of Philosophy 113 (8):365-395.
    We defend Uniqueness, the claim that given a body of total evidence, there is a uniquely rational doxastic state that it is rational for one to be in. Epistemic rationality doesn't give you any leeway in forming your beliefs. To this end, we bring in two metaepistemological pictures about the roles played by rational evaluations. Rational evaluative terms serve to guide our practices of deference to the opinions of others, and also to help us formulate contingency plans about what to (...)
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  • X - Phi and Carnapian Explication.Joshua Shepherd & James Justus - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (2):381-402.
    The rise of experimental philosophy has placed metaphilosophical questions, particularly those concerning concepts, at the center of philosophical attention. X-phi offers empirically rigorous methods for identifying conceptual content, but what exactly it contributes towards evaluating conceptual content remains unclear. We show how x-phi complements Rudolf Carnap’s underappreciated methodology for concept determination, explication. This clarifies and extends x-phi’s positive philosophical import, and also exhibits explication’s broad appeal. But there is a potential problem: Carnap’s account of explication was limited to empirical and (...)
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  • Epistemic Probabilities are Degrees of Support, not Degrees of (Rational) Belief.Nevin Climenhaga - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (1):153-176.
    I argue that when we use ‘probability’ language in epistemic contexts—e.g., when we ask how probable some hypothesis is, given the evidence available to us—we are talking about degrees of support, rather than degrees of belief. The epistemic probability of A given B is the mind-independent degree to which B supports A, not the degree to which someone with B as their evidence believes A, or the degree to which someone would or should believe A if they had B as (...)
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  • Time-Slice Rationality.Brian Hedden - 2015 - Mind 124 (494):449-491.
    I advocate Time-Slice Rationality, the thesis that the relationship between two time-slices of the same person is not importantly different, for purposes of rational evaluation, from the relationship between time-slices of distinct persons. The locus of rationality, so to speak, is the time-slice rather than the temporally extended agent. This claim is motivated by consideration of puzzle cases for personal identity over time and by a very moderate form of internalism about rationality. Time-Slice Rationality conflicts with two proposed principles of (...)
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  • Accuracy, Coherence and Evidence.Branden Fitelson & Kenny Easwaran - 2015 - Oxford Studies in Epistemology 5:61-96.
    Taking Joyce’s (1998; 2009) recent argument(s) for probabilism as our point of departure, we propose a new way of grounding formal, synchronic, epistemic coherence requirements for (opinionated) full belief. Our approach yields principled alternatives to deductive consistency, sheds new light on the preface and lottery paradoxes, and reveals novel conceptual connections between alethic and evidential epistemic norms.
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  • Deference Done Better.Kevin Dorst, Benjamin A. Levinstein, Bernhard Salow, Brooke E. Husic & Branden Fitelson - 2021 - Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1):99-150.
    There are many things—call them ‘experts’—that you should defer to in forming your opinions. The trouble is, many experts are modest: they’re less than certain that they are worthy of deference. When this happens, the standard theories of deference break down: the most popular (“Reflection”-style) principles collapse to inconsistency, while their most popular (“New-Reflection”-style) variants allow you to defer to someone while regarding them as an anti-expert. We propose a middle way: deferring to someone involves preferring to make any decision (...)
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  • Updating for Externalists.J. Dmitri Gallow - 2021 - Noûs 55 (3):487-516.
    The externalist says that your evidence could fail to tell you what evidence you do or not do have. In that case, it could be rational for you to be uncertain about what your evidence is. This is a kind of uncertainty which orthodox Bayesian epistemology has difficulty modeling. For, if externalism is correct, then the orthodox Bayesian learning norms of conditionalization and reflection are inconsistent with each other. I recommend that an externalist Bayesian reject conditionalization. In its stead, I (...)
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  • Beyond Uncertainty: Reasoning with Unknown Possibilities.Katie Steele & H. Orri Stefánsson - 2021 - Cambridge University Press.
    The main aim of this book is to introduce the topic of limited awareness, and changes in awareness, to those interested in the philosophy of decision-making and uncertain reasoning.
