Cartesian Knowledge and Confirmation

Bayesian conceptions of evidence have been invoked in recent arguments regarding the existence of God, the hypothesis of multiple physical universes, and the Doomsday Argument. Philosophers writing on these topics often claim that, given a Bayesian account of evidence, our existence or something entailed by our existence (perhaps in conjunction with some background knowledge or assumption) may serve as evidence for each of us. In this paper, I argue that this widespread view is mistaken. The mere fact of one's existence qua conscious creature cannot serve as evidence on the standard Bayesian conception of evidence because knowledge of one's existence is a necessary part of the background knowledge relative to which all epistemic probabilities are defined. It follows that some formulations of the fine-tuning argument (for theism or a multiverse), the argument from consciousness (for theism) and a rejoinder to the Doomsday argument are mistaken

A Conflict between Indexical Credal Transparency and Relevance Confirmation

According to the probabilistic relevance account of confirmation, E confirms H relative to background knowledge K just in case P(H/K&E) \u3e P(H/K). This requires an inequality between the rational degree of belief in H determined relative to two bodies of total knowledge which are such that one (K&E) includes the other (K) as a proper part. In this paper, I argue that it is quite plausible that there are no two possible bodies of total knowledge for ideally rational agents meeting this requirement. Hence, the positive relevance account may have to be rejected

Dutch Books and Logical Form

Dutch Book Arguments (DBAs) have been invoked to support various requirements of rationality. Some are plausible: probabilism and conditionalization. Others are less so: credal transparency and reflection. Anna Mahtani has argued for a new understanding of DBAs which, she claims, allow us to keep the DBAs for probabilism (and perhaps conditionalization) and reject the DBAs for credal transparency and reflection. I argue that Mahtani’s new account fails as (a) it does not support highly plausible requirements of rational coherence and (b) it does not, even setting aside the first objection, succeed in undermining the DBAs for credal transparency or reflection

No Double-Halfer Embarrassment: A Reply to Titelbaum

“Double-halfers” think that throughout the Sleeping Beauty Scenario, Beauty ought to maintain a credence of 1/2 in the proposition that the fair coin toss governing the experimental protocol comes up heads. Titelbaum (2012) introduces a novel variation on the standard scenario, one involving an additional coin toss, and claims that the double-halfer is committed to the absurd and embarrassing result that Beauty’s credence in an indexical proposition concerning the outcome of a future fair coin toss is not 1/2. I argue that there is no reason to regard the credence required by the double-halfer as any less acceptable than the one deemed required by Titelbaum

Review of A Priori Justification

A review of Albert Casullo's "A Priori Justification" (Oxford University Press)

Intuitions as evidence

This essay addresses the use of intuitions as evidence in contemporary analytic philosophy. Chapter 1 demonstrates that intuitions are currently treated as the primary source of evidence in philosophical investigation. Chapter 2 defends an account of intuition on which an intuition that p involves p's seeming necessarily true. Chapter 3 takes up one broad strand of contemporary skepticism about the evidential value of intuitions. It outlines some contemporary arguments against the use of intuitions in moral philosophy, semantics, modal metaphysics, and epistemology. It concludes with an outline of the general argument form of which the particular arguments presented are instances. Chapter 4 explains why one contemporary attempt to meet this kind of skepticism fails, and then goes on to argue that the skeptical arguments fail because they are unsupported and self-defeating. Chapter 5 turns to a more general ground of skepticism about intuitions: the claim that we have no independent assurance of their reliability. Drawing on the work of Thomas Reid and William Alston, it shows that this fact cannot reasonably ground a skepticism restricted to intuition because the same is true of every one of our basic faculties

SARAL: A Low-Resource Cross-Lingual Domain-Focused Information Retrieval System for Effective Rapid Document Triage

With the increasing democratization of elec-tronic media, vast information resources areavailable in less-frequently-taught languagessuch as Swahili or Somali.That informa-tion, which may be crucially important andnot available elsewhere, can be difficult formonolingual English speakers to effectivelyaccess. In this paper we present SARAL, anend-to-end cross-lingual information retrieval(CLIR) and summarization system for low-resource languages that 1) enables Englishspeakers to search foreign language reposito-ries of text and audio using English queries,2) summarizes the retrieved documents in En-glish with respect to a particular informa-tion need, and 3) provides complete transcrip-tions and translations as needed. The SARALsystem achieved the top end-to-end perfor-mance in the most recent IARPA MATERIALCLIR+summarization evaluations