-
28Remarks on Ángel Pinillos’s Why We DoubtInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 1-9. forthcoming.In these brief remarks, I describe the author’s Bayesian explication of the narrow function of the meta-cognitive, heuristic algorithm (pbs) that is at the heart of his psychological explanation of why we entertain skeptical doubts. I provide some critical remarks, and an alternative Bayesian approach that is (to my mind) somewhat more elegant than the author’s.
-
Symmetries and asymmetries in evidential supportIn Antony Eagle (ed.), Philosophy of Probability: Contemporary Readings, Routledge. 2011.
-
Closure, Counter-Closure, and Inferential KnowledgeIn Rodrigo Borges, Claudio de Almeida & Peter David Klein (eds.), Explaining Knowledge: New Essays on the Gettier Problem, Oxford University Press. pp. 312-324. 2017.The chapter begins with some general remarks about closure and counter-closure, and is followed with a discussion of the following: I (a) review some (alleged) counterexamples to counter-closure, I then continue by (b) discussing a popular strategy for responding to such counterexamples to counter-closure, and finally I (c) pose a dilemma for this popular strategy. Once I have discussed these three points I conclude the chapter by proposing that we reject counter-closure, but at the same time th…Read more
-
821Deference Done BetterPhilosophical Perspectives 35 (1): 99-150. 2021.There are many things—call them ‘experts’—that you should defer to in forming your opinions. The trouble is, many experts are modest: they’re less than certain that they are worthy of deference. When this happens, the standard theories of deference break down: the most popular (“Reflection”-style) principles collapse to inconsistency, while their most popular (“New-Reflection”-style) variants allow you to defer to someone while regarding them as an anti-expert. We propose a middle way: deferring…Read more
-
Part IV. Collective entities and formal epistemology. Individual coherence and group coherenceIn Jennifer Lackey (ed.), Essays in Collective Epistemology, Oxford University Press. 2014.
-
65A Problem for Confirmation Measure ZPhilosophy of Science 88 (4): 726-730. 2021.In this article, I present a serious problem for confirmation measure Z.
-
1125Four Approaches to SuppositionErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (26): 58-98. 2022.Suppositions can be introduced in either the indicative or subjunctive mood. The introduction of either type of supposition initiates judgments that may be either qualitative, binary judgments about whether a given proposition is acceptable or quantitative, numerical ones about how acceptable it is. As such, accounts of qualitative/quantitative judgment under indicative/subjunctive supposition have been developed in the literature. We explore these four different types of theories by systematica…Read more
-
190Two Approaches to Belief RevisionErkenntnis 84 (3): 487-518. 2019.In this paper, we compare and contrast two methods for the revision of qualitative beliefs. The first method is generated by a simplistic diachronic Lockean thesis requiring coherence with the agent’s posterior credences after conditionalization. The second method is the orthodox AGM approach to belief revision. Our primary aim is to determine when the two methods may disagree in their recommendations and when they must agree. We establish a number of novel results about their relative behavior.…Read more
-
41Confirmation, causation, and Simpson's paradoxEpisteme 14 (3): 297-309. 2017.ABSTRACTIn this paper, I review some recent treatments of Simpson's Paradox, and I propose a new rationalizing explanation of its paradoxicality.
-
IntroductionIn Cherie Braden, Rodrigo Borges & Branden Fitelson (eds.), Themes From Klein, Springer Verlag. 2019.
-
307How Not to Detect DesignThe Design Inference. William A. DembskiPhilosophy of Science 66 (3): 472-488. 1999.As every philosopher knows, “the design argument” concludes that God exists from premisses that cite the adaptive complexity of organisms or the lawfulness and orderliness of the whole universe. Since 1859, it has formed the intellectual heart of creationist opposition to the Darwinian hypothesis that organisms evolved their adaptive features by the mindless process of natural selection. Although the design argument developed as a defense of theism, the logic of the argument in fact encompasses …Read more
-
84Probability, confirmation, and the conjunction fallacyThinking and Reasoning 14 (2): 182-199. 2008.The conjunction fallacy has been a key topic in debates on the rationality of human reasoning and its limitations. Despite extensive inquiry, however, the attempt of providing a satisfactory account of the phenomenon has proven challenging. Here, we elaborate the suggestion (first discussed by Sides et al., 2001) that in standard conjunction problems the fallacious probability judgments experimentally observed are typically guided by sound assessments of confirmation relations, meant in terms of…Read more
-
265Logical Foundations of Evidential SupportPhilosophy of Science 73 (5): 500-512. 2006.Carnap's inductive logic (or confirmation) project is revisited from an "increase in firmness" (or probabilistic relevance) point of view. It is argued that Carnap's main desiderata can be satisfied in this setting, without the need for a theory of "logical probability." The emphasis here will be on explaining how Carnap's epistemological desiderata for inductive logic will need to be modified in this new setting. The key move is to abandon Carnap's goal of bridging confirmation and credence, in…Read more
-
44• Several recent Bayesian discussions make use of “approximation” – Earman on the Quantitative Old Evidence Problem – Vranas on Quantitative Approaches to the Ravens Paradox – Dorling’s Quantitative Approach to Duhem–Quine – Strevens’s Quantitative Approach to Duhem–Quine – rThere are also examples not involving confirmation: E.g.
