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1657Belief Revision for Growing AwarenessMind 130 (520). 2021.The Bayesian maxim for rational learning could be described as conservative change from one probabilistic belief or credence function to another in response to newinformation. Roughly: ‘Hold fixed any credences that are not directly affected by the learning experience.’ This is precisely articulated for the case when we learn that some proposition that we had previously entertained is indeed true (the rule of conditionalisation). But can this conservative-change maxim be extended to revisi…Read more
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1522What Should We Agree on about the Repugnant Conclusion?Utilitas 33 (4): 379-383. 2021.The Repugnant Conclusion served an important purpose in catalyzing and inspiring the pioneering stage of population ethics research. We believe, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion now receives too much focus. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion should no longer be the central goal driving population ethics research, despite its importance to the fundamental accomplishments of the existing literature.
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1262Beyond Uncertainty: Reasoning with Unknown PossibilitiesCambridge University Press. 2021.The main aim of this book is to introduce the topic of limited awareness, and changes in awareness, to those interested in the philosophy of decision-making and uncertain reasoning.
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743Climate Models, Calibration, and ConfirmationBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (3): 609-635. 2013.We argue that concerns about double-counting—using the same evidence both to calibrate or tune climate models and also to confirm or verify that the models are adequate—deserve more careful scrutiny in climate modelling circles. It is widely held that double-counting is bad and that separate data must be used for calibration and confirmation. We show that this is far from obviously true, and that climate scientists may be confusing their targets. Our analysis turns on a Bayesian/relative-likelih…Read more
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708Environmental Ethics and Decision Theory: Fellow Travellers or Bitter Enemies?In Kevin deLaplante, Bryson Brown & Kent A. Peacock (eds.), Philosophy of ecology, North-holland. pp. 285--300. 2011.On the face of it, ethics and decision theory give quite different advice about what the best course of action is in a given situation. In this paper we examine this alleged conflict in the realm of environmental decision-making. We focus on a couple of places where ethics and decision theory might be thought to be offering conflicting advice: environmental triage and carbon trading. We argue that the conflict can be seen as conflicts about other things (like appropriate temporal scales for valu…Read more
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686Transformative Experience, Awareness Growth, and the Limits of Rational PlanningPhilosophy of Science 89 (5): 939-948. 2022.Laurie Paul argues that, when it comes to many of your most significant life-changing decisions, the principles of rational choice are silent. That is because, in these cases, you anticipate that one of your choice options would yield a transformative experience. We argue that such decisions are best seen as ones in which you anticipate awareness growth. You do not merely lack knowledge about which possible outcome will arise from a transformative option; you lack knowledge about what are the po…Read more
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624The problem of evaluating automated large-scale evidence aggregatorsSynthese (8): 3083-3102. 2019.In the biomedical context, policy makers face a large amount of potentially discordant evidence from different sources. This prompts the question of how this evidence should be aggregated in the interests of best-informed policy recommendations. The starting point of our discussion is Hunter and Williams’ recent work on an automated aggregation method for medical evidence. Our negative claim is that it is far from clear what the relevant criteria for evaluating an evidence aggregator of this sor…Read more
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466Levelling counterfactual scepticismSynthese 199 (1-2): 927-947. 2020.In this paper, we develop a novel response to counterfactual scepticism, the thesis that most ordinary counterfactual claims are false. In the process we aim to shed light on the relationship between debates in the philosophy of science and debates concerning the semantics and pragmatics of counterfactuals. We argue that science is concerned with many domains of inquiry, each with its own characteristic entities and regularities; moreover, statements of scientific law often include an implicit c…Read more
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426Model-Selection Theory: The Need for a More Nuanced Picture of Use-Novelty and Double-CountingBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 2016.This article argues that common intuitions regarding (a) the specialness of ‘use-novel’ data for confirmation and (b) that this specialness implies the ‘no-double-counting rule’, which says that data used in ‘constructing’ (calibrating) a model cannot also play a role in confirming the model’s predictions, are too crude. The intuitions in question are pertinent in all the sciences, but we appeal to a climate science case study to illustrate what is at stake. Our strategy is to analyse the intuit…Read more
