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  1. Consequences of Assigning Non-Measurable Sets Imprecise Probabilities.Joshua Thong - 2024 - Mind (531):793-804.
    This paper is a discussion note on Isaacs et al. (2022), who have claimed to offer a new motivation for imprecise probabilities, based on the mathematical phenomenon of non-measurability. In this note, I clarify some consequences of their proposal. In particular, I show that if their proposal is applied to a bounded 3-dimensional space, then they have to reject at least one of the following: (i) If A is at most as probable as B and B is at most as (...)
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  • Dogmatism, Seemings, and Non-Deductive Inferential Justification.Dimitria Gatzia & Berit Brogaard - 2023 - In Kevin McCain, Scott Stapleford & Matthias Steup (eds.), Seemings: New Arguments, New Angles. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. Chapter 8.
    Dogmatism holds that an experience or seeming that p can provide prima facie immediate justification for believing p in virtue of its phenomenology. Dogmatism about perceptual justification has appealed primarily to proponents of representational theories of perceptual experience. Call dogmatism that takes perceptual experience to be representational "representational phenomenal dogmatism." As we show, phenomenal seemings play a crucial role in dogmatism of this kind. Despite its conventional appeal to representational theorists, dogmatism is not by definition committed to any particular view (...)
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  • Permission to believe: Descriptive and prescriptive beliefs in the Clifford/James debate.Christopher Paul Lawrence - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Cape Town
    This thesis modifies the wording of William Clifford’s 1877 evidence principle (that ‘it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence’) to propose an explicitly moral principle, restricted to descriptive beliefs (about what is or is not the case) and excluding prescriptive beliefs (about what ought or ought not to be the case). It considers potential counter-examples, particularly William James’s 1896 defence of religious belief; and concludes that the modified principle survives unscathed. It then searches (...)
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  • The Case for Incomparability.Benjamin Eva - manuscript
    According to influential arguments from several branches of philosophy, there exist some gradable natural language expressions that violate the following principle: if x and y are both F to some degree, then either x is at least as F as y or y is at least as F as x. Dorr, Nebel and Zuehl (2022) (DNZ), who refer to this principle as ‘Comparability’, respond to these arguments and offer a systematic case in support of Comparability. In this paper, I respond (...)
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  • The balance and weight of reasons.Nicholas Makins - 2023 - Theoria 89 (5):592-606.
    The aim of this paper is to provide a detailed characterisation of some ways in which our preferences reflect our reasons. I will argue that practical reasons can be characterised along two dimensions that influence our preferences: their balance and their weight. This is analogous to a similar characterisation of the way in which probabilities reflect the balance and weight of evidence in epistemology. In this paper, I will illustrate the distinction between the balance and weight of reasons, and show (...)
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  • Evidence and analogy in Archaeoastronomy.Francesco Nappo, Giulio Magli & Giovanni Valente - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-25.
    This paper addresses the role of analogical reasoning in archaeoastronomy - the discipline which studies the connections between the ancient monuments and the heavens. Archaeoastronomy is a highly interdisciplinary science, placed at the border between the humanities – especially archaeology – and the scientific approach to cultural heritage. As a consequence, its scientific foundations are a delicate matter. We plan to investigate here the question of what constitutes the evidence for analogical inferences in archaeoastronomy and to what extent one can (...)
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  • In defence of the modal account of legal risk.Duncan Pritchard - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-16.
    This paper offers an articulation and defence of the modal account of legal risk in light of a range of objections that have been proposed against this view in the recent literature. It is argued that these objections all trade on a failure to distinguish between the modal nature of risk more generally, and the application of this modal account to particular decision-making contexts, such as legal contexts, where one must rely on a restricted body of information. It is argued (...)
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  • Rationalizing the Principal Principle for Non-Humean Chance.J. Khawaja - manuscript
    According to Humean theories of objective chance, the chances reduce to patterns in the history of occurrent events, such as frequencies. According to non-Humean accounts, the chances are metaphysically fundamental, existing independently of the "Humean Mosaic" of actually-occurring events. It is therefore possible, by the lights of non-Humeanism, for the chances and the frequencies to diverge wildly. Humeans often allege that this undermines the ability of non-Humean accounts of chance to rationalize adherence to David Lewis' Principal Principle (PP), which states (...)
