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65Principal Values and Weak ExpectationsMind 123 (490): 517-531. 2014.This paper evaluates a recent method proposed by Jeremy Gwiazda for calculating the value of gambles that fail to have expected values in the standard sense. I show that Gwiazda’s method fails to give answers for many gambles that do have standardly defined expected values. However, a slight modification of his method (based on the mathematical notion of the ‘Cauchy principal value’ of an integral), is in fact a proper extension of both his method and the method of ‘weak expectations’. I show th…Read more
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342Interview with Kenny EaswaranThe Reasoner 15 (2): 9-12. 2021.Bill D'Alessandro talks to Kenny Easwaran about fractal music, Zoom conferences, being a good referee, teaching in math and philosophy, the rationalist community and its relationship to academia, decision-theoretic pluralism, and the city of Manhattan, Kansas.
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48Quitting Certainties: A Bayesian Framework Modeling Degrees of Belief (review)Philosophical Review 125 (1): 143-148. 2016.
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128Formal EpistemologyJournal of Philosophical Logic 44 (6): 651-662. 2015.Doxastic TheoriesThe application of formal tools to questions related to epistemology is of course not at all new. However, there has been a surge of interest in the field now known as “formal epistemology” over the past decade, with two annual conference series and an annual summer school at Carnegie Mellon University, in addition to many one-off events devoted to the field. A glance at the programs of these series illustrates the wide-ranging set of topics that have been grouped under this nam…Read more
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541Bayesianism II: Applications and CriticismsPhilosophy Compass 6 (5): 321-332. 2011.In the first paper, I discussed the basic claims of Bayesianism (that degrees of belief are important, that they obey the axioms of probability theory, and that they are rationally updated by either standard or Jeffrey conditionalization) and the arguments that are often used to support them. In this paper, I will discuss some applications these ideas have had in confirmation theory, epistemol- ogy, and statistics, and criticisms of these applications.
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469Why Countable Additivity?Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (1): 53-61. 2013.It is sometimes alleged that arguments that probability functions should be countably additive show too much, and that they motivate uncountable additivity as well. I show this is false by giving two naturally motivated arguments for countable additivity that do not motivate uncountable additivity
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232Logic and ProbabilityJournal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 27 (2): 229-253. 2010.As is clear from the other articles in this volume, logic has applications in a broad range of areas of philosophy. If logic is taken to include the mathematical disciplines of set theory, model theory, proof theory, and recursion theory (as well as first-order logic, second-order logic, and modal logic), then the only other area of mathematics with such wide-ranging applications in philosophy is probability theory
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102Bullshit activitiesAnalytic Philosophy. forthcoming.Frankfurt gave an account of “bullshit” as a statement made without regard to truth or falsity. Austin argued that a large amount of language consists of speech acts aimed at goals other than truth or falsity. We don't want our account of bullshit to include all performatives. I develop a modification of Frankfurt's account that makes interesting and useful categorizations of various speech acts as bullshit or not and show that this account generalizes to many other kinds of act as well. I show …Read more
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215Expected Accuracy Supports Conditionalization—and Conglomerability and ReflectionPhilosophy of Science 80 (1): 119-142. 2013.Expected accuracy arguments have been used by several authors (Leitgeb and Pettigrew, and Greaves and Wallace) to support the diachronic principle of conditionalization, in updates where there are only finitely many possible propositions to learn. I show that these arguments can be extended to infinite cases, giving an argument not just for conditionalization but also for principles known as ‘conglomerability’ and ‘reflection’. This shows that the expected accuracy approach is stronger than has …Read more
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583Bayesianism I: Introduction and Arguments in FavorPhilosophy Compass 6 (5): 312-320. 2011.Bayesianism is a collection of positions in several related fields, centered on the interpretation of probability as something like degree of belief, as contrasted with relative frequency, or objective chance. However, Bayesianism is far from a unified movement. Bayesians are divided about the nature of the probability functions they discuss; about the normative force of this probability function for ordinary and scientific reasoning and decision making; and about what relation (if any) holds be…Read more
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University of California, IrvineThe Department of Logic and Philosophy of ScienceAssociate Professor
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Irvine, California, United States of America