-
102This talk is (mainly) about the relationship two types of epistemic norms: accuracy norms and coherence norms. A simple example that everyone will be familiar with
-
41detail a question that, for a quarter of a century, remained open despite intense study by various researchers. Is the formula XC B = e(x e(e(e( ) e( )) z)) a single axiom for the classical equivalential calculus when the rules of inference consist..
-
165Favoring, Likelihoodism, and Bayesianism (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (3): 666-672. 2011.This (brief) note is about the (evidential) “favoring” relation. Pre-theoretically, favoring is a three-place (epistemic) relation, between an evidential proposition E and two hypotheses H1 and H2. Favoring relations are expressed via locutions of the form: E favors H1 over H2. Strictly speaking, favoring should really be thought of as a four-place relation, between E, H1, H2, and a corpus of background evidence K. But, for present purposes (which won't address issues involving K), I will suppre…Read more
-
17Review of Richard Swinburne (ed.), Bayes's Theorem (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2003 (11). 2003.
-
135Comments and Criticism: Measuring Confirmation and EvidenceJournal of Philosophy 97 (12): 663-672. 2000.Bayesian epistemology suggests various ways of measuring the support that a piece of evidence provides a hypothesis. Such measures are defined in terms of a subjective probability assignment, pr, over propositions entertained by an agent. The most standard measure (where “H” stands for “hypothesis” and “E” stands for “evidence”) is: the difference measure: d(H,E) = pr(H/E) - pr(H).0 This may be called a “positive (probabilistic) relevance measure” of confirmation, since, according to it, a piece…Read more
-
36Certain distributivity results for Lukasiewicz’s infinite-valued logic Lℵ0 are proved axiomatically (for the first time) with the help of the automated reasoning program Otter [16]. In addition, non -distributivity results are established for a wide variety of positive substructural logics by the use of logical matrices discovered with the automated model findingprograms Mace [15] and MaGIC [25].
-
74Let Ln be a sentential language with n atomic sentences {A1, . . . , An}. Let Sn = {s1, . . . , s2n} be the set of 2n state descriptions of Ln, in the following, canonical lexicographical truth-table order: State Description A1 A2 · · · An−1 An T T T T T s1 = A1 & A2 & · · · &An−1 & An T T T T F s1 = A1 & A2 & · · · &An−1 & ¬An T T T F T s3 = A1 & A2 & · · · & ¬An−1 & An T T T F F s4 = A1 & A2 & · · · & ¬An−1 & ¬An..
-
79∗ C pp, qq as a “mutual confirmation” generalization of pp & qq Prpe hq won’t work Prpp & qq won’t work ∗ C pp, qq, so understood, is not Prpp & qq or Prpq | pq, etc.
-
33With the inclusion of an e ective methodology, this article answers in detail a question that, for a quarter of a century, remained open despite intense study by various researchers. Is the formula XCB = e(x e(e(e(x y) e(z y)) z)) a single axiom for the classical equivalential calculus when the rules of inference consist of detachment (modus ponens) and substitution? Where the function e represents equivalence, this calculus can be axiomatized quite naturally with the formulas (x x), e(e(x y) e(…Read more
-
120Contrastive BayesianismIn Martijn Blaauw (ed.), Contrastivism in philosophy, Routledge/taylor & Francis Group. 2013.Bayesianism provides a rich theoretical framework, which lends itself rather naturally to the explication of various “contrastive” and “non-contrastive” concepts. In this (brief) discussion, I will focus on issues involving “contrastivism”, as they arise in some of the recent philosophy of science, epistemology, and cognitive science literature surrounding Bayesian confirmation theory
-
226The plurality of bayesian measures of confirmation and the problem of measure sensitivityPhilosophy of Science 66 (3): 378. 1999.Contemporary Bayesian confirmation theorists measure degree of (incremental) confirmation using a variety of non-equivalent relevance measures. As a result, a great many of the arguments surrounding quantitative Bayesian confirmation theory are implicitly sensitive to choice of measure of confirmation. Such arguments are enthymematic, since they tacitly presuppose that certain relevance measures should be used (for various purposes) rather than other relevance measures that have been proposed an…Read more
-
38The principle that every truth is possibly necessary can now be shown to entail that every truth is necessary by a chain of elementary inferences in a perspicuous notation unavailable to Hegel. —Williamson [5, p.
Boston, MA, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Formal Epistemology |