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65Right decisions or happy decision-makers?Social Epistemology 21 (4). 2007.Group decisions raise a number of substantial philosophical and methodological issues. We focus on the goal of the group decision exercise itself. We ask: What should be counted as a good group decision-making result? The right decision might not be accessible to, or please, any of the group members. Conversely, a popular decision can fail to be the correct decision. In this paper we discuss what it means for a decision to be "right" and what components are required in a decision process to prod…Read more
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669Climate Models, Calibration, and ConfirmationBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (3): 609-635. 2013.We argue that concerns about double-counting—using the same evidence both to calibrate or tune climate models and also to confirm or verify that the models are adequate—deserve more careful scrutiny in climate modelling circles. It is widely held that double-counting is bad and that separate data must be used for calibration and confirmation. We show that this is far from obviously true, and that climate scientists may be confusing their targets. Our analysis turns on a Bayesian/relative-likelih…Read more
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160The Scientist qua Policy Advisor Makes Value JudgmentsPhilosophy of Science 79 (5): 893-904. 2012.Richard Rudner famously argues that the communication of scientific advice to policy makers involves ethical value judgments. His argument has, however, been rightly criticized. This article revives Rudner’s conclusion, by strengthening both his lines of argument: we generalize his initial assumption regarding the form in which scientists must communicate their results and complete his ‘backup’ argument by appealing to the difference between private and public decisions. Our conclusion that scie…Read more
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109Uncertainty, Learning, and the “Problem” of DilationErkenntnis 79 (6): 1287-1303. 2014.Imprecise probabilism—which holds that rational belief/credence is permissibly represented by a set of probability functions—apparently suffers from a problem known as dilation. We explore whether this problem can be avoided or mitigated by one of the following strategies: (a) modifying the rule by which the credal state is updated, (b) restricting the domain of reasonable credal states to those that preclude dilation
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28Review of Husain Sarkar, Group Rationality in Scientific Research (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (10). 2007.
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105Distinguishing indeterminate belief from “risk-averse” preferencesSynthese 158 (2): 189-205. 2007.I focus my discussion on the well-known Ellsberg paradox. I find good normative reasons for incorporating non-precise belief, as represented by sets of probabilities, in an Ellsberg decision model. This amounts to forgoing the completeness axiom of expected utility theory. Provided that probability sets are interpreted as genuinely indeterminate belief, such a model can moreover make the “Ellsberg choices” rationally permissible. Without some further element to the story, however, the model does…Read more
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67Preference and information , Dan Egonsson. Ashgate, 2007, XI+163 pp (review)Economics and Philosophy 25 (2): 236-242. 2009.
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86Daniel steel philosophy and the precautionary principle: Science, evidence, and environmental policyBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (4): 1195-1200. 2016.
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287Model tuning in engineering: uncovering the logicJournal of Strain Analysis for Engineering Design 51 (1): 63-71. 2015.In engineering, as in other scientific fields, researchers seek to confirm their models with real-world data. It is common practice to assess models in terms of the distance between the model outputs and the corresponding experimental observations. An important question that arises is whether the model should then be ‘tuned’, in the sense of estimating the values of free parameters to get a better fit with the data, and furthermore whether the tuned model can be confirmed with the same data used…Read more
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127Can free evidence be bad? Value of informationfor the imprecise probabilistPhilosophy of Science 83 (1): 1-28. 2016.This paper considers a puzzling conflict between two positions that are each compelling: it is irrational for an agent to pay to avoid `free' evidence before making a decision, and rational agents may have imprecise beliefs and/or desires. Indeed, we show that Good's theorem concerning the invariable choice-worthiness of free evidence does not generalise to the imprecise realm, given the plausible existing decision theories for handling imprecision. A key ingredient in the analysis, and a potent…Read more
Acton, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Probability |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Social Science |