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  1. Conditionalization Does Not Maximize Expected Accuracy.Miriam Schoenfield - 2017 - Mind 126 (504):1155-1187.
    Greaves and Wallace argue that conditionalization maximizes expected accuracy. In this paper I show that their result only applies to a restricted range of cases. I then show that the update procedure that maximizes expected accuracy in general is one in which, upon learning P, we conditionalize, not on P, but on the proposition that we learned P. After proving this result, I provide further generalizations and show that much of the accuracy-first epistemology program is committed to KK-like iteration principles (...)
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  • 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. (...)
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  • Epistemic Value and the Jamesian Goals.Sophie Horowitz - 2018 - In Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij & Jeff Dunn (eds.), Epistemic Consequentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    William James famously tells us that there are two main goals for rational believers: believing truth and avoiding error. I argues that epistemic consequentialism—in particular its embodiment in epistemic utility theory—seems to be well positioned to explain how epistemic agents might permissibly weight these goals differently and adopt different credences as a result. After all, practical versions of consequentialism render it permissible for agents with different goals to act differently in the same situation. -/- Nevertheless, I argue that epistemic consequentialism (...)
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  • Bridging Rationality and Accuracy.Miriam Schoenfield - 2015 - Journal of Philosophy 112 (12):633-657.
    This paper is about the connection between rationality and accuracy. I show that one natural picture about how rationality and accuracy are connected emerges if we assume that rational agents are rationally omniscient. I then develop an alternative picture that allows us to relax this assumption, in order to accommodate certain views about higher order evidence.
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  • Epistemic Consequentialism as a Metatheory of Inquiry.Frederik J. Andersen & Klemens Kappel - 2024 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 3 (50):1-16.
    The overall aim of this article is to reorient the contemporary debate about epistemic consequentialism. Thus far the debate has to a large extent focused on whether standard theories of epistemic justification are consequentialist in nature and therefore vulnerable to certain trade-off cases where accepting a false or unjustified belief leads to good epistemic outcomes. We claim that these trade-offs raise an important—yet somewhat neglected—issue about the epistemic demands on inquiry. We first distinguish between two different kinds of epistemic evaluation, (...)
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  • It Can Be Rational to Change Priors.Ru Ye - forthcoming - Analysis.
    According to a widely held norm of rationality, one should not change prior credences without new evidence. An important argument for this norm appeals to accuracy considerations, which says that changing priors doesn’t maximize expected accuracy. This is because accuracy measures are strictly proper, and thus any probabilistically coherent person regards her own priors as uniquely maximizing expected accuracy compared with other priors. -/- This paper attempts to resist the accuracy argument against changing priors. We argue that even if rational (...)
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  • Towards the Inevitability of Non-Classical Probability.Giacomo Molinari - 2023 - Review of Symbolic Logic 16 (4):1053-1079.
    This paper generalises an argument for probabilism due to Lindley [9]. I extend the argument to a number of non-classical logical settings whose truth-values, seen here as ideal aims for belief, are in the set $\{0,1\}$, and where logical consequence $\models $ is given the “no-drop” characterization. First I will show that, in each of these settings, an agent’s credence can only avoid accuracy-domination if its canonical transform is a (possibly non-classical) probability function. In other words, if an agent values (...)
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  • Downwards Propriety in Epistemic Utility Theory.Alejandro Pérez Carballo - 2023 - Mind 132 (525):30-62.
    Epistemic Utility Theory is often identified with the project of *axiology-first epistemology*—the project of vindicating norms of epistemic rationality purely in terms of epistemic value. One of the central goals of axiology-first epistemology is to provide a justification of the central norm of Bayesian epistemology, Probabilism. The first part of this paper presents a new challenge to axiology first epistemology: I argue that in order to justify Probabilism in purely axiological terms, proponents of axiology first epistemology need to justify a (...)
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  • Accuracy, probabilism, and the insufficiency of the alethic.Corey Dethier - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (7):2285-2301.
    The best and most popular argument for probabilism is the accuracy-dominance argument, which purports to show that alethic considerations alone support the view that an agent’s degrees of belief should always obey the axioms of probability. I argue that extant versions of the accuracy-dominance argument face a problem. In order for the mathematics of the argument to function as advertised, we must assume that every omniscient credence function is classically consistent; there can be no worlds in the set of dominance-relevant (...)
