Giochi dei beni pubblici: il problema dei beni pubblici nella prospettiva della teoria dei giochi

The provision of public goods is an important problem in economics and the social sciences. It is often claimed that this problem has the structure of the well-known Prisoner’s Dilemma so that rational and self-interested individuals would not be able to provide any public good by spontaneous cooperation. In this paper, we argue that this pessimistic view of the possibility spontaneous cooperation is largely unjustified, since the game theoretic analysis of public goods shows how their voluntary provision is indeed feasible in a number of circumstances. We conclude by considering the implications of the game theoretic approach to the problem of public goods for political philosophy and, in particular, for the possibility of "ordered anarchy" as defended in the works of Anthony de Jasay

Unfolding the Grammar of Bayesian Confirmation: Likelihood and Antilikelihood Principles

We explore the grammar of Bayesian confirmation by focusing on some likelihood principles, including the Weak Law of Likelihood.We show that none of the likelihood principles proposed so far is satisfied by all incremental measures of confirmation, and we argue that some of these measures indeed obey new, prima facie strange, antilikelihood principles. To prove this, we introduce a new measure that violates the Weak Law of Likelihood while satisfying a strong antilikelihood condition. We conclude by hinting at some relevant links between the likelihood principles considered here and other properties of Bayesian confirmation recently explored in the literature

Approaching the truth via belief change in propositional languages

Starting from the sixties of the past century theory change has become a main concern of philosophy of science. Two of the best known formal accounts of theory change are the post-Popperian theories of verisimilitude (PPV for short) and the AGM theory of belief change (AGM for short). In this paper, we will investigate the conceptual relations between PPV and AGM and, in particular, we will ask whether the AGM rules for theory change are effective means for approaching the truth, i.e., for achieving the cognitive aim of science pointed out by PPV. First, the key ideas of PPV and AGM and their application to a particular kind of propositional theories - the so called "conjunctive propositions" - will be illustrated. Afterwards, we will prove that, as far as conjunctive propositions are concerned, AGM belief change is an effective tool for approaching the truth

Approaching probabilistic truths:introduction to the Topical Collection

After Karl Popper’s original work, several approaches were developed to provide a sound explication of the notion of verisimilitude. With few exceptions, these contributions have assumed that the truth to be approximated is deterministic. This collection of ten papers addresses the more general problem of approaching probabilistic truths. They include attempts to find appropriate measures for the closeness to probabilistic truth and to evaluate claims about such distances on the basis of empirical evidence. The papers employ multiple analytical approaches, and connect the research to related issues in the philosophy of science

A partial consequence account of truthlikeness

Popper’s original definition of truthlikeness relied on a central insight: that truthlikeness combines truth and information, in the sense that a proposition is closer to the truth the more true consequences and the less false consequences it entails. As intuitively compelling as this definition may be, it is untenable, as proved long ago; still, one can arguably rely on Popper’s intuition to provide an adequate account of truthlikeness. To this aim, we mobilize some classical work on partial entailment in defining a new measure of truthlikeness which satisfies a number of desiderata. The resulting account has some interesting and surprising connections with other accounts on the market, thus shedding new light on current attempts of systematizing different approaches to verisimilitude