14 found
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  1. Scoring Imprecise Credences: A Mildly Immodest Proposal.Conor Mayo-Wilson & Gregory Wheeler - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 92 (1):55-78.
    Jim Joyce argues for two amendments to probabilism. The first is the doctrine that credences are rational, or not, in virtue of their accuracy or “closeness to the truth” (1998). The second is a shift from a numerically precise model of belief to an imprecise model represented by a set of probability functions (2010). We argue that both amendments cannot be satisfied simultaneously. To do so, we employ a (slightly-generalized) impossibility theorem of Seidenfeld, Schervish, and Kadane (2012), who show that (...)
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  2. Demystifying Dilation.Arthur Paul Pedersen & Gregory Wheeler - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (6):1305-1342.
    Dilation occurs when an interval probability estimate of some event E is properly included in the interval probability estimate of E conditional on every event F of some partition, which means that one’s initial estimate of E becomes less precise no matter how an experiment turns out. Critics maintain that dilation is a pathological feature of imprecise probability models, while others have thought the problem is with Bayesian updating. However, two points are often overlooked: (1) knowing that E is stochastically (...)
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  3. A Gentle Approach to Imprecise Probabilities.Gregory Wheeler - 2022 - In Thomas Augustin, Fabio Gagliardi Cozman & Gregory Wheeler (eds.), Reflections on the Foundations of Probability and Statistics: Essays in Honor of Teddy Seidenfeld. Springer. pp. 37-67.
    The field of of imprecise probability has matured, in no small part because of Teddy Seidenfeld’s decades of original scholarship and essential contributions to building and sustaining the ISIPTA community. Although the basic idea behind imprecise probability is (at least) 150 years old, a mature mathematical theory has only taken full form in the last 30 years. Interest in imprecise probability during this period has also grown, but many of the ideas that the mature theory serves can be difficult to (...)
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  4. Changing use of formal methods in philosophy: late 2000s vs. late 2010s.Samuel C. Fletcher, Joshua Knobe, Gregory Wheeler & Brian Allan Woodcock - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):14555-14576.
    Traditionally, logic has been the dominant formal method within philosophy. Are logical methods still dominant today, or have the types of formal methods used in philosophy changed in recent times? To address this question, we coded a sample of philosophy papers from the late 2000s and from the late 2010s for the formal methods they used. The results indicate that the proportion of papers using logical methods remained more or less constant over that time period but the proportion of papers (...)
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  5. Coherence and Confirmation through Causation.Gregory Wheeler & Richard Scheines - 2013 - Mind 122 (485):135-170.
    Coherentism maintains that coherent beliefs are more likely to be true than incoherent beliefs, and that coherent evidence provides more confirmation of a hypothesis when the evidence is made coherent by the explanation provided by that hypothesis. Although probabilistic models of credence ought to be well-suited to justifying such claims, negative results from Bayesian epistemology have suggested otherwise. In this essay we argue that the connection between coherence and confirmation should be understood as a relation mediated by the causal relationships (...)
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  6. Less is More for Bayesians, Too.Gregory Wheeler - 2020 - In Riccardo Viale (ed.), Routledge Handbook on Bounded Rationality. pp. 471-483.
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  7. Why formal objections to the error theory are sound.Christine Tiefensee & Gregory Wheeler - 2022 - Analysis 82 (4):608-616.
    Recent debate about the error theory has taken a ‘formal turn’. On the one hand, there are those who argue that the error theory should be rejected because of its difficulties in providing a convincing formal account of the logic and semantics of moral claims. On the other hand, there are those who claim that such formal objections fail, maintaining that arguments against the error theory must be of a substantive rather than a formal kind. In this paper, we argue (...)
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  8. Epistemic Decision Theory's Reckoning.Conor Mayo-Wilson & Gregory Wheeler - manuscript
    Epistemic decision theory (EDT) employs the mathematical tools of rational choice theory to justify epistemic norms, including probabilism, conditionalization, and the Principal Principle, among others. Practitioners of EDT endorse two theses: (1) epistemic value is distinct from subjective preference, and (2) belief and epistemic value can be numerically quantified. We argue the first thesis, which we call epistemic puritanism, undermines the second.
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  9. Moving Beyond Sets of Probabilities.Gregory Wheeler - 2021 - Statistical Science 36 (2):201--204.
    The theory of lower previsions is designed around the principles of coherence and sure-loss avoidance, thus steers clear of all the updating anomalies highlighted in Gong and Meng's "Judicious Judgment Meets Unsettling Updating: Dilation, Sure Loss, and Simpson's Paradox" except dilation. In fact, the traditional problem with the theory of imprecise probability is that coherent inference is too complicated rather than unsettling. Progress has been made simplifying coherent inference by demoting sets of probabilities from fundamental building blocks to secondary representations (...)
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  10. Dilation and Asymmetric Relevance.Arthur Paul Pedersen & Gregory Wheeler - 2019 - Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 103:324-26.
    A characterization result of dilation in terms of positive and negative association admits an extremal counterexample, which we present together with a minor repair of the result. Dilation may be asymmetric whereas covariation itself is symmetric. Dilation is still characterized in terms of positive and negative covariation, however, once the event to be dilated has been specified.
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  11. Discounting Desirable Gambles.Gregory Wheeler - 2021 - Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 147:331-341.
    The desirable gambles framework offers the most comprehensive foundations for the theory of lower pre- visions, which in turn affords the most general ac- count of imprecise probabilities. Nevertheless, for all its generality, the theory of lower previsions rests on the notion of linear utility. This commitment to linearity is clearest in the coherence axioms for sets of desirable gambles. This paper considers two routes to relaxing this commitment. The first preserves the additive structure of the desirable gambles framework and (...)
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  12. 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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  13. Is there a logic of information?Gregory Wheeler - 2015 - Journal of Theoretical and Applied Artificial Intelligence 27 (1):95-98.
    Information-based epistemology maintains that ‘being informed’ is an independent cognitive state that cannot be reduced to knowledge or to belief, and the modal logic KTB has been proposed as a model. But what distinguishes the KTB analysis of ‘being informed’, the Brouwersche schema (B), is precisely its downfall, for no logic of information should include (B) and, more generally, no epistemic logic should include (B), either.
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  14. “Visualizing High-Dimensional Loss Landscapes with Hessian Directions”.Lucas Böttcher & Gregory Wheeler - forthcoming - Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment.
    Analyzing geometric properties of high-dimensional loss functions, such as local curvature and the existence of other optima around a certain point in loss space, can help provide a better understanding of the interplay between neural network structure, implementation attributes, and learning performance. In this work, we combine concepts from high-dimensional probability and differential geometry to study how curvature properties in lower-dimensional loss representations depend on those in the original loss space. We show that saddle points in the original space are (...)
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