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  • Entrepreneurial Beliefs and Agency under Knightian Uncertainty.Randall Westgren & Travis Holmes - 2021 - Philosophy of Management 21 (2):199-217.
    At the centenary of Frank H. Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, we explore the continuing relevance of Knightian uncertainty to the theory and practice of entrepreneurship. There are three challenges facing such assessment. First, RUP is complex and difficult to interpret. The key but neglected element of RUP is that Knight’s account is not solely about risk and uncertainty as states of nature, but about how an agent’s beliefs about uncertain outcomes and confidence in those beliefs guide their choices. Second, (...)
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  • Carnap’s Logical Probability and Free Will Dilemma.Paweł Pruski - 2022 - Open Journal of Philosophy 12 (1):133-145.
    Pondering the question of free will in the context of probability allows us to take a fresh look at a number of old problems. We are able to avoid deterministic entrapments and attempt to look at free will as an outcome of the entire decision-making system. In my paper, I will argue that free will should be considered in the context of a complex system of decisions, not individual cases. The proposed system will be probabilistic in character, so it will (...)
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  • (1 other version)Refining the Bayesian Approach to Unifying Generalisation.Nina Poth - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology (3):1-31.
    Tenenbaum and Griffiths (2001) have proposed that their Bayesian model of generalisation unifies Shepard’s (1987) and Tversky’s (1977) similarity-based explanations of two distinct patterns of generalisation behaviours by reconciling them under a single coherent task analysis. I argue that this proposal needs refinement: instead of unifying the heterogeneous notion of psychological similarity, the Bayesian approach unifies generalisation by rendering the distinct patterns of behaviours informationally relevant. I suggest that generalisation as a Bayesian inference should be seen as a complement to, (...)
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  • Coherence of Inferences.Matheus Silva - manuscript
    It is usually accepted that deductions are non-informative and monotonic, inductions are informative and nonmonotonic, abductions create hypotheses but are epistemically irrelevant, and both deductions and inductions can’t provide new insights. In this article, I attempt to provide a more cohesive view of the subject with the following hypotheses: (1) the paradigmatic examples of deductions, such as modus ponens and hypothetical syllogism, are not inferential forms, but coherence requirements for inferences; (2) since any reasoner aims to be coherent, any inference (...)
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  • Uncertain Values: An Axiomatic Approach to Axiological Uncertainty.Stefan Riedener - 2021 - Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter.
    How ought you to evaluate your options if you're uncertain about what's fundamentally valuable? A prominent response is Expected Value Maximisation (EVM)—the view that under axiological uncertainty, an option is better than another if and only if it has the greater expected value across axiologies. But the expected value of an option depends on quantitative probability and value facts, and in particular on value comparisons across axiologies. We need to explain what it is for such facts to hold. Also, EVM (...)
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  • Logical Truth / Logička istina (Bosnian translation by Nijaz Ibrulj).Nijaz Ibrulj & Willard Van Orman Quine - 2018 - Sophos 1 (11):115-128.
    Translated from: W.V.O.Quine, W. H. O. (1986): Philosophy of Logic. Second Edition. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 47-61.
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  • Direct inference and probabilistic accounts of induction.Jon Williamson - 2022 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 54 (3):451-472.
    Schurz (2019, ch. 4) argues that probabilistic accounts of induction fail. In particular, he criticises probabilistic accounts of induction that appeal to direct inference principles, including subjective Bayesian approaches (e.g., Howson 2000) and objective Bayesian approaches (see, e.g., Williamson 2017). In this paper, I argue that Schurz’ preferred direct inference principle, namely Reichenbach’s Principle of the Narrowest Reference Class, faces formidable problems in a standard probabilistic setting. Furthermore, the main alternative direct inference principle, Lewis’ Principal Principle, is also hard to (...)
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  • The Fate of Explanatory Reasoning in the Age of Big Data.Frank Cabrera - 2021 - Philosophy and Technology 34 (4):645-665.
