•  15
    Saturday Round Table Panel
    with Allan Gibbard, Jim Joyce, and Brian Skyrms
  •  119
    Deliberation welcomes prediction
    Episteme 13 (4): 507-528. 2016.
    According to the so-called ‘deliberation crowds out prediction’ thesis, while deliberating about what you’ll do, you cannot rationally have credences for what you’ll do – you cannot rationally have option-credences. Versions of the thesis have been defended by authors such as Spohn, Levi, Gilboa, Price, Louise, and others. After registering a number of concerns about the thesis, I rehearse and rebut many of the main arguments for it, grouped according to their main themes: agency, vacuity, betti…Read more
  •  3542
    A Tale of Two Epistemologies?
    with Hanti Lin
    Res Philosophica 94 (2): 207-232. 2017.
    So-called “traditional epistemology” and “Bayesian epistemology” share a word, but it may often seem that the enterprises hardly share a subject matter. They differ in their central concepts. They differ in their main concerns. They differ in their main theoretical moves. And they often differ in their methodology. However, in the last decade or so, there have been a number of attempts to build bridges between the two epistemologies. Indeed, many would say that there is just one branch of philos…Read more
  •  38
    Crimmins, Gonzales and Moore
    with Daniel Stoljar
    Analysis 61 (3): 208-213. 2001.
    Gonzales tells Mark Crimmins (1992) that Crimmins knows him under two guises, and that under his other guise Crimmins thinks him an idiot. Knowing his cleverness, but not knowing which guise he has in mind, Crimmins trusts Gonzales but does not know which of his beliefs to revise. He therefore asserts to Gonzales. (FBI) I falsely believe that you are an idiot.
  •  1
    The Conditional Construal of Conditional Probability
    Dissertation, Princeton University. 1993.
    Very roughly, the conditional construal of conditional probability is the hypothesis that the conditional probability P equals the probability of the conditional 'if A, then B'. My main purposes are to hone this rough statement down to various precise versions of the Hypothesis, as I call it, and to argue that virtually none of them is tenable. ;In S 1, I distinguish four versions of the Hypothesis. The subsequent four sections are largely an opinionated historical survey, tracing the motivation…Read more
  •  163
    This paper is partly a tribute to Richard Jeffrey, partly a reflection on some of his writings, The Logic of Decision in particular. I begin with a brief biography and some fond reminiscences of Dick. I turn to some of the key tenets of his version of Bayesianism. All of these tenets are deployed in my discussion of his response to the St. Petersburg paradox, a notorious problem for decision theory that involves a game of infinite expectation. Prompted by that paradox, I conclude with some sugge…Read more
  •  216
    According to finite frequentism, the probability of an attribute A in a finite reference class B is the relative frequency of actual occurrences of A within B. I present fifteen arguments against this position.
  •  60
    In Defense of Hume’s Balancing of Probabilities in the Miracles Argument
    Southwest Philosophy Review 11 (1): 111-118. 1995.
    I vindicate Hume’s argument against belief in miracle reports against a prevalent objection. Hume has us balance the probability of a miracle’s occurrence against the probability of its being falsely attested to, and argues that the latter must inevitably be the greater; thus, reason requires us to reject any miracle report. The "flaw" in this reasoning, according to Butler and many others, is that it proves too much--it counsels us to never believe historians, newspaper reports of lottery resul…Read more
  •  29
    Bayes or Bust? (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (3): 707-711. 2000.
    A battered old philosophy of science vehicle heads west towards the Bayesian gold fields. Odd bits of junk are tied to the roof. In the rear window is a sign that reads “Bayes or Bust!” So far the story is not new. But at the wheel is a famous race car driver who has accelerated out of Newtonian space-time and decelerated back again.. Who could resist going along for the ride? We couldn’t—and you shouldn’t either.
  •  147
    Unexpected Expectations
    Mind 123 (490): 533-567. 2014.
    A decade ago, Harris Nover and I introduced the Pasadena game, which we argued gives rise to a new paradox in decision theory even more troubling than the St Petersburg paradox. Gwiazda's and Smith's articles in this volume both offer revisionist solutions. I critically engage with both articles. They invite reflections on a number of deep issues in the foundations of decision theory, which I hope to bring out. These issues include: some ways in which orthodox decision theory might be supplement…Read more
  •  224
    The Cable Guy paradox
    Analysis 65 (2): 112-119. 2005.
    The Cable Guy is coming. You have to be home in order for him to install your new cable service, but to your chagrin he cannot tell you exactly when he will come. He will definitely come between 8.a.m. and 4 p.m. tomorrow, but you have no more information than that. I offer to keep you company while you wait. To make things more interesting, we decide now to bet on the Cable Guy’s arrival time. We subdivide the relevant part of the day into two 4-hour long intervals, ‘morning’: (8, 12], and ‘aft…Read more
  •  90
    Probabilities of counterfactuals and counterfactual probabilities
    Journal of Applied Logic 12 (3): 235-251. 2014.
    Probabilities figure centrally in much of the literature on the semantics of conditionals. I find this surprising: it accords a special status to conditionals that other parts of language apparently do not share. I critically discuss two notable ‘probabilities first’ accounts of counterfactuals, due to Edgington and Leitgeb. According to Edgington, counterfactuals lack truth values but have probabilities. I argue that this combination gives rise to a number of problems. According to Leitgeb, cou…Read more
  •  128
    Counterfactuals are a species of conditionals. They are propositions or sentences, expressed by or equivalent to subjunctive conditionals of the form 'if it were the case that A, then it would be the case that B', or 'if it had been the case that A, then it would have been the case that B'; A is called the antecedent, and B the consequent. Counterfactual reasoning typically involves the entertaining of hypothetical states of affairs: the antecedent is believed or presumed to be false, or contrar…Read more
  •  200
    The Fall of “Adams' Thesis”?
