In standard decision theory, the probability function ought to be updated in light of evidence, but the utility function generally stays fixed. However, there is nothing in the formal theory that prevents one from instead updating the utility function, while keeping the probability function fixed. Moreover, there are good arguments for updating the utilities and not just the probabilities. Hence, the first puzzle is whether there is anything that justifies updating beliefs, but not desires, in light of evidence. The paper (...) argues that there is not, but that this raises a second puzzle. (shrink)

Bayesian inference is limited in scope because it cannot be applied in idealized contexts where none of the hypotheses under consideration is true and because it is committed to always using the likelihood as a measure of evidential favouring, even when that is inappropriate. The purpose of this article is to study inductive inference in a very general setting where finding the truth is not necessarily the goal and where the measure of evidential favouring is not necessarily the likelihood. I (...) use an accuracy argument to argue for probabilism and I develop a new kind of argument to argue for two general updating rules, both of which are reasonable in different contexts. One of the updating rules has standard Bayesian updating, Bissiri et al.’s general Bayesian updating, Douven’s IBE-based updating, and Vassend’s ]) quasi-Bayesian updating as special cases. The other updating rule is novel. (shrink)

Scientists often study hypotheses that they know to be false. This creates an interpretive problem for Bayesians because the probability assigned to a hypothesis is typically interpreted as the probability that the hypothesis is true. I argue that solving the interpretive problem requires coming up with a new semantics for Bayesian inference. I present and contrast two new semantic frameworks, and I argue that both of them support the claim that there is pervasive pragmatic encroachment on whether a given Bayesian (...) probability assignment is rational. (shrink)

According to a widespread but implicit thesis in Bayesian confirmation theory, two confirmation measures are considered equivalent if they are ordinally equivalent—call this the “ordinal equivalence thesis”. I argue that adopting OET has significant costs. First, adopting OET renders one incapable of determining whether a piece of evidence substantially favors one hypothesis over another. Second, OET must be rejected if merely ordinal conclusions are to be drawn from the expected value of a confirmation measure. Furthermore, several arguments and applications of (...) confirmation measures given in the literature already rely on a rejection of OET. I also contrast OET with stronger equivalence theses and show that they do not have the same costs as OET. On the other hand, adopting a thesis stronger than OET has costs of its own, since a rejection of OET ostensibly implies that people’s epistemic states have a very fine-grained quantitative structure. However, I suggest that the normative upshot of the paper in fact has a conditional form, and that other Bayesian norms can also fruitfully be construed as having a similar conditional form. (shrink)

It is often thought that the main significant difference between evidential decision theory and causal decision theory is that they recommend different acts in Newcomb-style examples (broadly construed) where acts and states are correlated in peculiar ways. However, this paper presents a class of non-Newcombian examples that evidential decision theory cannot adequately model whereas causal decision theory can. Briefly, the examples involve situations where it is clearly best to perform an act that will not influence the desired outcome. On evidential (...) decision theory—but not causal decision theory—this situation turns out to be impossible: acts that an agent does not think influence the desired outcome are never optimal. Typically, sophisticated versions of evidential decision theory emulate causal decision theoretic reasoning by (implicitly) conditioning on causal confounders, but in the kind of example considered here, this trick does not work. The upshot is that there is more to causal reasoning than has so far been appreciated. (shrink)

I argue that information is a goal-relative concept for Bayesians. More precisely, I argue that how much information is provided by a piece of evidence depends on whether the goal is to learn the truth or to rank actions by their expected utility, and that different confirmation measures should therefore be used in different contexts. I then show how information measures may reasonably be derived from confirmation measures, and I show how to derive goal-relative non-informative and informative priors given background (...) information. Finally, I argue that my arguments have important implications for both objective and subjective Bayesianism. In particular, the Uniqueness Thesis is either false or must be modified. Moreover, objective Bayesians must concede that pragmatic factors systematically influence which priors are rational, and subjective Bayesians must concede that pragmatic factors sometimes partly determine which prior distribution most accurately represents an agent's epistemic state. (shrink)