    In this paper, I critically evaluate several related, provocative claims made by proponents of data-intensive science and “Big Data” which bear on scientific methodology, especially the claim that scientists will soon no longer have any use for familiar concepts like causation and explanation. After introducing the issue, in Section 2, I elaborate on the alleged changes to scientific method that feature prominently in discussions of Big Data. In Section 3, I argue that these methodological claims are in tension with a (...)
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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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  • Interpreting the probabilities in Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism.Gary Neels - forthcoming - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion:1-13.
    In this paper, I examine Plantinga’s (1993, 2000, 2011) Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). While there has been much discussion about Plantinga’s use of probabilities in the argument, I contend that insufficient attention has been paid to the question of how we are to interpret those probabilities. In this paper, I argue that views Plantinga defends elsewhere limit the range of interpretations available to him here. The upshot is that the EAAN is more limited in its applicability than Plantinga alleges.
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  • Goodness, availability, and argument structure.Anna-Sara Malmgren - 2021 - Synthese 198:10395-10427.
    According to a widely shared generic conception of inferential justification—‘the standard conception’—an agent is inferentially justified in believing that p only if she has antecedently justified beliefs in all the non-redundant premises of a good argument for p. This conception tends to serve as the starting-point in contemporary debates about the nature and scope of inferential justification: as neutral common ground between various competing, more specific, conceptions. But it’s a deeply problematic starting-point. This paper explores three questions that haven’t been (...)
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  • On the gnoseologic principles of Bertrand Russell.Rafael Andrés Alemañ-Berenguer - 2021 - Naturaleza y Libertad. Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinares.
    Exposed in 1948, within his masterpiece on the scope and limits of human knowledge, the epistemological tenets that Bertrand Russell regarded as fundamental elements in the construction of scientific knowledge, are still worthy of a detailed discussion today. Given the excellence of the author, it will not be surprising to see that Russell's gnoseologic postulates, even for the present scientific view, address some of the most controversial questions still to be solved in the theory of knowledge.
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  • An Epistemic Advantage of Accommodation over Prediction.Finnur Dellsén - forthcoming - Philosophers' Imprint.
    Many philosophers have argued that a hypothesis is better confirmed by some data if the hypothesis was not specifically designed to fit the data. ‘Prediction’, they argue, is superior to ‘accommodation’. Others deny that there is any epistemic advantage to prediction, and conclude that prediction and accommodation are epistemically on a par. This paper argues that there is a respect in which accommodation is superior to prediction. Specifically, the information that the data was accommodated rather than predicted suggests that the (...)
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  • Techno-Telepathy & Silent Subvocal Speech-Recognition Robotics.Virgil W. Brower - 2021 - HORIZON. Studies in Phenomenology 10 (1):232-257.
    The primary focus of this project is the silent and subvocal speech-recognition interface unveiled in 2018 as an ambulatory device wearable on the neck that detects a myoelectrical signature by electrodes worn on the surface of the face, throat, and neck. These emerge from an alleged “intending to speak” by the wearer silently-saying-something-to-oneself. This inner voice is believed to occur while one reads in silence or mentally talks to oneself. The artifice does not require spoken sounds, opening the mouth, or (...)
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  • Consequences of Comparability.Cian Dorr, Jacob M. Nebel & Jake Zuehl - 2021 - Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1):70-98.
    We defend three controversial claims about preference, credence, and choice. First, all agents (not just rational ones) have complete preferences. Second, all agents (again, not just rational ones) have real-valued credences in every proposition in which they are confident to any degree. Third, there is almost always some unique thing we ought to do, want, or believe.
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  • On the Independence of Belief and Credence.Elizabeth Jackson - 2022 - Philosophical Issues 32 (1):9-31.
    Much of the literature on the relationship between belief and credence has focused on the reduction question: that is, whether either belief or credence reduces to the other. This debate, while important, only scratches the surface of the belief-credence connection. Even on the anti-reductive dualist view, belief and credence could still be very tightly connected. Here, I explore questions about the belief-credence connection that go beyond reduction. This paper is dedicated to what I call the independence question: just how independent (...)
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  • Fine‐tuning, weird sorts of atheism and evidential favouring.Tamaz Tokhadze - 2021 - Analytic Philosophy (3):1-12.