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  • Rational Aversion to Information.Sven Neth - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Is more information always better? Or are there some situations in which more information can make us worse off? Good (1967) argues that expected utility maximizers should always accept more information if the information is cost-free and relevant. But Good's argument presupposes that you are certain you will update by conditionalization. If we relax this assumption and allow agents to be uncertain about updating, these agents can be rationally required to reject free and relevant information. Since there are good reasons (...)
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  • (1 other version)Higher-Order Evidence.Kevin Dorst - 2023 - In Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & Clayton Littlejohn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 176-194.
    On at least one of its uses, ‘higher-order evidence’ refers to evidence about what opinions are rationalized by your evidence. This chapter surveys the foundational epistemological questions raised by such evidence, the methods that have proven useful for answering them, and the potential consequences and applications of such answers.
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  • Epistemic Utility Theory and the Aim of Belief.Jennifer Rose Carr - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (3):511-534.
    How should rational believers pursue the aim of truth? Epistemic utility theorists have argued that by combining the tools of decision theory with an epistemic form of value—gradational accuracy, proximity to the truth—we can justify various epistemological norms. I argue that deriving these results requires using decision rules that are different in important respects from those used in standard (practical) decision theory. If we use the more familiar decision rules, we can’t justify the epistemic coherence norms that epistemic utility theory (...)
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  • Conditional Probabilities.Kenny Easwaran - 2019 - In Richard Pettigrew & Jonathan Weisberg (eds.), The Open Handbook of Formal Epistemology. PhilPapers Foundation. pp. 131-198.
    Conditional probability is one of the central concepts in probability theory. Some notion of conditional probability is part of every interpretation of probability. The basic mathematical fact about conditional probability is that p(A |B) = p(A ∧B)/p(B) where this is defined. However, while it has been typical to take this as a definition or analysis of conditional probability, some (perhaps most prominently Hájek, 2003) have argued that conditional probability should instead be taken as the primitive notion, so that this formula (...)
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  • Chilling out on epistemic rationality: A defense of imprecise credences.Miriam Schoenfield - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 158 (2):197-219.
    A defense of imprecise credences (and other imprecise doxastic attitudes).
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  • The Externalist’s Guide to Fishing for Compliments.Bernhard Salow - 2018 - Mind 127 (507):691-728.
    Suppose you’d like to believe that p, whether or not it’s true. What can you do to help? A natural initial thought is that you could engage in Intentionally Biased Inquiry : you could look into whether p, but do so in a way that you expect to predominantly yield evidence in favour of p. This paper hopes to do two things. The first is to argue that this initial thought is mistaken: intentionally biased inquiry is impossible. The second is (...)
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  • Credal Dilemmas.Sarah Moss - 2014 - Noûs 48 (3):665-683.
    Recently many have argued that agents must sometimes have credences that are imprecise, represented by a set of probability measures. But opponents claim that fans of imprecise credences cannot provide a decision theory that protects agents who follow it from foregoing sure money. In particular, agents with imprecise credences appear doomed to act irrationally in diachronic cases, where they are called to make decisions at earlier and later times. I respond to this claim on behalf of imprecise credence fans. Once (...)
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  • Updating as Communication.Sarah Moss - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (2):225-248.
    Traditional procedures for rational updating fail when it comes to self-locating opinions, such as your credences about where you are and what time it is. This paper develops an updating procedure for rational agents with self-locating beliefs. In short, I argue that rational updating can be factored into two steps. The first step uses information you recall from your previous self to form a hypothetical credence distribution, and the second step changes this hypothetical distribution to reflect information you have genuinely (...)
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  • Being Rational and Being Wrong.Kevin Dorst - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23 (1).
    Do people tend to be overconfident? Many think so. They’ve run studies on whether people are calibrated: whether their average confidence in their opinions matches the proportion of those opinions that are true. Under certain conditions, people are systematically ‘over-calibrated’—for example, of the opinions they’re 80% confident in, only 60% are true. From this empirical over-calibration, it’s inferred that people are irrationally overconfident. My question: When and why is this inference warranted? Answering it requires articulating a general connection between being (...)
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  • Reversibility or Disagreement.Jacob Ross & Mark Schroeder - 2013 - Mind 122 (485):43-84.