Hinge epistemology and Bayesianism are two prominent approaches in contemporary epistemology, but the relationship between these approaches has not been systematically studied. This paper formalizes the central commitments of hinge epistemology in a Bayesian framework and argues for the following two theses: (1) many of the types of claims that are treated as paradigmatic hinges in the hinge epistemology literature, such as the claim that there exists an external world of physical objects, are not capable of enabling rational inquiry, even (...) though this is typically regarded as a central property of hinges; (2) the standard Bayesian story of how rational inquiry proceeds is incorrect or at best incomplete. (shrink)

A major open question in the borderlands between epistemology and philosophy of science concerns whether Bayesian updating and abductive inference are compatible. Some philosophers—most influentially Bas van Fraassen—have argued that they are not. Others have disagreed, arguing that abduction, properly understood, is indeed compatible with Bayesianism. Here we present two formal results that allow us to tackle this question from a new angle. We start by formulating what we take to be a minimal version of the claim that abduction is (...) a rational pattern of reasoning. We then show that this minimal abductivist principle, when combined with Bayesian updating by conditionalization, places surprisingly strong and controversial constraints on how we must measure explanatory power. The lesson is not that Bayesianism is definitely incompatible with abduction, but that both compatibilism and incompatibilism have hitherto unrecognized consequences. We end the paper by formulating these consequences in the form of a trilemma. (shrink)

Olav Benjamin Vassend proposes two solutions to the “interpretive problem” of assigning nonzero probabilities to hypotheses that are known to be false. He argues that the verisimilitude interpretation and the counterfactual interpretation are equivalent. While Vassend’s intuition about these two solutions is basically correct, the technical details of his treatment need elaboration and correction. Appropriate tools for combining verisimilitude and Bayesian probabilities can be found in my Truthlikeness.

Stanley Stevens draws a useful distinction among ordinal scales, interval scales, and ratio scales. Most recent discussions of confirmation measures have proceeded on the ordinal level of analysis. In this article, I give a more quantitative analysis. In particular, I show that the requirement that our desired confirmation measure be at least an interval measure naturally yields necessary conditions that jointly entail the log-likelihood measure. Thus, I conclude that the log-likelihood measure is the only good candidate interval measure.

Charles Stein discovered a paradox in 1955 that many statisticians think is of fundamental importance. Here we explore its philosophical implications. We outline the nature of Stein’s result and of subsequent work on shrinkage estimators; then we describe how these results are related to Bayesianism and to model selection criteria like AIC. We also discuss their bearing on scientific realism and instrumentalism. We argue that results concerning shrinkage estimators underwrite a surprising form of holistic pragmatism.

Bayesianism and likelihoodism are two of the most important frameworks philosophers of science use to analyse scientific methodology. However, both frameworks face a serious objection: much scientific inquiry takes place in highly idealized frameworks where all the hypotheses are known to be false. Yet, both Bayesianism and likelihoodism seem to be based on the assumption that the goal of scientific inquiry is always truth rather than closeness to the truth. Here, I argue in favour of a verisimilitude framework for inductive (...) inference. In the verisimilitude framework, scientific inquiry is conceived of, in part, as a process where inference methods ought to be calibrated to appropriate measures of closeness to the truth. To illustrate the verisimilitude framework, I offer a reconstruction of parsimony evaluations of scientific theories, and I give a reconstruction and extended analysis of the use of parsimony inference in phylogenetics. By recasting phylogenetic inference in the verisimilitude framework, it becomes possible to both raise and address objections to phylogenetic methods that rely on parsimony. 1Introduction2Problems with the Law of Likelihood3Introducing Verisimilitude-Based Inference4Examples of Verisimilitude-Based Inference Procedures4.1Parsimony inference over theories4.2Parsimony inference in phylogenetics5Conclusion. (shrink)

