7,072 research outputs found
Chances, counterfactuals and similarity
John Hawthorne in a recent paper takes issue with Lewisian accounts of counterfactuals, when relevant laws of nature are chancy. I respond to his arguments on behalf of the Lewisian, and conclude that while some can be rebutted, the case against the original Lewisian account is strong.
I develop a neo-Lewisian account of what makes for closeness of worlds. I argue that my revised version avoids Hawthorneâs challenges. I argue that this is closer to the spirit of Lewisâs first (non-chancy) proposal than is Lewisâs own suggested modification
Aggregation, Beneficence, and Chance
It is plausible to think that it is wrong to cure many peopleâs headaches rather than save someone elseâs life. On the other hand, it is plausible to think that it is not wrong to expose someone to a tiny risk of death when curing this personâs headache. I will argue that these claims are inconsistent. For if we keep taking this tiny risk then it is likely that one person dies, while many othersâ headaches are cured. In light of this inconsistency, there is a conflict in our intuitions about beneficence and chance. This conflict is perplexing. And I have not been able to find a satisfactory way of resolving it. Perhaps you can do better
Isolation and folk physics
There is a huge chasm between the notion of lawful determination that figures in fundamental physics, and the notion of causal determination that figures in the "folk physics" of everyday objects. In everyday life, we think of the behavior of an ordinary object as being determined by a small set of simple conditions. But in fundamental physics, no such conditions suffice to determine an ordinary object's behavior. What bridges the chasm is that fundamental physical laws make the folk picture of the world approximately true in certain domains. How? In part, by entailing that many objects are approximately isolated from most of their environments. Dynamical laws yield this result only in conjunction with appropriate statistical assumptions about initial conditions
Can All-Accuracy Accounts Justify Evidential Norms?
Some of the most interesting recent work in formal epistemology has focused on developing accuracy-based approaches to justifying Bayesian norms. These approaches are interesting not only because they offer new ways to justify these norms, but because they potentially offer a way to justify all of these norms by appeal to a single, attractive epistemic goal: having accurate beliefs. Recently, Easwaran & Fitelson (2012) have raised worries regarding whether such âall-accuracyâ or âpurely alethicâ approaches can accommodate and justify evidential Bayesian norms. In response, proponents of purely alethic approaches, such as Pettigrew (2013b) and Joyce (2016), have argued that scoring rule arguments provide us with compatible and purely alethic justifications for the traditional Bayesian norms, including evidential norms. In this paper I raise several challenges to this claim. First, I argue that many of the justifications these scoring rule arguments provide are not compatible. Second, I raise worries for the claim that these scoring rule arguments provide purely alethic justifications. Third, I turn to assess the more general question of whether purely alethic justifications for evidential norms are even possible, and argue that, without making some contentious assumptions, they are not. Fourth, I raise some further worries for the possibility of providing purely alethic justifications for content-sensitive evidential norms, like the Principal Principle
Pranab Kumar Sen: Life and works
In this article, we describe briefly the highlights and various
accomplishments in the personal as well as the academic life of Professor
Pranab Kumar Sen.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/193940307000000013 the IMS
Collections (http://www.imstat.org/publications/imscollections.htm) by the
Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Indifference to Anti-Humean Chances
An indifference principle says that your credences should be distributed uniformly over each of the possibilities you recognise. A chance deference principle says that your credences should be aligned with the chances. My thesis is that, if we are anti-Humeans about chance, then these two principles are incompatible. Anti-Humeans think that it is possible for the actual frequencies to depart from the chances. So long as you recognise possibilities like this, you cannot both spread your credences evenly and defer to the chances. I discuss some weaker forms of indifference which will allow anti-Humeans to defer to the chances
Chance, Credence and Circles
This is a discussion of Richard Pettigrew's book "Accuracy and the Laws of Credence". I target Pettigrew's application of the accuracy framework to derive chance-credence principles. My principal contention is that Pettigrew's preferred version of the argument might in one sense be circular and, moreover, that Pettigrew's premises have content that go beyond that of standard chance-credence principles
Did the Universe Have a Chance?
In a world awash in statistical patterns, should we conclude that the universeâs evolution or genesis is somehow subject to chance? I draw attention to alternatives that must be acknowledged if we are to have an adequate assessment of what chance the universe might have had
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