Borut Trpin has raised a novel objection to Jeffrey conditionalization (JC). He argues that JC can lead to increasing confidence in a false hypothesis, based on non-misleading observations. But I show that on a standard way of understanding whether observations are misleading, that the observations in his case would be misleading. I show why Trpin’s response to this objection is inadequate, and use two probabilistic models to show that (1) the observations actually are misleading and (2) if they…
Read moreBorut Trpin has raised a novel objection to Jeffrey conditionalization (JC). He argues that JC can lead to increasing confidence in a false hypothesis, based on non-misleading observations. But I show that on a standard way of understanding whether observations are misleading, that the observations in his case would be misleading. I show why Trpin’s response to this objection is inadequate, and use two probabilistic models to show that (1) the observations actually are misleading and (2) if they are made non-misleading, JC leads to certainty in the true hypothesis. Finally, I prove that the cases that he is worried about cannot arise in general.