Scientists and Bayesian statisticians often study hypotheses that they know to be false. This creates an interpretive problem because the Bayesian probability of a hypothesis is supposed to represent the probability that the hypothesis is true. I investigate whether Bayesianism can accommodate the idea that false hypotheses are sometimes approximately true or that some hypotheses or models can be closer to the truth than others. I argue that the idea that some hypotheses are approximately true in an absolute sense is (...) hard to square with Bayesianism, but that the notion that some hypotheses are comparatively closer to the truth than others can be made compatible with Bayesianism, and that this provides an adequate and potentially useful solution to the interpretive problem. Finally, I compare my ``verisimilitude'' solution to the interpretive problem with a ``counterfactual'' solution recently proposed by Jan Sprenger. (shrink)

Scientists and Bayesian statisticians often study hypotheses that they know to be false. This creates an interpretive problem because the Bayesian probability of a hypothesis is typically interpreted as a degree of belief that the hypothesis is true. In this paper, I present and contrast two solutions to the interpretive problem, both of which involve reinterpreting the Bayesian framework in such a way that pragmatic factors directly determine in part how probability assignments are interpreted and whether a given probability assignment (...) is rational. I argue that there is an important sense in which the two solutions are equivalent, and I suggest that the two reinterpretations can help us do Bayesian inference better. I also explore various features of the two reinterprations, including their relations to the standard Bayesian interpretation of probability and to the Law of Likelihood. (shrink)

One of the main goals of Bayesian epistemology is to justify the rational norms credence functions ought to obey. Accuracy arguments attempt to justify these norms from the assumption that the source of value for credences relevant to their epistemic status is their accuracy. This assumption and some standard decision-theoretic principles are used to argue for norms like Probabilism, the thesis that an agent’s credence function is rational only if it obeys the probability axioms. We introduce an example that shows (...) that the accuracy arguments for Probabilism given by Joyce and Pettigrew fail, and that Probabilism in fact turns out to be false given Pettigrew’s way of conceiving of the goal of having accurate credences. Finally, we use our discussion of Pettigrew’s framework to draw an important general lesson about normative theorizing that relies on the positing of ideal agents. (shrink)

Olav Vassend has recently (2021) presented a decision-theoretic argument for updating utility functions by what he calls “utility conditionalization.” Vassend’s argument is meant to mirror closely the well-known argument for Bayesian conditionalization due to Hilary Greaves and David Wallace (2006). I show that Vassend’s argument is inconsistent with ZF set theory and argue that it therefore does not provide support for utility conditionalization.

“Sophisticated” theories of welfare face two potentially devastating criticisms. They are based upon two claims: that theories of welfare should be tested for what they imply about newborn infants and that even if a theory of welfare is intended to apply only to adults, we might still have sufficient reason to reject it because it implies an implausible divergence between adult and neonatal welfare. It has been argued we ought reject sophisticated theories of welfare because they have significantly counterintuitive implications (...) about neonatal welfare and because they imply an implausible divergence between the welfare of adults and that of newborns. I argue against both claims. (shrink)

Wilson et al. focus on one class of AGL tasks: the cognitively demanding task of detecting non‐adjacent dependencies (NADs) among items. They provide a typology of the different types of NADs in natural languages and in AGL tasks. A range of cues affect NAD learning, ranging from the variability and number of intervening elements to the presence of shared prosodic cues between the dependent items. These cues, important for humans to discover non‐adjacent dependencies, are also found to facilitate NAD learning (...) in several nonhuman animal species. (shrink)

The Office of Human Research Protections was not justified in issuing findings against the SUPPORT Institutions. Our community can learn from the evolving healthcare transformation into learning health systems by thinking about the novel ethical issues about standard of care research raised by the SUPPORT with the same spirit of quality improvement. The current regulatory framework and the concept of foreseeable research risks is insufficient to advance the debate about the ethics of randomization of standard clinical interventions. This article uses (...) the example of the Wisconsin cystic fibrosis randomized clinical trial for newborn screening trial to explore the distinctions between risks of research and clinical care and waivers of informed consent for randomization. Collaborative exploration of these complex policy issues is needed and further deliberation, community engagement, and social science research will be critical to advance novel approaches for informed consent. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 90-91.

