King's College London
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2005
Bundoora, Victoria, Australia
  • Ch. 1
    In Jake Chandler & Victoria S. Harrison (eds.), Probability in the Philosophy of Religion, Oxford University Press. 2012.
  •  9
    Elementary Belief Revision Operators
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 52 (1): 267-311. 2023.
    Discussions of the issue of iterated belief revision are commonly accompanied by the presentation of three “concrete” operators: natural, restrained and lexicographic. This raises a natural question: What is so distinctive about these three particular methods? Indeed, the common axiomatic ground for work on iterated revision, the AGM and Darwiche-Pearl postulates, leaves open a whole range of alternative proposals. In this paper, we show that it is satisfaction of an additional principle of “Ind…Read more
  •  49
    Recent work has considered the problem of extending to the case of iterated belief change the so-called `Harper Identity' (HI), which defines single-shot contraction in terms of single-shot revision. The present paper considers the prospects of providing a similar extension of the Levi Identity (LI), in which the direction of definition runs the other way. We restrict our attention here to the three classic iterated revision operators--natural, restrained and lexicographic, for which we provide …Read more
  •  428
    Darwiche and Pearl’s seminal 1997 article outlined a number of baseline principles for a logic of iterated belief revision. These principles, the DP postulates, have been supplemented in a number of alternative ways. Most suggestions have resulted in a form of ‘reductionism’ that identifies belief states with orderings of worlds. However, this position has recently been criticised as being unacceptably strong. Other proposals, such as the popular principle (P), aka ‘Independence’, characteristic…Read more
  •  155
    The transmission of support: a Bayesian re-analysis
    Synthese 176 (3): 333-343. 2010.
    Crispin Wright’s discussion of the notion of ‘transmission-failure’ promises to have important philosophical ramifications, both in epistemology and beyond. This paper offers a precise, formal characterisation of the concept within a Bayesian framework. The interpretation given avoids the serious shortcomings of a recent alternative proposal due to Samir Okasha.
  •  88
    Probability in the Philosophy of Religion (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2012.
    Probability theory promises to deliver an exact and unified foundation for inquiry in epistemology and philosophy of science. But philosophy of religion is also fertile ground for the application of probabilistic thinking. This volume presents original contributions from twelve contemporary researchers, both established and emerging, to offer a representative sample of the work currently being carried out in this potentially rich field of inquiry. Grouped into five parts, the chapters span a bro…Read more
  •  55
    Descriptive Decision Theory
    The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. 2017.
  •  210
    Extending the Harper Identity to Iterated Belief Change
    In Subbarao Kambhampati (ed.), Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Aaai Press / International Joint Conferences On Artificial Intelligence. 2016.
    The field of iterated belief change has focused mainly on revision, with the other main operator of AGM belief change theory, i.e. contraction, receiving relatively little attention. In this paper we extend the Harper Identity from single-step change to define iterated contraction in terms of iterated revision. Specifically, just as the Harper Identity provides a recipe for defining the belief set resulting from contracting A in terms of (i) the initial belief set and (ii) the belief set resulti…Read more
  •  113
  •  164
    The Lottery Paradox Generalized?
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (3): 667-679. 2010.
    In a recent article, Douven and Williamson offer both (i) a rebuttal of various recent suggested sufficient conditions for rational acceptability and (ii) an alleged ‘generalization’ of this rebuttal, which, they claim, tells against a much broader class of potential suggestions. However, not only is the result mentioned in (ii) not a generalization of the findings referred to in (i), but in contrast to the latter, it fails to have the probative force advertised. Their paper does however, if unw…Read more
  •  694
    The Irreducibility of Iterated to Single Revision
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 46 (4): 405-418. 2017.
    After a number of decades of research into the dynamics of rational belief, the belief revision theory community remains split on the appropriate handling of sequences of changes in view, the issue of so-called iterated revision. It has long been suggested that the matter is at least partly settled by facts pertaining to the results of various single revisions of one’s initial state of belief. Recent work has pushed this thesis further, offering various strong principles that ultimately result i…Read more
  •  700
    Acceptance, Aggregation and Scoring Rules
    Erkenntnis 78 (1): 201-217. 2013.