    The phenomenon of disagreement has recently been brought into focus by the debate between contextualists and relativist invariantists about epistemic expressions such as ‘might’, ‘probably’, indicative conditionals, and the deontic ‘ought’. Against the orthodox contextualist view, it has been argued that an invariantist account can better explain apparent disagreements across contexts by appeal to the incompatibility of the propositions expressed in those contexts. This paper introduces an important and underappreciated phenomenon associated with epistemic expressions — a phenomenon that we call (...)
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  • Bayesian updating when what you learn might be false.Richard Pettigrew - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (1):309-324.
    Rescorla (Erkenntnis, 2020) has recently pointed out that the standard arguments for Bayesian Conditionalization assume that whenever I become certain of something, it is true. Most people would reject this assumption. In response, Rescorla offers an improved Dutch Book argument for Bayesian Conditionalization that does not make this assumption. My purpose in this paper is two-fold. First, I want to illuminate Rescorla’s new argument by giving a very general Dutch Book argument that applies to many cases of updating beyond those (...)
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  • Solving the Problem of Logical Omniscience.Sinan Dogramaci - 2018 - Philosophical Issues 28 (1):107-128.
    This paper looks at three ways of addressing probabilism’s implausible requirement of logical omniscience. The first and most common strategy says it’s okay to require an ideally rational person to be logically omniscient. I argue that this view is indefensible on any interpretation of ‘ideally rational’. The second strategy says probabilism should be formulated not in terms of logically possible worlds but in terms of doxastically possible worlds, ways you think the world might be. I argue that, on the interpretation (...)
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  • Local and global deference.J. Dmitri Gallow - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (9):2753-2770.
    A norm of local expert deference says that your credence in an arbitrary proposition A, given that the expert's probability for A is n, should be n. A norm of global expert deference says that your credence in A, given that the expert's entire probability function is E, should be E(A). Gaifman (1988) taught us that these two norms are not equivalent. Stalnaker (2019) conjectures that Gaifman's example is "a loophole". Here, I substantiate Stalnaker's suspicions by providing characterisation theorems which (...)
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  • You've Come a Long Way, Bayesians.Jonathan Weisberg - 2015 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 44 (6):817-834.
    Forty years ago, Bayesian philosophers were just catching a new wave of technical innovation, ushering in an era of scoring rules, imprecise credences, and infinitesimal probabilities. Meanwhile, down the hall, Gettier’s 1963 paper [28] was shaping a literature with little obvious interest in the formal programs of Reichenbach, Hempel, and Carnap, or their successors like Jeffrey, Levi, Skyrms, van Fraassen, and Lewis. And how Bayesians might accommodate the discourses of full belief and knowledge was but a glimmer in the eye (...)
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  • Options and Diachronic Tragedy.Brian Hedden - 2013 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (2):423-451.
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  • The normative status of logic.Florian Steinberger - 2017 - Stanford Enyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Dutch book arguments.Susan Vineberg - 2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • People with Common Priors Can Agree to Disagree.Harvey Lederman - 2015 - Review of Symbolic Logic 8 (1):11-45.
    Robert Aumann presents his Agreement Theorem as the key conditional: “if two people have the same priors and their posteriors for an event A are common knowledge, then these posteriors are equal” (Aumann, 1976, p. 1236). This paper focuses on four assumptions which are used in Aumann’s proof but are not explicit in the key conditional: (1) that agents commonly know, of some prior μ, that it is the common prior; (2) that agents commonly know that each of them updates (...)
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  • On the pragmatic and epistemic virtues of inference to the best explanation.Richard Pettigrew - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12407-12438.
    In a series of papers over the past twenty years, and in a new book, Igor Douven has argued that Bayesians are too quick to reject versions of inference to the best explanation that cannot be accommodated within their framework. In this paper, I survey their worries and attempt to answer them using a series of pragmatic and purely epistemic arguments that I take to show that Bayes’ Rule really is the only rational way to respond to your evidence.
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  • Externalism and exploitability.Nilanjan Das - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (1):101-128.
    According to Bayesian orthodoxy, an agent should update---or at least should plan to update---her credences by conditionalization. Some have defended this claim by means of a diachronic Dutch book argument. They say: an agent who does not plan to update her credences by conditionalization is vulnerable (by her own lights) to a diachronic Dutch book, i.e., a sequence of bets which, when accepted, guarantee loss of utility. Here, I show that this argument is in tension with evidence externalism, i.e., the (...)