    This paper defends a novel sceptical response to the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God (FTA). According to this response, even if FTA can establish, what I call, the confirmation proposition: ‘fine-tuning confirms the God hypothesis’, there is no reason to think that a strengthening of FTA can establish the evidence-favouring proposition: ‘fine-tuning favours the God hypothesis over its competitors’. My argument is that, any criteria for the explanation of fine-tuning that permit us to take the God hypothesis seriously (...)
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  • Uncertainty, equality, fraternity.Rush T. Stewart - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):9603-9619.
    Epistemic states of uncertainty play important roles in ethical and political theorizing. Theories that appeal to a “veil of ignorance,” for example, analyze fairness or impartiality in terms of certain states of ignorance. It is important, then, to scrutinize proposed conceptions of ignorance and explore promising alternatives in such contexts. Here, I study Lerner’s probabilistic egalitarian theorem in the setting of imprecise probabilities. Lerner’s theorem assumes that a social planner tasked with distributing income to individuals in a population is “completely (...)
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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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  • On the imprecision of full conditional probabilities.Gregory Wheeler & Fabio G. Cozman - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):3761-3782.
    The purpose of this paper is to show that if one adopts conditional probabilities as the primitive concept of probability, one must deal with the fact that even in very ordinary circumstances at least some probability values may be imprecise, and that some probability questions may fail to have numerically precise answers.
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  • The Sources of Mill’s View of Ratiocination and Induction.Steffen Ducheyne & John P. McCaskey - 2014 - In Antis Loizides (ed.), Mill’s a System of Logic: Critical Appraisals. New York: Routledge.
    The philosophical background important to Mill’s theory of induction has two major components: Richard Whately’s introduction of the uniformity principle into inductive inference and the loss of the idea of formal cause.
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  • Vagueness and Imprecise Credence.Anna Mahtani - 2019 - In Richard Dietz (ed.), Vagueness and Rationality in Language Use and Cognition. Springer Verlag. pp. 7-30.
    In this paper I investigate an alternative to imprecise probabilism. Imprecise probabilism is a popular revision of orthodox Bayesianism: while the orthodox Bayesian claims that a rational agent’s belief-state can be represented by a single credence function, the imprecise probabilist claims instead that a rational agent’s belief-state can be represented by a set of such functions. The alternative that I put forward in this paper is to claim that the expression ‘credence’ is vague, and then apply the theory of supervaluationism (...)
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  • The Case for Comparability.Cian Dorr, Jacob M. Nebel & Jake Zuehl - 2023 - Noûs 57 (2):414-453.
    We argue that all comparative expressions in natural language obey a principle that we call Comparability: if x and y are at least as F as themselves, then either x is at least as F as y or y is at least as F as x. This principle has been widely rejected among philosophers, especially by ethicists, and its falsity has been claimed to have important normative implications. We argue that Comparability is needed to explain the goodness of several patterns (...)
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  • Sleeping Beauty's evidence.Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2024 - In Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & Clayton Littlejohn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence. New York, NY: Routledge.
    What degrees of belief does Sleeping Beauty's evidence support? That depends.
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  • Internalism and the Nature of Justification.Jonathan Egeland Harouny - 2020 - Dissertation, Stockholm University
    There are many important dimensions of epistemic evaluation, one of which is justification. We don’t just evaluate beliefs for truth, reliability, accuracy, and knowledge, but also for justification. However, in the epistemological literature, there is much disagreement about the nature of justification and how it should be understood. One of the controversies that has separated the contemporary epistemological discourse into two opposing camps has to do with the internalism-externalism distinction. Whereas internalists defend certain core assumptions about justification from the pre-Gettier (...)
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  • Epistemology and the Structure of Language.Jeffrey A. Barrett & Travis LaCroix - 2020 - Erkenntnis 87 (2):953-967.
    We are concerned here with how structural properties of language may come to reflect features of the world in which it evolves. As a concrete example, we will consider how a simple term language might evolve to support the principle of indifference over state descriptions in that language. The point is not that one is justified in applying the principle of indifference to state descriptions in natural language. Instead, it is that one should expect a language that has evolved in (...)
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  • Information vs. entropy vs. probability.Orly Shenker - 2019 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 10 (1):1-25.