As a metaphysical theory, radical ontic structural realism is characterised mainly in terms of the ontological primacy it places on relations and structures, as opposed to the individual relata and objects that inhabit these relations/structures. The most popular criticism of ROSR is that its central thesis is incoherent. Bain attempts to address this criticism by arguing that the mathematical language of category theory allows for a coherent articulation of ROSR’s key thesis. Subsequently, Wüthrich and Lam and Lal and Teh have (...) criticised Bain’s arguments and claimed that category theory fares no better than set theory in coherently articulating the main ideas of ROSR. In this paper, we defend Bain’s main arguments against these critiques, and attempt to elaborate on the sense in which category theory can be seen as providing a coherent articulation of ROSR. We also consider the relationship between ROSR and Categorical Quantum Mechanics. (shrink)

Lies are typically defined as believed falsehoods asserted with the intention of deceiving the hearer. A particularly problematic case for this definition is that of false implicatures. These are prototypically cases where the proposition expressed by the speaker's utterance is true, yet an implicature conveyed by this proposition in context is false. However, implicature is a diverse category and whether a blanket statement such as “false implicatures are lies,” as some have argued can account for all of them is open (...) to investigation. We present an experimental investigation of whether naïve participants define different types of implicatures as lies. Our results show that only a couple of types of implicatures were strongly rated as lies by participants. These results suggest that participants distinguish between different types of communicated meanings on linguistic grounds, contributing both to the literature on lying, as well as to theoretical discussions of how different types of meaning are communicated. (shrink)

The discussion about the double inscription of the political is a familiar trope among progressive thinkers, whose discussions have focused primarily on the ontological presuppositions of the political at the expense of a theoretical reflection on politics. This article shifts the emphasis to the latter. It develops an image of thought of our political actuality that moves beyond the commonplace observation that politics exceeds electoral representation. Its underlying assumption is that modernity is characterized by a continual process of political territorialization (...) and re-territorialization whereby the political frontier has experienced a series of displacements along a migratory arc that goes from the sovereign state to liberal party democracies. However, it does not stop there, for as politics colonizes new domains and carves up novel places of enunciation, the cartography we inherited from democratic liberalism experiences a Copernican de-centring that throws us into a scenario best described as an archipelago of political domains. This announces the becoming-other of politics, the post-liberal setting of our political actuality. (shrink)

This new collection of philosophically rigorous essays critiques the interpretation of divine omniscience known as open theism, focusing primarily on philosophically motivated open theism and positing arguments that reject divine knowledge of future contingents in the face of the dilemma of freedom and foreknowledge. The sixteen new essays in this collection, written by some of the most renowned philosophers on the topic of divine providence, represent a philosophical attempt to seriously consider open theism. They cover a wide variety of issues, (...) including: the ontology of time, systematic metaphysics, perfect being theology, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, the problem of evil, and the nature of divine knowledge in general. _Philosophical Essays Against Open Theism _advances the discussion by wrestling against the assertions of open theism, and will be of interest to both proponents and opponents of this controversial issue. (shrink)

The argument for modal collapse is partly responsible for the widespread rejection of the so-called Principle of Sufficient Reason in recent times. This paper discusses the PSR against the background of the recent debate about grounding and develops principled reasons for rejecting the argument from modal collapse.

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 4, Page 348-355, May 2022.

In this article, I examine the relationship between physical quantities and physical states in quantum theories. I argue against the claim made by Arageorgis that the approach to interpreting quantum theories known as Algebraic Imperialism allows for “too many states.” I prove a result establishing that the Algebraic Imperialist has very general resources that she can employ to change her abstract algebra of quantities in order to rule out unphysical states.

The paper begins by contrasting the unitary nature of conscious experience with the demonstrable localization of neural events. Philosophers and neuroscientists have developed models to account for this paradox, but they have yet to be tested empirically. The author proposes a `Conscious Mental Field', which is produced by, but is phenomenologically distinct from, brain activity. The hypothesis is, in principle, open to experimental verification. The paper suggests appropriate surgical procedures and some of the difficulties that would need to be overcome (...) in such an experiment. (shrink)

