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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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201Arguments for probabilism aim to undergird/motivate a synchronic probabilistic coherence norm for partial beliefs. Standard arguments for probabilism are all of the form: An agent S has a non-probabilistic partial belief function b iff (⇐⇒) S has some “bad” property B (in virtue of the fact that their p.b.f. b has a certain kind of formal property F). These arguments rest on Theorems (⇒) and Converse Theorems (⇐): b is non-Pr ⇐⇒ b has formal property F.
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69Probability and LogicPhilosophy Compass 9 (12): 876-883. 2014.Probability and logic are two branches of mathematics that have important philosophical applications. This article discusses several areas of intersection between them. Several involve the role for probability in giving semantics for logic or the role of logic in governing assignments of probability. Some involve probability over non-classical logic or self-referential sentences
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126A classification of Newcomb problems and decision theoriesSynthese 198 (Suppl 27): 6415-6434. 2019.Newcomb-like problems are classified by the payoff table of their act-state pairs, and the causal structure that gives rise to the act-state correlation. Decision theories are classified by the one or more points of intervention whose causal role is taken to be relevant to rationality in various problems. Some decision theories suggest an inherent conflict between different notions of rationality that are all relevant. Some issues with causal modeling raise problems for decision theories in the …Read more
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91The Concept of Rationality for a CityTopoi 40 (2): 409-421. 2019.The central aim of this paper is to argue that there is a meaningful sense in which a concept of rationality can apply to a city. The idea will be that a city is rational to the extent that the collective practices of its people enable diverse inhabitants to simultaneously live the kinds of life they are each trying to live. This has significant implications for the varieties of social practices that constitute being more or less rational. Some of these implications may be welcome to a theorist …Read more
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102Infinity, Causation, and Paradox, by Alexander PrussMind 129 (516): 1287-1291. 2019._ Infinity, Causation, and Paradox _, by PrussAlexander. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii + 207.
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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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339Interview 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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University of California, IrvineThe Department of Logic and Philosophy of ScienceAssociate Professor
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Irvine, California, United States of America