    Information, entropy, probability: these three terms are closely interconnected in the prevalent understanding of statistical mechanics, both when this field is taught to students at an introductory level and in advanced research into the field’s foundations. This paper examines the interconnection between these three notions in light of recent research in the foundations of statistical mechanics. It disentangles these concepts and highlights their differences, at the same time explaining why they came to be so closely linked in the literature. In (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Bertrand's Paradox and the Maximum Entropy Principle.Nicholas Shackel & Darrell P. Rowbottom - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (3):505-523.
    An important suggestion of objective Bayesians is that the maximum entropy principle can replace a principle which is known to get into paradoxical difficulties: the principle of indifference. No one has previously determined whether the maximum entropy principle is better able to solve Bertrand’s chord paradox than the principle of indifference. In this paper I show that it is not. Additionally, the course of the analysis brings to light a new paradox, a revenge paradox of the chords, that is unique (...)
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  • Rational understanding: toward a probabilistic epistemology of acceptability.Finnur Dellsén - 2019 - Synthese 198 (3):2475-2494.
    To understand something involves some sort of commitment to a set of propositions comprising an account of the understood phenomenon. Some take this commitment to be a species of belief; others, such as Elgin and I, take it to be a kind of cognitive policy. This paper takes a step back from debates about the nature of understanding and asks when this commitment involved in understanding is epistemically appropriate, or ‘acceptable’ in Elgin’s terminology. In particular, appealing to lessons from the (...)
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  • Les risques majeurs et l'action publique.Céline Grislain-Letremy, Reza Lahidji & Philippe Mongin - 2012 - Paris: La Documentation Française.
    Par risques majeurs, on entend ceux qui s’attachent à des événements dont les conséquences défavorables, pour l’humanité ou pour l’environnement, sont d’une gravité exceptionnelle. On n’ajoutera ni que ces événements sont d’une intensité physique extrême, ni qu’ils surviennent rarement, car ce n’est pas toujours le cas. Seuls des risques majeurs de nature civile seront considérés dans cet ouvrage, et il s'agira, plus limitativement, de risques naturels, comme ceux d’inondation et de submersion marine, illustrés par la tempête Xynthia en 2010, de (...)
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  • Prime Time (for the Basing Relation).Kurt Sylvan & Errol Lord - 2019 - In Joseph Adam Carter & Patrick Bondy (eds.), Well Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation. New York: Routledge.
    It is often assumed that believing that p for a normative reason consists in nothing more than (i) believing that p for a reason and (ii) that reason’s corresponding to a normative reason to believe that p, where (i) and (ii) are independent factors. This is the Composite View. In this paper, we argue against the Composite View on extensional and theoretical grounds. We advocate an alternative that we call the Prime View. On this view, believing for a normative reason (...)
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  • Evidence of Evidence as Higher Order Evidence.Anna-Maria A. Eder & Peter Brössel - 2019 - In Mattias Skipper & Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (eds.), Higher-Order Evidence: New Essays. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 62-83.
    In everyday life and in science we acquire evidence of evidence and based on this new evidence we often change our epistemic states. An assumption underlying such practice is that the following EEE Slogan is correct: 'evidence of evidence is evidence' (Feldman 2007, p. 208). We suggest that evidence of evidence is best understood as higher-order evidence about the epistemic state of agents. In order to model evidence of evidence we introduce a new powerful framework for modelling epistemic states, Dyadic (...)
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  • Higher-Order Defeat and Doxastic Resilience.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen - 2019 - In Mattias Skipper & Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (eds.), Higher-Order Evidence: New Essays. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    It seems obvious that when higher-order evidence makes it rational for one to doubt that one’s own belief on some matter is rational, this can undermine the rationality of that belief. This is known as higher-order defeat. However, despite its intuitive plausibility, it has proved puzzling how higher-order defeat works, exactly. To highlight two prominent sources of puzzlement, higher-order defeat seems to defy being understood in terms of conditionalization; and higher-order defeat can sometimes place agents in what seem like epistemic (...)
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  • Epistemic theories of objective chance.Richard Johns - 2020 - Synthese 197 (2):703-730.