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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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  • Exploring by Believing.Sara Aronowitz - 2021 - Philosophical Review 130 (3):339-383.
    Sometimes, we face choices between actions most likely to lead to valuable outcomes, and actions which put us in a better position to learn. These choices exemplify what is called the exploration/exploitation trade-off. In computer science and psychology, this trade-off has fruitfully been applied to modulating the way agents or systems make choices over time. This article extends the trade-off to belief. We can be torn between two ways of believing, one of which is expected to be more accurate in (...)
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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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  • Closing the Case on Self-Fulfilling Beliefs.Chad Marxen - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):1-14.
    Two principles in epistemology are apparent examples of the close connection between rationality and truth. First, adding a disjunct to what it is rational to believe yields a proposition that’s also rational to believe. Second, what’s likely if believed is rational to believe. While these principles are accepted by many, it turns out that they clash. In light of this clash, we must relinquish the second principle. Reflecting on its rationale, though, reveals that there are two distinct ways to understand (...)
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  • Concept Appraisal.Sapphira R. Thorne, Jake Quilty-Dunn, Joulia Smortchkova, Nicholas Shea & James A. Hampton - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (5):e12978.
    This paper reports the first empirical investigation of the hypothesis that epistemic appraisals form part of the structure of concepts. To date, studies of concepts have focused on the way concepts encode properties of objects and the way those features are used in categorization and in other cognitive tasks. Philosophical considerations show the importance of also considering how a thinker assesses the epistemic value of beliefs and other cognitive resources and, in particular, concepts. We demonstrate that there are multiple, reliably (...)
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  • Epistemic utility theory’s difficult future.Chad Marxen - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):7401-7421.
    According to epistemic utility theory, epistemic rationality is teleological: epistemic norms are instrumental norms that have the aim of acquiring accuracy. What’s definitive of these norms is that they can be expected to lead to the acquisition of accuracy when followed. While there’s much to be said in favor of this approach, it turns out that it faces a couple of worrisome extensional problems involving the future. The first problem involves credences about the future, and the second problem involves future (...)
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  • On the epistemic rationality and significance of self-fulfilling beliefs.Chad Marxen - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):4243-4260.
    Some propositions are not likely to be true overall, but are likely to be true if you believe them. Appealing to the platitude that belief aims at truth, it has become increasingly popular to defend the view that such propositions are epistemically rational to believe. However, I argue that this view runs into trouble when we consider the connection between what’s epistemically rational to believe and what’s practically rational to do. I conclude by discussing how rejecting the view bears on (...)
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  • Epistemic Consequentialism. [REVIEW]Kevin Dorst - 2020 - Philosophical Review 129 (3):484-489.
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  • A Conflict between Indexical Credal Transparency and Relevance Confirmation.Joel Pust - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (3):385-397.
    According to the probabilistic relevance account of confirmation, E confirms H relative to background knowledge K just in case P(H/K&E) > P(H/K). This requires an inequality between the rational degree of belief in H determined relative to two bodies of total knowledge which are such that one (K&E) includes the other (K) as a proper part. In this paper, I argue that it is quite plausible that there are no two possible bodies of total knowledge for ideally rational agents meeting (...)
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  • The theory of games as a tool for the social epistemologist.Kevin J. S. Zollman - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (4):1381-1401.
    Traditionally, epistemologists have distinguished between epistemic and pragmatic goals. In so doing, they presume that much of game theory is irrelevant to epistemic enterprises. I will show that this is a mistake. Even if we restrict attention to purely epistemic motivations, members of epistemic groups will face a multitude of strategic choices. I illustrate several contexts where individuals who are concerned solely with the discovery of truth will nonetheless face difficult game theoretic problems. Examples of purely epistemic coordination problems and (...)
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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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  • Is Every Theory of Knowledge False?Blake Roeber - 2019 - Noûs 54 (4):839-866.
    Is knowledge consistent with literally any credence in the relevant proposition, including credence 0? Of course not. But is credence 0 the only credence in p that entails that you don’t know that p? Knowledge entails belief (most epistemologists think), and it’s impossible to believe that p while having credence 0 in p. Is it true that, for every value of ‘x,’ if it’s impossible to know that p while having credence x in p, this is simply because it’s impossible (...)
