The eternal Coin: A puzzle about self-locating conditional credence

Philosophical Perspectives 24 (1):189-205 (2010)
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Abstract

The Eternal Coin is a fair coin has existed forever, and will exist forever, in a region causally isolated from you. It is tossed every day. How confident should you be that the Coin lands heads today, conditional on (i) the hypothesis that it has landed Heads on every past day, or (ii) the hypothesis that it will land Heads on every future day? I argue for the extremely counterintuitive claim that the correct answer to both questions is 1.

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2011

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10.1111/j.1520-8583.2010.00190.x

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Cian Dorr
New York University

Citations of this work

Credal Dilemmas.Sarah Moss - 2014 - Noûs 48 (3):665-683.
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Self-locating Priors and Cosmological Measures.Frank Arntzenius & Cian Dorr - 2017 - In Khalil Chamcham, John Barrow, Simon Saunders & Joe Silk (eds.), The Philosophy of Cosmology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 396-428.
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References found in this work

Attitudes de dicto and de se.David Lewis - 1979 - Philosophical Review 88 (4):513-543.
Reflection and disagreement.Adam Elga - 2007 - Noûs 41 (3):478–502.
Belief and the Will.Bas C. van Fraassen - 1984 - Journal of Philosophy 81 (5):235-256.
What conditional probability could not be.Alan Hájek - 2003 - Synthese 137 (3):273--323.

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