    Epistemic theories of objective chance hold that chances are idealised epistemic probabilities of some sort. After giving a brief history of this approach to objective chance, I argue for a particular version of this view, that the chance of an event E is its epistemic probability, given maximal knowledge of the possible causes of E. The main argument for this view is the demonstration that it entails all of the commonly-accepted properties of chance. For example, this analysis entails that chances (...)
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  • Comparativism and the Measurement of Partial Belief.Edward Elliott - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (6):2843-2870.
    According to comparativism, degrees of belief are reducible to a system of purely ordinal comparisons of relative confidence. (For example, being more confident that P than that Q, or being equally confident that P and that Q.) In this paper, I raise several general challenges for comparativism, relating to (i) its capacity to illuminate apparently meaningful claims regarding intervals and ratios of strengths of belief, (ii) its capacity to draw enough intuitively meaningful and theoretically relevant distinctions between doxastic states, and (...)
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  • Variety of Evidence.Jürgen Landes - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (1):183-223.
    Varied evidence confirms more strongly than less varied evidence, ceteris paribus. This epistemological Variety of Evidence Thesis enjoys widespread intuitive support. We put forward a novel explication of one notion of varied evidence and the Variety of Evidence Thesis within Bayesian models of scientific inference by appealing to measures of entropy. Our explication of the Variety of Evidence Thesis holds in many of our models which also pronounce on disconfirmatory and discordant evidence. We argue that our models pronounce rightly. Against (...)
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  • Genuine confirmation and tacking by conjunction.Michael Schippers & Gerhard Schurz - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (1):321-352.
    Tacking by conjunction is a deep problem for Bayesian confirmation theory. It is based on the insight that to each hypothesis h that is confirmed by a piece of evidence e one can ‘tack’ an irrelevant hypothesis h′ so that h∧h′ is also confirmed by e. This seems counter-intuitive. Existing Bayesian solution proposals try to soften the negative impact of this result by showing that although h∧h′ is confirmed by e, it is so only to a lower degree. In this (...)
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  • Combining Probability with Qualitative Degree-of-Certainty Metrics in Assessment.Casey Helgeson, Richard Bradley & Brian Hill - 2018 - Climatic Change 149:517-525.
    Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) employ an evolving framework of calibrated language for assessing and communicating degrees of certainty in findings. A persistent challenge for this framework has been ambiguity in the relationship between multiple degree-of-certainty metrics. We aim to clarify the relationship between the likelihood and confidence metrics used in the Fifth Assessment Report (2013), with benefits for mathematical consistency among multiple findings and for usability in downstream modeling and decision analysis. We discuss how our (...)
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  • Distributing Risks: Allocation Principles for Distributing Reversible and Irreversible Losses.Neelke Doorn - 2018 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 21 (1):96-109.
    This paper aims to develop a framework for distributing risks. Based on a distinction between risks with reversible losses and risks with irreversible losses, I defend the following composite allocation principle: first, irreversible risks should be allocated on the basis of needs and only after some threshold level has been achieved can the remaining risks distributed in such a way that the total disvalue of these losses is minimized. An important advantage of this allocation framework is that it does not (...)
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  • In defense of an epistemic probability account of luck.Gregory Stoutenburg - 2019 - Synthese 196 (12):5099-5113.
    Many philosophers think that part of what makes an event lucky concerns how probable that event is. In this paper, I argue that an epistemic probability account of luck successfully resists recent arguments that all theories of luck, including probability theories, are subject to counterexample (Hales 2016). I argue that an event is lucky if and only if it is significant and sufficiently improbable. An event is significant when, given some reflection, the subject would regard the event as significant, and (...)
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  • Hawking radiation and analogue experiments: A Bayesian analysis.Radin Dardashti, Stephan Hartmann, Karim P. Y. Thébault & Eric Winsberg - 2019 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 67:1-11.
    We present a Bayesian analysis of the epistemology of analogue experiments with particular reference to Hawking radiation. Provided such experiments can be externally validated via universality arguments, we prove that they are confirmatory in Bayesian terms. We then provide a formal model for the scaling behaviour of the confirmation measure for multiple distinct realisations of the analogue system and isolate a generic saturation feature. Finally, we demonstrate that different potential analogue realisations could provide different levels of confirmation. Our results thus (...)
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