The concept of hospitality has seen a strong revival in the literature on migration and among pro-migrant activists. However, its meaning, its scope, and the nature of the obligations it imposes remain contested. Open-border advocates see hospitality as a moral principle of openness that should trump nationalist arguments for closure, while nationalists tap into the home analogy and compare the state to a household welcoming migrants as guests, whose stay should accordingly be temporary and marked by gratitude. Some consider hospitality (...) a virtue that should translate into a personal responsibility to open one’s doors to others, while some politicise the concept to apply it to borders and state duties towards migrants. This paper unpacks the various literal and metaphorical meanings of the age-old concept of hospitality, and the shortcomings of its rhetorical uses. It then argues for a conception of hospitality as a principle of care towards displaced people. Hospitality alleviates ordinary obstacles that prevent a functional life in a new environment and allows for home-making practices. It is triggered by the vulnerability created by displacement, i.e., the material, emotional and political harms resulting from the loss of a home. (shrink)

Translation of Oskar Becker’s “Transcendence and Paratranscendence” (1937). The essay is the first announcement of Becker’s project of “paraontology,” a phenomenological investigation of essence that attempted to encompass both mathematical and “natural” entities (which he took to include racial identity).

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 102-103.

The use of statistics in medical research has been compared to a religion: it has its high priests, supplicants, and orthodoxy. Although the comparison may be more unfair to religion than to research, a useful lesson can nonetheless be drawn: the practice of clinical research may benefit—as does the spirit—from critical self-examination. Arguably, no aspect of the conduct of clinical trials is currently more controversial—and thus in as dire need of critical examination—than the use of placebo controls. The ethical and (...) scientific controversies associated with placebo-controlled trials, never far below the surface, have once again seized public attention. Clearly, concern about these issues within the professional community runs deep and wide, as evidenced by the volume of response generated by Kenneth Rothman and Karin Michels's recent Critique. Criticisms of the use of placebo controls in clinical research are scattered through the literatureo; our objective is to present the case against placebos in a compendious form that takes account of scientific and statistical as well as normative issues. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to examine and clarify the truth theory of American pragmatism. Three central ideas of this truth theory will be considered in light of Whitehead's metaphysics: a rejection of the correspondence theory of truth, a defense of fallibilism, and a recognition of the temporality of truth.

In this pilot study, deliberate practice and competence-based assessment were incorporated into a first-year graduate course on professional issues and ethics. Students responded to challenging simulations of basic ethical situations in therapy before and after the course. Aspects of deliberate practice were incorporated into the course. Student self-report ratings and independent performance ratings blind to timing found improvements in students’ ability to manage basic ethical situations in practice. Pilot evidence suggests competence-based assessment and training have potential use for training students (...) preparing to engage in their first therapy practicum experiences. Additional controlled studies are needed to examine the benefits of competence-based assessment and training. (shrink)

At least some of your beliefs are commitments. When you believe that P as a commitment, your stance on P is such that you believe it on the basis of your considered judgement. Sometimes, you also believe that you believe P. Such self‐beliefs can also be commissive in a sense, as when they are reflective endorsements of your lower‐order commissive beliefs. In this paper I argue that one's commissive self‐beliefs ontologically constitute one's lower‐order commissive beliefs because one's commissive self‐beliefs instantiate (...) the same inferential dispositions that are constitutive of one's lower‐order commissive beliefs. Constitutive relations between commissive self‐beliefs and first‐order commissive beliefs are maximally epistemically secure because they do not result from any epistemic procedure by which one must try (and possibly fail) to detect one's first‐order commissive beliefs. This maximal epistemic security suffices to warrant one's commissive self‐beliefs, such that one possesses commissive self‐knowledge of an especially privileged sort. (shrink)

The problem of deviant causation has been a serious obstacle for causal theories of action. We suggest that attending to the problem of deviant causation reveals two related problems for causal theories. First, it threatens the reductive ambitions of causal theories of intentional action. Second, it suggests that such a theory fails to account for how the agent herself is guided by her reasons. Focusing on the second of these, we argue that the problem of guidance turns out to be (...) related to a number of other issues in the literature on action explanation, and that it is much more general: it threatens not only causal theories but any theory of action. Finally, we suggest that a certain version of the view that acting has a constitutive or formal aim can overcome this problem. (shrink)