•  1342
    Different people reason differently, which means that sometimes they reach different conclusions from the same evidence. We maintain that this is not only natural, but rational. In this essay we explore the epistemology of that state of affairs. First we will canvass arguments for and against the claim that rational methods of reasoning must always reach the same conclusions from the same evidence. Then we will consider whether the acknowledgment that people have divergent rational reasoning met…Read more
  •  945
    The Uniqueness Thesis
    Philosophy Compass 11 (4): 189-200. 2016.
    The Uniqueness Thesis holds, roughly speaking, that there is a unique rational response to any particular body of evidence. We first sketch some varieties of Uniqueness that appear in the literature. We then discuss some popular views that conflict with Uniqueness and others that require Uniqueness to be true. We then examine some arguments that have been presented in its favor and discuss why permissivists find them unconvincing. Last, we present some purported counterexamples that have been ra…Read more
  •  21
    'Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology' provides an accessible introduction to the key concepts and principles of the Bayesian formalism. Volume 2 introduces applications of Bayesianism to confirmation and decision theory, then gives a critical survey of arguments for and challenges to Bayesian epistemology.--
  •  71
    'Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology' provides an accessible introduction to the key concepts and principles of the Bayesian formalism. This volume introduces degrees of belief as a concept in epistemology and the rules for updating degrees of belief derived from Bayesian principles.--
  •  65
    The Stability of Belief: How Rational Belief Coheres with Probability, by LeitgebHannes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 365.
  •  77
    Reason without Reasons For
    Oxford Studies in Metaethics 14. 2019.
    Metaethicists have recently devoted a great deal of attention to questions about when a fact counts as a reason for or against a particular conclusion, and how such reasons interact. Chapter 9 asks a broader question: When a set of facts counts in favor of some conclusion, is that always because at least one of those facts is a reason for that conclusion? Examples are offered in which a set supports a conclusion without any fact in that set’s being a reason for. The chapter then assesses the sig…Read more
  •  155
    Rationality’s Fixed Point
    Oxford Studies in Epistemology 5. 2015.
    This article defends the Fixed Point Thesis: that it is always a rational mistake to have false beliefs about the requirements of rationality. The Fixed Point Thesis is inspired by logical omniscience requirements in formal epistemology. It argues to the Fixed Point Thesis from the Akratic Principle: that rationality forbids having an attitude while believing that attitude is rationally forbidden. It then draws out surprising consequences of the Fixed Point Thesis, for instance that certain kind…Read more
  •  559
    Precise Credences
    In Richard Pettigrew & Jonathan Weisberg (eds.), The Open Handbook of Formal Epistemology, Philpaper Foundation. pp. 1-55. 2019.
  •  107
    Roger White argued for a principle of indifference. Hart and Titelbaum showed that White’s argument relied on an intuition about conditioning on biconditionals that, while widely shared, is incorrect. Hawthorne, Landes, Wallmann, and Williamson argue for a principle of indifference. Remarkably, their argument relies on the same faulty intuition. We explain their intuition, explain why it’s faulty, and show how it generates their principle of indifference. 1Introduction 2El Caminos and Indifferen…Read more
  •  108
    Bayesian modeling techniques have proven remarkably successful at representing rational constraints on agents’ degrees of belief. Yet Frank Arntzenius’s “Shangri-La” example shows that these techniques fail for stories involving forgetting. This paper presents a formalized, expanded Bayesian modeling framework that generates intuitive verdicts about agents’ degrees of belief after losing information. The framework’s key result, called Generalized Conditionalization, yields applications like a ve…Read more
  •  56
    One’s own reasoning
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (3): 208-232. 2017.
    Responding to Cappelen and Dever’s claim that there is no distinctive role for perspectivality in epistemology, I argue that facts about the outcomes of one’s own reasoning processes may have a different evidential significance than facts about the outcomes of others’.
  •  151
    Self-Locating Credences
    In Alan Hajek Christopher Hitchcock (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Probability and Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2016.
    A plea: If you're going to propose a Bayesian framework for updating self-locating degrees of belief, please read this piece first. I've tried to survey all the extant formalisms, group them by their general approach, then describe challenges faced by every formalism employing a given approach. Hopefully this survey will prevent further instances of authors' re-inventing updating rules already proposed elsewhere in the literature.
  •  320
    Tell me you love me: bootstrapping, externalism, and no-lose epistemology
    Philosophical Studies 149 (1): 119-134. 2010.
    Recent discussion of Vogel-style “bootstrapping” scenarios suggests that they provide counterexamples to a wide variety of epistemological theories. Yet it remains unclear why it’s bad for a theory to permit bootstrapping, or even exactly what counts as a bootstrapping case. Going back to Vogel's original bootstrapping example, I note that an agent who could gain justification through the method Vogel describes would have available a “no-lose investigation”: an investigation that can justify a p…Read more
  •  85
    Continuing on
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (5): 670-691. 2015.