    As the ongoing literature on the paradoxes of the Lottery and the Preface reminds us, the nature of the relation between probability and rational acceptability remains far from settled. This article provides a novel perspective on the matter by exploiting a recently noted structural parallel with the problem of judgment aggregation. After offering a number of general desiderata on the relation between finite probability models and sets of accepted sentences in a Boolean sentential language, it i…Read more
  •  342
    Defeat reconsidered
    Analysis 73 (1): 49-51. 2013.
    It appears to have gone unnoticed in the literature that Pollock's widely endorsed analysis of evidential defeat entails a remarkably strong symmetry principle, according to which, for any three propositions D, E and H, if both E and D provide a reason to believe H, then D is a defeater for E's support for H if and only if, in turn, E is a defeater for D's support for H. After illustrating the counterintuitiveness of this constraint, a simple, more suitable, alternative to the Pollockian accoun…Read more
  •  142
    Contrastive confirmation: some competing accounts
    Synthese 190 (1): 129-138. 2013.
    I outline four competing probabilistic accounts of contrastive evidential support and consider various considerations that might help arbitrate between these. The upshot of the discussion is that the so-called 'Law of Likelihood' is to be preferred to any of the alternatives considered
  •  86
    Self-Respect Regained
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 111 (2pt2): 311-318. 2011.
    In a recent article, David Christensen casts aspersions on a restricted version of van Fraassen's Reflection principle, which he dubs ‘Self-Respect’(sr). Rejecting two possible arguments for sr, he concludes that the principle does not constitute a requirement of rationality. In this paper we argue that not only has Christensen failed to make a case against the aforementioned arguments, but that considerations pertaining to Moore's paradox indicate that sr, or at the very least a mild weakening …Read more
  •  753
    In a recent pair of publications, Richard Bradley has offered two novel no-go theorems involving the principle of Preservation for conditionals, which guarantees that one’s prior conditional beliefs will exhibit a certain degree of inertia in the face of a change in one’s non-conditional beliefs. We first note that Bradley’s original discussions of these results—in which he finds motivation for rejecting Preservation, first in a principle of Commutativity, then in a doxastic analogue of the rule…Read more
  •  25
    Whyte on desire fulfilment conditions: a simple problem
    Disputatio 2 (21): 65-68. 2006.
    According to Jamie Whyte, the proper assignment of fulfilment conditions to an agent’s set of desires proceeds in three steps. First, one identifies various desire extinction and behavioural reinforcement conditions to obtain the fulfilment conditions of a certain subset of the agent’s desires. With these fulfilment conditions in hand, one then appeals to a principle connecting desire fulfilment conditions with belief truth conditions to obtain the truth conditions of a number of the agent’s bel…Read more
  •  1030
    Transmission Failure, AGM Style
    Erkenntnis 78 (2): 383-398. 2013.
    This article provides a discussion of the principle of transmission of evidential support across entailment from the perspective of belief revision theory in the AGM tradition. After outlining and briefly defending a small number of basic principles of belief change, which include a number of belief contraction analogues of the Darwiche-Pearl postulates for iterated revision, a proposal is then made concerning the connection between evidential beliefs and belief change policies in rational agent…Read more
  •  937
    Subjective Probabilities Need Not be Sharp
    Erkenntnis 79 (6): 1273-1286. 2014.
    It is well known that classical, aka ‘sharp’, Bayesian decision theory, which models belief states as single probability functions, faces a number of serious difficulties with respect to its handling of agnosticism. These difficulties have led to the increasing popularity of so-called ‘imprecise’ models of decision-making, which represent belief states as sets of probability functions. In a recent paper, however, Adam Elga has argued in favour of a putative normative principle of sequential choi…Read more