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  • Epistemic Teleology: Synchronic and Diachronic.Ralph Wedgwood - 2018 - In Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij & Jeff Dunn (eds.), Epistemic Consequentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 85-112.
    According to a widely held view of the matter, whenever we assess beliefs as ‘rational’ or ‘justified’, we are making normative judgements about those beliefs. In this discussion, I shall simply assume, for the sake of argument, that this view is correct. My goal here is to explore a particular approach to understanding the basic principles that explain which of these normative judgements are true. Specifically, this approach is based on the assumption that all such normative principles are grounded in (...)
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  • Being Realist about Bayes, and the Predictive Processing Theory of Mind.Matteo Colombo, Lee Elkin & Stephan Hartmann - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (1):185-220.
    Some naturalistic philosophers of mind subscribing to the predictive processing theory of mind have adopted a realist attitude towards the results of Bayesian cognitive science. In this paper, we argue that this realist attitude is unwarranted. The Bayesian research program in cognitive science does not possess special epistemic virtues over alternative approaches for explaining mental phenomena involving uncertainty. In particular, the Bayesian approach is not simpler, more unifying, or more rational than alternatives. It is also contentious that the Bayesian approach (...)
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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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  • Disagreement and the division of epistemic labor.Bjørn G. Hallsson & Klemens Kappel - 2018 - Synthese 197 (7):2823-2847.
    In this article we discuss what we call the deliberative division of epistemic labor. We present evidence that the human tendency to engage in motivated reasoning in defense of our beliefs can facilitate the occurrence of divisions of epistemic labor in deliberations among people who disagree. We further present evidence that these divisions of epistemic labor tend to promote beliefs that are better supported by the evidence. We show that promotion of these epistemic benefits stands in tension with what extant (...)
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  • Learning and Value Change.J. Dmitri Gallow - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19:1--22.
    Accuracy-first accounts of rational learning attempt to vindicate the intuitive idea that, while rationally-formed belief need not be true, it is nevertheless likely to be true. To this end, they attempt to show that the Bayesian's rational learning norms are a consequence of the rational pursuit of accuracy. Existing accounts fall short of this goal, for they presuppose evidential norms which are not and cannot be vindicated in terms of the single-minded pursuit of accuracy. I propose an alternative account, according (...)
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  • When propriety is improper.Kevin Blackwell & Daniel Drucker - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (2):367-386.
    We argue that philosophers ought to distinguish epistemic decision theory and epistemology, in just the way ordinary decision theory is distinguished from ethics. Once one does this, the internalist arguments that motivate much of epistemic decision theory make sense, given specific interpretations of the formalism. Making this distinction also causes trouble for the principle called Propriety, which says, roughly, that the only acceptable epistemic utility functions make probabilistically coherent credence functions immodest. We cast doubt on this requirement, but then argue (...)
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  • Shrinking three arguments for conditionalization.Sophie Horowitz - 2021 - Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1):303-319.
    I argue that three arguments for conditionalization -- the Diachronic Dutch Book, the expected-accuracy maximization argument from Greaves and Wallace, and the accuracy-dominance argument from Briggs and Pettigrew -- can all be improved by narrowing their focus. I suggest alternative, targeted arguments which better identify the flaw involved in non-conditionalizing updates.
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  • Bayesians too should follow Wason: A comprehensive accuracy-based analysis of the selection task.Filippo Vindrola & Vincenzo Crupi - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Wason’s selection task is a paramount experimental problem in the study of human reasoning, often connected with the celebrated ravens paradox in the philosophical literature. Various normative accounts of the selection task rely on a Bayesian approach. Some claim vindication of participants’ rationality. Others don’t, thus following Wason’s original intuition that observed responses are mistaken. In this article we argue that despite claims to the contrary, all these accounts actually speak to the same effect: Wason was right. First, we provide (...)
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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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  • The Foundations of Epistemic Decision Theory.Jason Konek & Ben Levinstein - 2019 - Mind 128 (509):69-107.