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327Should subjective probabilities be sharp?Episteme 11 (3): 277-289. 2014.There has been much recent interest in imprecise probabilities, models of belief that allow unsharp or fuzzy credence. There have also been some influential criticisms of this position. Here we argue, chiefly against Elga (2010), that subjective probabilities need not be sharp. The key question is whether the imprecise probabilist can make reasonable sequences of decisions. We argue that she can. We outline Elga's argument and clarify the assumptions he makes and the principles of rationality he…Read more
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318Model tuning in engineering: uncovering the logicJournal of Strain Analysis for Engineering Design 51 (1): 63-71. 2015.In engineering, as in other scientific fields, researchers seek to confirm their models with real-world data. It is common practice to assess models in terms of the distance between the model outputs and the corresponding experimental observations. An important question that arises is whether the model should then be ‘tuned’, in the sense of estimating the values of free parameters to get a better fit with the data, and furthermore whether the tuned model can be confirmed with the same data used…Read more
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312Modelling the Moral Dimension of DecisionsNoûs 44 (3): 503-529. 2010.In this paper we explore the connections between ethics and decision theory. In particular, we consider the question of whether decision theory carries with it a bias towards consequentialist ethical theories. We argue that there are plausible versions of the other ethical theories that can be accommodated by “standard” decision theory, but there are also variations of these ethical theories that are less easily accommodated. So while “standard” decision theory is not exclusively consequentialis…Read more
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247Making climate decisionsPhilosophy Compass 10 (11): 799-810. 2015.Many fine-grained decisions concerning climate change involve significant, even severe, uncertainty. Here, we focus on modelling the decisions of single agents, whether individual persons or groups perceived as corporate entities. We offer a taxonomy of the sources and kinds of uncertainty that arise in framing these decision problems, as well as strategies for making a choice in spite of uncertainty. The aim is to facilitate a more transparent and structured treatment of uncertainty in climate …Read more
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241Decision TheoryIn Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012.
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211Choice modelsIn Nancy Cartwright & Eleonora Montuschi (eds.), Philosophy of Social Science: A New Introduction, Oxford University Press. 2014.
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172The Scientist qua Policy Advisor Makes Value JudgmentsPhilosophy of Science 79 (5): 893-904. 2012.Richard Rudner famously argues that the communication of scientific advice to policy makers involves ethical value judgments. His argument has, however, been rightly criticized. This article revives Rudner’s conclusion, by strengthening both his lines of argument: we generalize his initial assumption regarding the form in which scientists must communicate their results and complete his ‘backup’ argument by appealing to the difference between private and public decisions. Our conclusion that scie…Read more
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139Can free evidence be bad? Value of informationfor the imprecise probabilistPhilosophy of Science 83 (1): 1-28. 2016.This paper considers a puzzling conflict between two positions that are each compelling: it is irrational for an agent to pay to avoid `free' evidence before making a decision, and rational agents may have imprecise beliefs and/or desires. Indeed, we show that Good's theorem concerning the invariable choice-worthiness of free evidence does not generalise to the imprecise realm, given the plausible existing decision theories for handling imprecision. A key ingredient in the analysis, and a potent…Read more
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132Climate Science, The Philosophy ofInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2020.The Philosophy of Climate Science Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. But what is climate change, how do we know about it, and how should we react to it? This article summarizes the main conceptual issues and questions in the foundations of climate science, as well as of the … Continue reading Climate Science, The Philosophy of →
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128What are the minimal requirements of rational choice? Arguments from the sequential-decision settingTheory and Decision 68 (4): 463-487. 2010.There are at least two plausible generalisations of subjective expected utility (SEU) theory: cumulative prospect theory (which relaxes the independence axiom) and Levi’s decision theory (which relaxes at least ordering). These theories call for a re-assessment of the minimal requirements of rational choice. Here, I consider how an analysis of sequential decision making contributes to this assessment. I criticise Hammond’s (Economica 44(176):337–350, 1977; Econ Philos 4:292–297, 1988a; Risk, dec…Read more
