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  1. Ramsey and Joyce on Deliberation and Prediction.Yang Liu & Huw Price - 2020 - Synthese 197:4365-4386.
    Can an agent deliberating about an action A hold a meaningful credence that she will do A? 'No', say some authors, for 'Deliberation Crowds Out Prediction' (DCOP). Others disagree, but we argue here that such disagreements are often terminological. We explain why DCOP holds in a Ramseyian operationalist model of credence, but show that it is trivial to extend this model so that DCOP fails. We then discuss a model due to Joyce, and show that Joyce's rejection of DCOP rests (...)
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  2. Heart of DARCness.Yang Liu & Huw Price - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (1):136-150.
    There is a long-standing disagreement in the philosophy of probability and Bayesian decision theory about whether an agent can hold a meaningful credence about an upcoming action, while she deliberates about what to do. Can she believe that it is, say, 70% probable that she will do A, while she chooses whether to do A? No, say some philosophers, for Deliberation Crowds Out Prediction (DCOP), but others disagree. In this paper, we propose a valid core for DCOP, and identify terminological (...)
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  3. A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory.Haim Gaifman & Yang Liu - 2018 - Synthese 195 (10):4205--4241.
    In his classic book “the Foundations of Statistics” Savage developed a formal system of rational decision making. The system is based on (i) a set of possible states of the world, (ii) a set of consequences, (iii) a set of acts, which are functions from states to consequences, and (iv) a preference relation over the acts, which represents the preferences of an idealized rational agent. The goal and the culmination of the enterprise is a representation theorem: Any preference relation that (...)
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  4. Countable Additivity, Idealization, and Conceptual Realism.Yang Liu - 2020 - Economics and Philosophy 36 (1):127-147.
    This paper addresses the issue of finite versus countable additivity in Bayesian probability and decision theory -- in particular, Savage's theory of subjective expected utility and personal probability. I show that Savage's reason for not requiring countable additivity in his theory is inconclusive. The assessment leads to an analysis of various highly idealised assumptions commonly adopted in Bayesian theory, where I argue that a healthy dose of, what I call, conceptual realism is often helpful in understanding the interpretational value of (...)
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  5. Incomplete Preference and Indeterminate Comparative Probabilities.Yang Liu - 2022 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (3):795-810.
    The notion of comparative probability defined in Bayesian subjectivist theory stems from an intuitive idea that, for a given pair of events, one event may be considered “more probable” than the other. Yet it is conceivable that there are cases where it is indeterminate as to which event is more probable, due to, e.g., lack of robust statistical information. We take that these cases involve indeterminate comparative probabilities. This paper provides a Savage-style decision-theoretic foundation for indeterminate comparative probabilities.
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  6. "Click!" Bait for Causalists.Huw Price & Yang Liu - 2018 - In Arif Ahmed (ed.), Newcomb's Problem. Cambridge University Press. pp. 160-179.
    Causalists and Evidentialists can agree about the right course of action in an (apparent) Newcomb problem, if the causal facts are not as initially they seem. If declining $1,000 causes the Predictor to have placed $1m in the opaque box, CDT agrees with EDT that one-boxing is rational. This creates a difficulty for Causalists. We explain the problem with reference to Dummett's work on backward causation and Lewis's on chance and crystal balls. We show that the possibility that the causal (...)
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  7. The Sure-thing Principle and P2.Yang Liu - 2017 - Economics Letters 159:221-223.
    This paper offers a fine analysis of different versions of the well known sure-thing principle. We show that Savage's formal formulation of the principle, i.e., his second postulate (P2), is strictly stronger than what is intended originally.
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  8. Editorial to “Decision theory and the future of AI”.Yang Liu, Stephan Hartmann & Huw Price - 2021 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 27):6413-6414.
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  9. Context-dependent Utilities.Haim Gaifman & Yang Liu - 2015 - In Wiebe Van Der Hoek, Wesley H. Holliday & Wen Fang Wang (eds.), Logic, Rationality, and Interaction. Springer. pp. 90-101.
    Savage's framework of subjective preference among acts provides a paradigmatic derivation of rational subjective probabilities within a more general theory of rational decisions. The system is based on a set of possible states of the world, and on acts, which are functions that assign to each state a consequence€. The representation theorem states that the given preference between acts is determined by their expected utilities, based on uniquely determined probabilities (assigned to sets of states), and numeric utilities assigned to consequences. (...)
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  10. Two Tales of Epistemic Models.Yang Liu - 2019 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 8 (4):291-302.
    This short paper has two parts. First,we prove a generalisation of Aumann’s surprising impossibility result in the context of rational decision making. We then move, in the second part, to discuss the interpretational meaning of some formal setups of epistemic models, and we do so by means of presenting an interesting puzzle in epistemic logic. The aim is to highlight certain problematic aspects of these epistemic systems concerning first/third-person asymmetry which underlies both parts of the story. This asymmetry, we argue, (...)
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  11. Frege's Begriffsschrift is Indeed First-Order Complete.Yang Liu - 2017 - History and Philosophy of Logic 38 (4):342-344.
    It is widely taken that the first-order part of Frege's Begriffsschrift is complete. However, there does not seem to have been a formal verification of this received claim. The general concern is that Frege's system is one axiom short in the first-order predicate calculus comparing to, by now, the standard first-order theory. Yet Frege has one extra inference rule in his system. Then the question is whether Frege's first-order calculus is still deductively sufficient as far as the first-order completeness is (...)
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