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104An Impossibility Result for Coherence RankingsPhilosophical Studies 128 (1): 77-91. 2006.If we receive information from multiple independent and partially reliable information sources, then whether we are justified to believe these information items is affected by how reliable the sources are, by how well the information coheres with our background beliefs and by how internally coherent the information is. We consider the following question. Is coherence a separable determinant of our degree of belief, i.e. is it the case that the more coherent the new information is, the more justi…Read more
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136Bets on Hats: On Dutch Books Against Groups, Degrees of Belief as Betting Rates, and Group-ReflectionEpisteme 8 (3): 281-300. 2011.The Puzzle of the Hats is a puzzle in social epistemology. It describes a situation in which a group of rational agents with common priors and common goals seems vulnerable to a Dutch book if they are exposed to different information and make decisions independently. Situations in which this happens involve violations of what might be called the Group-Reflection Principle. As it turns out, the Dutch book is flawed. It is based on the betting interpretation of the subjective probabilities, but ig…Read more
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251Affirmative action - a Polish example?In Robert Solomon (ed.), Above the Bottom Line - An Introduction to Business Ethics, Harcourt. pp. 337-9. 1994.I argue that the post-1990 practice of giving leadership positions in companies to non-ex-communists is an example of affirmative action.
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100A Dutch book for group decision-making?In Benedikt Löwe, Eric Pacuit & Jan-Willem Romeijn (eds.), Foundations of the Formal Sciences Vi: Probabilistic Reasoning and Reasoning With Probabilities. Studies in Logic, College Publication. pp. 91-101. 2008.The Puzzle of the Hats is a betting arrangement which seems to show that a Dutch book can be made against a group of rational players with common priors who act in the common interest and have full trust in the other players’ rationality. But we show that appearances are misleading—no such Dutch book can be made. There are four morals. First, what can be learned from the puzzle is that there is a class of situations in which credences and betting rates diverge. Second, there is an analogy betwee…Read more
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51Welfarist evaluations of decision rules for boards of representativesSocial Choice and Welfare 29 (4): 581-608. 2007.We consider a decision board with representatives who vote on proposals on behalf of their constituencies. We look for decision rules that realize utilitarian and (welfarist) egalitarian ideals. We set up a simple model and obtain roughly the following results. If the interests of people from the same constituency are uncorrelated, then a weighted rule with square root weights does best in terms of both ideals. If there are perfect correlations, then the utilitarian ideal requires proportional w…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Economics |
Moral Psychology |
Formal Epistemology |
Epistemic Paradoxes |