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115Testimony as Evidence: More Problems for Linear Pooling (review)Journal of Philosophical Logic 41 (6): 983-999. 2012.This paper considers a special case of belief updating—when an agent learns testimonial data, or in other words, the beliefs of others on some issue. The interest in this case is twofold: (1) the linear averaging method for updating on testimony is somewhat popular in epistemology circles, and it is important to assess its normative acceptability, and (2) this facilitates a more general investigation of what it means/requires for an updating method to have a suitable Bayesian representation (tak…Read more
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114Uncertainty, Learning, and the “Problem” of DilationErkenntnis 79 (6): 1287-1303. 2013.Imprecise probabilism—which holds that rational belief/credence is permissibly represented by a set of probability functions—apparently suffers from a problem known as dilation. We explore whether this problem can be avoided or mitigated by one of the following strategies: (a) modifying the rule by which the credal state is updated, (b) restricting the domain of reasonable credal states to those that preclude dilation
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106Distinguishing indeterminate belief from “risk-averse” preferencesSynthese 158 (2): 189-205. 2007.I focus my discussion on the well-known Ellsberg paradox. I find good normative reasons for incorporating non-precise belief, as represented by sets of probabilities, in an Ellsberg decision model. This amounts to forgoing the completeness axiom of expected utility theory. Provided that probability sets are interpreted as genuinely indeterminate belief, such a model can moreover make the “Ellsberg choices” rationally permissible. Without some further element to the story, however, the model does…Read more
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96Persistent Experimenters, Stopping Rules, and Statistical InferenceErkenntnis 78 (4): 937-961. 2013.This paper considers a key point of contention between classical and Bayesian statistics that is brought to the fore when examining so-called ‘persistent experimenters’—the issue of stopping rules, or more accurately, outcome spaces, and their influence on statistical analysis. First, a working definition of classical and Bayesian statistical tests is given, which makes clear that (1) once an experimental outcome is recorded, other possible outcomes matter only for classical inference, and (2) f…Read more
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93Moral uncertainty, noncognitivism, and the multi‐objective storyNoûs 57 (4): 922-941. 2022.We sometimes seem to face fundamental moral uncertainty, i.e., uncertainty about what is morally good or morally right that cannot be reduced to ordinary descriptive uncertainty. This phenomenon raises a puzzle for noncognitivism, according to which moral judgments are desire-like attitudes as opposed to belief-like attitudes. Can a state of moral uncertainty really be a noncognitive state? So far, noncognitivists have not been able to offer a completely satisfactory account. Here, we argue that…Read more
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92Daniel steel philosophy and the precautionary principle: Science, evidence, and environmental policyBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (4): 1195-1200. 2016.
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73Preference and information , Dan Egonsson. Ashgate, 2007, XI+163 pp (review)Economics and Philosophy 25 (2): 236-242. 2009.
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69Right decisions or happy decision-makers?Social Epistemology 21 (4). 2007.Group decisions raise a number of substantial philosophical and methodological issues. We focus on the goal of the group decision exercise itself. We ask: What should be counted as a good group decision-making result? The right decision might not be accessible to, or please, any of the group members. Conversely, a popular decision can fail to be the correct decision. In this paper we discuss what it means for a decision to be "right" and what components are required in a decision process to prod…Read more
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67The Diversity of Model Tuning Practices in Climate SciencePhilosophy of Science 83 (5): 113-114. 2016.Many examples of calibration in climate science raise no alarms regarding model reliability. We examine one example and show that, in employing Classical Hypothesis-testing, it involves calibrating a base model against data that is also used to confirm the model. This is counter to the "intuitive position". We argue, however, that aspects of the intuitive position are upheld by some methods, in particular, the general Cross-validation method. How Cross-validation relates to other prominent Class…Read more
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52Meta-uncertainty and the proof paradoxesPhilosophical Studies 180 (7): 1927-1950. 2023.Various real and imagined criminal law cases rest on “naked statistical evidence”. That is, they rest more or less entirely on a probability for guilt/liability derived from a single statistical model. The intuition is that there is something missing in these cases, high as the probability for guilt/liability may be, such that the relevant standard for legal proof is not met. Here we contribute to the considerable debate about how this intuition is best explained and what it teaches us about evi…Read more
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49The distinct moral importance of acting togetherPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (2): 505-510. 2022.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 2, Page 505-510, March 2022.
Acton, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Probability |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Social Science |