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  • Precise Credences.Michael Titelbaum - 2019 - In Richard Pettigrew & Jonathan Weisberg (eds.), The Open Handbook of Formal Epistemology. PhilPapers Foundation. pp. 1-55.
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  • A puzzle about fickleness.Elise Woodard - 2020 - Noûs 56 (2):323-342.
    In this paper, I motivate a puzzle about epistemic rationality. On the one hand, there seems to be something problematic about frequently changing your mind. On the other hand, changing your mind once is often permissible. Why do one-off changes of mind seem rationally permissible, even admirable, while constant changes seem quintessentially irrational? The puzzle of fickleness is to explain this asymmetry. To solve the puzzle, I propose and defend the Ratifiable Reasoning Account. According to this solution, as agents redeliberate, (...)
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  • Subjunctive Credences and Semantic Humility.Sarah Moss - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (2):251-278.
    This paper argues that several leading theories of subjunctive conditionals are incompatible with ordinary intuitions about what credences we ought to have in subjunctive conditionals. In short, our theory of subjunctives should intuitively display semantic humility, i.e. our semantic theory should deliver the truth conditions of sentences without pronouncing on whether those conditions actually obtain. In addition to describing intuitions about subjunctive conditionals, I argue that we can derive these ordinary intuitions from justified premises, and I answer a possible worry (...)
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  • Epistemic Risk and the Demands of Rationality.Richard Pettigrew - 2022 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    How much does rationality constrain what we should believe on the basis of our evidence? According to this book, not very much. For most people and most bodies of evidence, there is a wide range of beliefs that rationality permits them to have in response to that evidence. The argument, which takes inspiration from William James' ideas in 'The Will to Believe', proceeds from two premises. The first is a theory about the basis of epistemic rationality. It's called epistemic utility (...)
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  • Epistemic utility arguments for Probabilism.Richard Pettigrew - 2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia.
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  • On the proper formulation of conditionalization.Michael Rescorla - 2021 - Synthese 198 (3):1935-1965.
    Conditionalization is a norm that governs the rational reallocation of credence. I distinguish between factive and non-factive formulations of Conditionalization. Factive formulations assume that the conditioning proposition is true. Non-factive formulations allow that the conditioning proposition may be false. I argue that non-factive formulations provide a better foundation for philosophical and scientific applications of Bayesian decision theory. I furthermore argue that previous formulations of Conditionalization, factive and non-factive alike, have almost universally ignored, downplayed, or mishandled a crucial causal aspect of (...)
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  • Epistemic Self-Doubt.Sherrilyn Roush - 2017 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    When we get evidence that tells us our belief-forming mechanisms may not be reliable this presents a thorny set of questions about whether and how to revise our original belief. This article analyzes aspects of the problem and a variety of approaches to its solution.
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  • An Improved Dutch Book Theorem for Conditionalization.Michael Rescorla - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (3):1013-1041.
    Lewis proved a Dutch book theorem for Conditionalization. The theorem shows that an agent who follows any credal update rule other than Conditionalization is vulnerable to bets that inflict a sure loss. Lewis’s theorem is tailored to factive formulations of Conditionalization, i.e. formulations on which the conditioning proposition is true. Yet many scientific and philosophical applications of Bayesian decision theory require a non-factive formulation, i.e. a formulation on which the conditioning proposition may be false. I prove a Dutch book theorem (...)
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  • In Defense of Reflection.Simon M. Huttegger - 2013 - Philosophy of Science 80 (3):413-433.
    I discuss two ways of justifying reflection principles. First, I propose that an undogmatic reading of dynamic Dutch book arguments provides them with a sound foundation. Second, I show also that minimizing expected inaccuracy leads to a novel argument for reflection principles. The required inaccuracy measures comprise a natural class of functions that can be derived from a generalization of a condition known as propriety or immodesty. This shows that reflection principles are an essential feature not just of consistent degrees (...)
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  • A modesty proposal.Jennifer Rose Carr - 2019 - Synthese 198 (4):3581-3601.
    Accuracy-first epistemology aims to show that the norms of epistemic rationality can be derived from the effective pursuit of accuracy. This paper explores the prospects within accuracy-first epistemology for vindicating “modesty”: the thesis that ideal rationality permits uncertainty about one’s own rationality. I argue that accuracy-first epistemology faces serious challenges in accommodating three forms of modesty: uncertainty about what priors are rational, uncertainty about whether one’s update policy is rational, and uncertainty about what one’s evidence is. I argue that the (...)
