•  744
    How Degrees of Belief Reflect Evidence
    Philosophical Perspectives 19 (1): 153-179. 2005.
    How Degrees of Belief Reflect Evidence.
  •  472
    A nonpragmatic vindication of probabilism
    Philosophy 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
  •  320
    Regret and instability in causal decision theory
    Synthese 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
  •  239
    Are 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
  •  199
    Arif Ahmed: Evidence, Decision and Causality
    Journal of Philosophy 113 (4): 224-232. 2016.
  •  191
    The Foundations of Causal Decision Theory
    Cambridge University Press. 1999.
    This book defends the view that any adequate account of rational decision making must take a decision maker's beliefs about causal relations into account. The early chapters of the book introduce the non-specialist to the rudiments of expected utility theory. The major technical advance offered by the book is a 'representation theorem' that shows that both causal decision theory and its main rival, Richard Jeffrey's logic of decision, are both instances of a more general conditional decision the…Read more
  •  190
    Why we still need the logic of decision
    Philosophy 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
  •  177
    Bayes' theorem
    Stanford 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
  •  168
    Causal reasoning and backtracking
    Philosophical Studies 147 (1). 2010.
    I argue that one central aspect of the epistemology of causation, the use of causes as evidence for their effects, is largely independent of the metaphysics of causation. In particular, I use the formalism of Bayesian causal graphs to factor the incremental evidential impact of a cause for its effect into a direct cause-to-effect component and a backtracking component. While the “backtracking” evidence that causes provide about earlier events often obscures things, once we our restrict attention…Read more
  •  167
    Epistemic Deference: The Case of Chance
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 107 (2). 2007.
  •  127
    Williamson on Evidence and Knowledge
    Philosophical Books 45 (4): 296-305. 2004.
  •  116
    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
  •  109
    Confirmation
    In 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.
  •  99
    The Foundations of Causal Decision Theory
    with Isaac Levi
    Journal of Philosophy 97 (7): 387. 2000.
  •  90
    Bayesianism
    In 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
  •  89
    Commentary on Lara Buchak’s risk and rationality
    Philosophical Studies 174 (9): 2385-2396. 2017.
  •  80
    The development of subjective Bayesianism
    In Dov M. Gabbay, John Woods & Akihiro Kanamori (eds.), Handbook of the History of Logic, Elsevier. pp. 10--415. 2004.
  •  79
    Accuracy and the Imps
    Logos 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
  •  57
    The value of truth: a reply to Howson
    Analysis 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
  •  57
    VIII—Epistemic Deference: The Case of Chance
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 107 (1pt2): 187-206. 2007.
    Peer Reviewed.
  •  38
    Remarks on Richard Pettigrew's Accuracy and the Laws of Credence
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 96 (3): 755-762. 2018.
    Peer Reviewed.
  •  28
    Decision theory
    Philosophical Books 36 (4): 225-237. 1995.
  •  26
    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
  •  25
  •  21
    In Search of Lost Opportunities
    with Marcel Proust
    Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 55 (1): 155-161. 2012.
  •  10
    Saturday Round Table Panel
    with Allan Gibbard, Alan Hájek, and Brian Skyrms