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61VIII—Epistemic Deference: The Case of ChanceProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 107 (1pt2): 187-206. 2007.Peer Reviewed.
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34Conditional desirability: comments on Richard Bradley’s decision theory with a human faceSynthese 198 (9): 8413-8431. 2020.Richard Bradley’s landmark book Decision Theory with a Human Face makes seminal contributions to nearly every major area of decision theory, as well as most areas of formal epistemology and many areas of semantics. In addition to sketching Bradley’s distinctive semantics for conditional beliefs and desires, I will explain his theory of conditional desire, focusing particularly on his claim that we should not desire events, either positively or negatively, under the supposition that they will occ…Read more
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102BayesianismIn Piers Rawling & Alfred R. Mele (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Rationality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 132--155. 2004.Bayesianism claims to provide a unified theory of epistemic and practical rationality based on the principle of mathematical expectation. In its epistemic guise it requires believers to obey the laws of probability. In its practical guise it asks agents to maximize their subjective expected utility. Joyce’s primary concern is Bayesian epistemology, and its five pillars: people have beliefs and conditional beliefs that come in varying gradations of strength; a person believes a proposition strong…Read more
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493A nonpragmatic vindication of probabilismPhilosophy of Science 65 (4): 575-603. 1998.The pragmatic character of the Dutch book argument makes it unsuitable as an "epistemic" justification for the fundamental probabilist dogma that rational partial beliefs must conform to the axioms of probability. To secure an appropriately epistemic justification for this conclusion, one must explain what it means for a system of partial beliefs to accurately represent the state of the world, and then show that partial beliefs that violate the laws of probability are invariably less accurate th…Read more
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84Accuracy and the ImpsLogos and Episteme 10 (3): 263-282. 2019.Recently several authors have argued that accuracy-first epistemology ends up licensing problematic epistemic bribes. They charge that it is better, given the accuracy-first approach, to deliberately form one false belief if this will lead to forming many other true beliefs. We argue that this is not a consequence of the accuracy-first view. If one forms one false belief and a number of other true beliefs, then one is committed to many other false propositions, e.g., the conjunction of that fals…Read more
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49Remarks on Richard Pettigrew's Accuracy and the Laws of CredencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 96 (3): 755-762. 2018.Peer Reviewed.
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10The Axiomatic Foundations of Bayesian Decision TheoryDissertation, University of Michigan. 1992.Bayesian decision theorists argue that rational agents should always perform acts that maximize subjective expected utility. To justify this claim, they prove representation theorems which are designed to show that any decision maker whose beliefs and desires satisfy reasonable axiomatic constraints will necessarily behave like an expected utility maximizer. The existence of such a representation result is a prerequisite for any adequate account of rational choice because one is only able to det…Read more
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26Rationality and Dynamic Choice: Foundational ExplorationsPhilosophical Books 33 (1): 27-30. 1992.
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337Regret and instability in causal decision theorySynthese 187 (1): 123-145. 2012.Andy Egan has recently produced a set of alleged counterexamples to causal decision theory in which agents are forced to decide among causally unratifiable options, thereby making choices they know they will regret. I show that, far from being counterexamples, CDT gets Egan's cases exactly right. Egan thinks otherwise because he has misapplied CDT by requiring agents to make binding choices before they have processed all available information about the causal consequences of their acts. I elucid…Read more
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253Are Newcomb problems really decisions?Synthese 156 (3): 537-562. 2006.Richard Jeffrey long held that decision theory should be formulated without recourse to explicitly causal notions. Newcomb problems stand out as putative counterexamples to this ‘evidential’ decision theory. Jeffrey initially sought to defuse Newcomb problems via recourse to the doctrine of ratificationism, but later came to see this as problematic. We will see that Jeffrey’s worries about ratificationism were not compelling, but that valid ratificationist arguments implicitly presuppose causal …Read more
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67The value of truth: a reply to HowsonAnalysis 75 (3): 413-424. 2015.Colin Howson has recently argued that accuracy arguments for probabilism fail because they assume a privileged ‘coding’ in which TRUE is assigned the value 1 and FALSE is assigned the value 0. I explain why this is wrong by first showing that Howson’s objections are based on a misconception about the way in which degrees of confidence are measured, and then reformulating the accuracy argument in a way that manifestly does not depend on the coding of truth-values. Along the way, I will explain ho…Read more
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763How Degrees of Belief Reflect EvidencePhilosophical Perspectives 19 (1): 153-179. 2005.How Degrees of Belief Reflect Evidence.
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261Accuracy and Coherence: Prospects for an Alethic Epistemology of Partial BeliefIn Franz Huber & Christoph Schmidt-Petri (eds.), Degrees of belief, Springer. pp. 263-297. 2009.
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184Bayes' theoremStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.Bayes' Theorem is a simple mathematical formula used for calculating conditional probabilities. It figures prominently in subjectivist or Bayesian approaches to epistemology, statistics, and inductive logic. Subjectivists, who maintain that rational belief is governed by the laws of probability, lean heavily on conditional probabilities in their theories of evidence and their models of empirical learning. Bayes' Theorem is central to these enterprises both because it simplifies the calculation o…Read more
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109ConfirmationIn S. Psillos & M. Curd (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Science, Routledge. 2008.Confirmation theory is intended to codify the evidential bearing of observations on hypotheses, characterizing relations of inductive “support” and “countersupport” in full generality. The central task is to understand what it means to say that datum E confirms or supports a hypothesis H when E does not logically entail H.
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202Why we still need the logic of decisionPhilosophy of Science 67 (3): 13. 2000.In The Logic of Decision Richard Jeffrey defends a version of expected utility theory that advises agents to choose acts with an eye to securing evidence for thinking that desirable results will ensue. Proponents of "causal" decision theory have argued that Jeffrey's account is inadequate because it fails to properly discriminate the causal features of acts from their merely evidential properties. Jeffrey's approach has also been criticized on the grounds that it makes it impossible to extract a…Read more
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123Levi on causal decision theory and the possibility of predicting one's own actionsPhilosophical Studies 110 (1). 2002.Isaac Levi has long criticized causal decisiontheory on the grounds that it requiresdeliberating agents to make predictions abouttheir own actions. A rational agent cannot, heclaims, see herself as free to choose an actwhile simultaneously making a prediction abouther likelihood of performing it. Levi is wrongon both points. First, nothing in causaldecision theory forces agents to makepredictions about their own acts. Second,Levi's arguments for the ``deliberation crowdsout prediction thesis'' r…Read more
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91The development of subjective BayesianismIn Dov M. Gabbay, John Woods & Akihiro Kanamori (eds.), Handbook of the History of Logic, Elsevier. pp. 10--415. 2004.
Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Probability |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Social Science |
General Philosophy of Science |