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  • Global Constraints on Imprecise Credences: Solving Reflection Violations, Belief Inertia, and Other Puzzles.Sarah Moss - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (3):620-638.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 103, Issue 3, Page 620-638, November 2021.
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  • Dutch Books, Coherence, and Logical Consistency.Anna Mahtani - 2014 - Noûs 49 (3):522-537.
    In this paper I present a new way of understanding Dutch Book Arguments: the idea is that an agent is shown to be incoherent iff he would accept as fair a set of bets that would result in a loss under any interpretation of the claims involved. This draws on a standard definition of logical inconsistency. On this new understanding, the Dutch Book Arguments for the probability axioms go through, but the Dutch Book Argument for Reflection fails. The question of (...)
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  • (1 other version)A Dutch Book Theorem and Converse Dutch Book Theorem for Kolmogorov Conditionalization.Michael Rescorla - unknown
    This paper discusses how to update one’s credences based on evidence that has initial probability 0. I advance a diachronic norm, Kolmogorov Conditionalization, that governs credal reallocation in many such learning scenarios. The norm is based upon Kolmogorov’s theory of conditional probability. I prove a Dutch book theorem and converse Dutch book theorem for Kolmogorov Conditionalization. The two theorems establish Kolmogorov Conditionalization as the unique credal reallocation rule that avoids a sure loss in the relevant learning scenarios.
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  • (1 other version)A dutch book theorem and converse dutch book theorem for Kolmogorov conditionalization.Michael Rescorla - 2018 - Review of Symbolic Logic 11 (4):705-735.
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  • Knowledge of Our Own Beliefs.Sherrilyn Roush - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (3):45-69.
    There is a widespread view that in order to be rational we must mostly know what we believe. In the probabilistic tradition this is defended by arguments that a person who failed to have this knowledge would be vulnerable to sure loss, or probabilistically incoherent. I argue that even gross failure to know one's own beliefs need not expose one to sure loss, and does not if we follow a generalization of the standard bridge principle between first-order and second-order beliefs. (...)
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  • Formal Representations of Belief.Franz Huber - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. Belief is thus central to epistemology. It comes in a qualitative form, as when Sophia believes that Vienna is the capital of Austria, and a quantitative form, as when Sophia's degree of belief that Vienna is the capital of Austria is at least twice her degree of belief that tomorrow it will be sunny in Vienna. Formal epistemology, as opposed to mainstream epistemology (Hendricks 2006), is epistemology done in a formal way, (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • For Bayesians, Rational Modesty Requires Imprecision.Brian Weatherson - 2015 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 2.
    Gordon Belot has recently developed a novel argument against Bayesianism. He shows that there is an interesting class of problems that, intuitively, no rational belief forming method is likely to get right. But a Bayesian agent’s credence, before the problem starts, that she will get the problem right has to be 1. This is an implausible kind of immodesty on the part of Bayesians. My aim is to show that while this is a good argument against traditional, precise Bayesians, the (...)
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  • The eternal Coin: A puzzle about self-locating conditional credence.Cian Dorr - 2010 - Philosophical Perspectives 24 (1):189-205.
    The Eternal Coin is a fair coin has existed forever, and will exist forever, in a region causally isolated from you. It is tossed every day. How confident should you be that the Coin lands heads today, conditional on (i) the hypothesis that it has landed Heads on every past day, or (ii) the hypothesis that it will land Heads on every future day? I argue for the extremely counterintuitive claim that the correct answer to both questions is 1.
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  • Non-Measurability, Imprecise Credences, and Imprecise Chances.Yoaav Isaacs, Alan Hájek & John Hawthorne - 2021 - Mind 131 (523):892-916.
    – We offer a new motivation for imprecise probabilities. We argue that there are propositions to which precise probability cannot be assigned, but to which imprecise probability can be assigned. In such cases the alternative to imprecise probability is not precise probability, but no probability at all. And an imprecise probability is substantially better than no probability at all. Our argument is based on the mathematical phenomenon of non-measurable sets. Non-measurable propositions cannot receive precise probabilities, but there is a natural (...)
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