    According to accuracy-first epistemology, accuracy is the fundamental epistemic good. Epistemic norms — Probabilism, Conditionalization, the Principal Principle, etc. — have their binding force in virtue of helping to secure this good. To make this idea precise, accuracy-firsters invoke Epistemic Decision Theory (EpDT) to determine which epistemic policies are the best means toward the end of accuracy. Hilary Greaves and others have recently challenged the tenability of this programme. Their arguments purport to show that EpDT encourages obviously epistemically irrational behavior. (...)
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  • Rationality as the Capacity for Understanding.Karl Schafer - 2019 - Noûs 53 (3):639-663.
    In this essay, I develop and defend a virtue‐theoretic conception of rationality as a capacity whose function is understanding, as opposed to mere truth or correctness. I focus on two main potential advantages of this view. First, its ability to explain the rationality of forms of explanatory reasoning, and second, its ability to offer a more unified account of theoretical and practical rationality.
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  • Ideal counterpart theorizing and the accuracy argument for probabilism.Clinton Castro & Olav Vassend - 2018 - Analysis 78 (2):207-216.
    One of the main goals of Bayesian epistemology is to justify the rational norms credence functions ought to obey. Accuracy arguments attempt to justify these norms from the assumption that the source of value for credences relevant to their epistemic status is their accuracy. This assumption and some standard decision-theoretic principles are used to argue for norms like Probabilism, the thesis that an agent’s credence function is rational only if it obeys the probability axioms. We introduce an example that shows (...)
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  • Accurate Updating for the Risk Sensitive.Catrin Campbell-Moore & Bernhard Salow - 2020 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (3):751-776.
    Philosophers have recently attempted to justify particular belief revision procedures by arguing that they are the optimal means towards the epistemic end of accurate credences. These attempts, however, presuppose that means should be evaluated according to classical expected utility theory; and there is a long tradition maintaining that expected utility theory is too restrictive as a theory of means–end rationality, ruling out too many natural ways of taking risk into account. In this paper, we investigate what belief-revision procedures are supported (...)
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  • Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij and Jeffrey Dunn (Eds.), 2018, Epistemic Consequentialism: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, 335 pages, $77.00.Peter Hartl - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (3):1273-1281.
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  • (1 other version)Accuracy, conditionalization, and probabilism.Don Fallis & Peter J. Lewis - 2019 - Synthese 198 (5):4017-4033.
    Accuracy-based arguments for conditionalization and probabilism appear to have a significant advantage over their Dutch Book rivals. They rely only on the plausible epistemic norm that one should try to decrease the inaccuracy of one’s beliefs. Furthermore, conditionalization and probabilism apparently follow from a wide range of measures of inaccuracy. However, we argue that there is an under-appreciated diachronic constraint on measures of inaccuracy which limits the measures from which one can prove conditionalization, and none of the remaining measures allow (...)
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  • A taxonomy of types of epistemic dependence: introduction to the Synthese special issue on epistemic dependence.Fernando Broncano-Berrocal & Jesús Vega-Encabo - 2020 - Synthese 197 (7):2745-2763.
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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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  • Group epistemic value.Jeffrey Dunn - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (1):65-92.
    Sometimes we are interested in how groups are doing epistemically in aggregate. For instance, we may want to know the epistemic impact of a change in school curriculum or the epistemic impact of abolishing peer review in the sciences. Being able to say something about how groups are doing epistemically is especially important if one is interested in pursuing a consequentialist approach to social epistemology of the sort championed by Goldman. According to this approach we evaluate social practices and institutions (...)
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  • Counterfactuals and Probability. [REVIEW]Justin Khoo - 2020 - Philosophical Review 129 (3):489-495.
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  • Just As Planned: Bayesianism, Externalism, and Plan Coherence.Pablo Zendejas Medina - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23.
    Two of the most influential arguments for Bayesian updating ("Conditionalization") -- Hilary Greaves' and David Wallace's Accuracy Argument and David Lewis' Diachronic Dutch Book Argument-- turn out to impose a strong and surprising limitation on rational uncertainty: that one can never be rationally uncertain of what one's evidence is. Many philosophers ("externalists") reject that claim, and now seem to face a difficult choice: either to endorse the arguments and give up Externalism, or to reject the arguments and lose some of (...)
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