    What goes wrong, from a rational point of view, when an agent’s beliefs change while her evidence remains constant? I canvass a number of answers to this question suggested by recent literature, then identify some desiderata I would like any potential answer to meet. Finally, I suggest that the rational problem results from the undermining of reasoning processes that are necessarily extended in time
  •  169
    What would a Rawlsian ethos of justice look like?
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 36 (3): 289-322. 2008.
    A response to G.A. Cohen's argument that a prevailing "ethos" of justice would prevent a Rawlsian just society from having any income inequalities. I suggest that Cohen's argument fails because a Rawlsian ethos would involve correlates of both of Rawls' principles of justice.
  •  104
    Michael G. Titelbaum presents a new Bayesian framework for modeling rational degrees of belief—the first of its kind to represent rational requirements on agents who undergo certainty loss.
  •  104
    Intuitive Dilation?
    with Casey Hart
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 4 (4): 252-262. 2015.
    Roger White objects to interval-valued credence theories because they produce a counterintuitive “dilation” effect in a story he calls the Coin Game. We respond that results in the Coin Game were bound to be counterintuitive anyway, because the story involves an agent who learns a biconditional. Biconditional updates produce surprising results whether the credences involved are ranged or precise, so White's story is no counterexample to ranged credence theories
  •  197
    The relevance of self-locating beliefs
    Philosophical Review 117 (4): 555-606. 2008.
    Can self-locating beliefs be relevant to non-self-locating claims? Traditional Bayesian modeling techniques have trouble answering this question because their updating rule fails when applied to situations involving contextsensitivity. This essay develops a fully general framework for modeling stories involving context-sensitive claims. The key innovations are a revised conditionalization rule and a principle relating models of the same story with different modeling languages. The essay then app…Read more
  •  164
    How to derive a narrow-scope requirement from wide-scope requirements
    Philosophical Studies 172 (2): 535-542. 2015.
    I argue that given standard deontic logic, wide-scope rational requirements entail narrow-scope rational requirements. In particular, the widely-embraced Enkratic Principle entails that if a particular combination of attitudes is rationally forbidden, it is also rationally forbidden to believe that that combination of attitudes is required.
  •  27
  •  54
    Reply to Kim’s “Two Versions of Sleeping Beauty”
    Erkenntnis 80 (6): 1237-1243. 2015.
    I begin by discussing a conundrum that arises when Bayesian models attempt to assess the relevance of one claim to another. I then explain how my formal modeling framework manages this conundrum. Finally, I apply my modeling methodology to respond to Namjoong Kim’s objection to my framework
  •  214
    Deference Done Right
    Philosophers' Imprint 14 1-19. 2014.
    There are many kinds of epistemic experts to which we might wish to defer in setting our credences. These include: highly rational agents, objective chances, our own future credences, our own current credences, and evidential probabilities. But exactly what constraint does a deference requirement place on an agent's credences? In this paper we consider three answers, inspired by three principles that have been proposed for deference to objective chances. We consider how these options fare when a…Read more
  •  397
    Ten Reasons to Care About the Sleeping Beauty Problem
    Philosophy Compass 8 (11): 1003-1017. 2013.
    The Sleeping Beauty Problem attracts so much attention because it connects to a wide variety of unresolved issues in formal epistemology, decision theory, and the philosophy of science. The problem raises unanswered questions concerning relative frequencies, objective chances, the relation between self-locating and non-self-locating information, the relation between self-location and updating, Dutch Books, accuracy arguments, memory loss, indifference principles, the existence of multiple univer…Read more
  •  189
    Not enough there there evidence, reasons, and language independence
    Philosophical Perspectives 24 (1): 477-528. 2010.
    Begins by explaining then proving a generalized language dependence result similar to Goodman's "grue" problem. I then use this result to cast doubt on the existence of an objective evidential favoring relation (such as "the evidence confirms one hypothesis over another," "the evidence provides more reason to believe one hypothesis over the other," "the evidence justifies one hypothesis over the other," etc.). Once we understand what language dependence tells us about evidential favoring, our …Read more
  •  674
    Starting from the premise that akrasia is irrational, I argue that it is always a rational mistake to have false beliefs about the requirements of rationality. Using that conclusion, I defend logical omniscience requirements, the claim that one can never have all-things-considered misleading evidence about what's rational, and the Right Reasons position concerning peer disagreement.
  •  190
    An Embarrassment for Double-Halfers
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (2): 146-151. 2012.
    “Double-halfers” think that throughout the Sleeping Beauty Problem, Beauty should keep her credence that a fair coin flip came up heads equal to 1/2. I introduce a new wrinkle to the problem that shows even double-halfers can't keep Beauty's credences equal to the objective chances for all coin-flip propositions. This leaves no way to deny that self-locating information generates an unexpected kind of inadmissible evidence