    Journal of Logic, Language and Information 21 (2): 145-161. 2012.
    The so-called ‘Adams’ Thesis’ is often understood as the claim that the assertibility of an indicative conditional equals the corresponding conditional probability—schematically: $${({\rm AT})}\qquad\qquad\quad As(A\rightarrow B)=P({B|A}),{\rm provided}\quad P(A)\neq 0.$$ The Thesis is taken by many to be a touchstone of any theorizing about indicative conditionals. Yet it is unclear exactly what the Thesis is . I suggest some precise statements of it. I then rebut a number of arguments that hav…Read more
  •  77
    Making Ado Without Expectations
    Mind 125 (499): 829-857. 2016.
    This paper is a response to Paul Bartha’s ‘Making Do Without Expectations’. We provide an assessment of the strengths and limitations of two notable extensions of standard decision theory: relative expectation theory and Paul Bartha’s relative utility theory. These extensions are designed to provide intuitive answers to some well-known problems in decision theory involving gaps in expectations. We argue that both RET and RUT go some way towards providing solutions to the problems in question but…Read more
  •  118
    Nuke 'Em Problems
    Analysis 51 (4). 1991.
  •  88
    Interview: “Masses of formal philosophy”
    In Vincent F. Hendricks & John Symons (eds.), Masses of Formal Philosophy, Automatic Press/vip. 2006.
    I came to philosophy as a refugee from mathematics and statistics. I was impressed by their power at codifying and precisifying antecedently understood but rather nebulous concepts, and at clarifying and exploring their interrelations. I enjoyed learning many of the great theorems of probability theory—equations rich in ‘P’s of this and of that. But I wondered what is this ‘P’? What do statements of probability mean? When I asked one of my professors, he looked at me like I needed medication. Th…Read more
  •  109
    Confirmation
    In Martin Curd & Stathis Psillos (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science, Routledge. 2005.
    Confirmation theory is intended to codify the evidential bearing of observations on hypotheses, characterizing relations of inductive “support” and “counter­support” in full generality. The central task is to understand what it means to say that datum E confirms or supports a hypothesis H when E does not logically entail H.
  •  523
    What conditional probability could not be
    Synthese 137 (3): 273--323. 2003.
    Kolmogorov''s axiomatization of probability includes the familiarratio formula for conditional probability: 0).$$ " align="middle" border="0">.
  •  282
    Pascal's Wager
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
    “Pascal's Wager” is the name given to an argument due to Blaise Pascal for believing, or for at least taking steps to believe, in God. The name is somewhat misleading, for in a single paragraph of his Pensées, Pascal apparently presents at least three such arguments, each of which might be called a ‘wager’ — it is only the final of these that is traditionally referred to as “Pascal's Wager”. We find in it the extraordinary confluence of several important strands of thought: the justification of …Read more
  •  147
    Scotching Dutch Books?
    Philosophical Perspectives 19 (1): 139-151. 2005.
    The Dutch Book argument, like Route 66, is about to turn 80. It is arguably the most celebrated argument for subjective Bayesianism. Start by rejecting the Cartesian idea that doxastic attitudes are ‘all-or-nothing’; rather, they are far more nuanced degrees of belief, for short credences, susceptible to fine-grained numerical measurement. Add a coherentist assumption that the rationality of a doxastic state consists in its internal consistency. The remaining problem is to determine what consist…Read more
  •  155
    Minkish dispositions
    Synthese 197 (11): 4795-4811. 2020.
    Start with an ordinary disposition ascription, like ‘the wire is live’ or ‘the glass is fragile’. Lewis gives a canonical template for what he regards as the analysandum of such an ascription:“Something x is disposed at time t to give response r to stimulus s”.For example, the wire is disposed at noon to conduct electrical current when touched by a conductor.What Lewis calls “the simple conditional analysis” gives putatively necessary and sufficient conditions for the analysandum in terms of a c…Read more
  •  111
    Epr
    Foundations of Physics 22 (3): 313-332. 1992.
    We present an exegesis of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument for the incompleteness of quantum mechanics, and defend it against the critique in Fine. (1) We contend,contra Fine, that it compares favorably with an argument reconstructed by him from a letter by Einstein to Schrödinger; and also with one given by Einstein in a letter to Popper. All three arguments turn on a dubious assumption of “separability,” which accords separate elements of reality to space-like separated systems. We discuss…Read more
  •  875
    Uncertainty governs our lives. From the unknowns of living with the risks of terrorism to developing policies on genetically modified foods, or disaster planning for catastrophic climate change, how we conceptualize, evaluate and cope with uncertainty drives our actions and deployment of resources, decisions and priorities.
  •  159
    Triviality Pursuit
    Topoi 30 (1): 3-15. 2011.
    The thesis that probabilities of conditionals are conditional probabilities has putatively been refuted many times by so-called ‘triviality results’, although it has also enjoyed a number of resurrections. In this paper I assault it yet again with a new such result. I begin by motivating the thesis and discussing some of the philosophical ramifications of its fluctuating fortunes. I will canvas various reasons, old and new, why the thesis seems plausible, and why we should care about its fate. I…Read more
  •  174
    Dutch Book Arguments
    In Paul Anand, Prasanta Pattanaik & Clemens Puppe (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Rational and Social Choice, Oxford University Press. 2008.
    in The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Social Responsibility, ed. Paul Anand, Prasanta Pattanaik, and Clemens Puppe, forthcoming 2007.