Against the contention of David Lewis Philosophy and Public Affairs 8, 235–240, that the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a Newcomb Problem, José Luis Bermúdez Analysis 73, 423–429, has urged that Lewis’s assimilation removes the very outcome scenarios that make the Dilemma so puzzling. I objected that this criticism of Lewis presupposes that the Dilemma is harder to resolve than Newcomb’s Problem, in effect challenging Bermúdez to justify this assumption. In his 2015 he takes up the challenge, arguing that while the former (...) presents a problem of strategic choice the latter is problem of parametric choice. I argue here that appeal to the distinction between these two kinds of choice cannot sustain the rejection of Lewis’s view. (shrink)

In Bermúdez 2013 I argued against David Lewis’s well-known and widely accepted claim that Newcomb’s problem and the prisoner’s dilemma are really notational variants of a single problem. Mark Walker’s paper in this journal takes issue with my argument. In this note I show how Walker’s criticisms are misplaced. The problems with Walker’s argument point to more general and independently interesting conclusions about, first, the relation between deliberation and decision and, second, the differences between the prisoner’s dilemma, which is a (...) strategic choice problem, and Newcomb’s problem, which is a parametric choice problem. (shrink)

David Lewis argued that Newcomb’s Problem and the Prisoner’s Dilemma are “one and the same problem” or, to be more precise, that the Prisoner’s Dilemma is nothing else than “two Newcomb problems side by side” (Lewis Philosophy and Public Affairs 8:235–240, 1979 : 235). It has been objected that his argument fails to take into account certain epistemic asymmetries which undermine the one-problem thesis. Sobel ( 1985 ) acknowledges that many tokens satisfy the structural requirements of both problems, while questioning (...) the generality of the thesis. Bermúdez (Analysis 73:423–429, 2013 ), on the other hand, argues that there is a deeper structural conflict between the two problems in the sense that the epistemic requirements that give Newcomb’s Problem its force are precisely those that prevent it from being a Prisoner’s Dilemma. I argue that the epistemic asymmetry objections raised by Sobel and Bermúdez fail to undermine the one-problem thesis. A different type of objection raised by Bermúdez, one which relies on the contrast between parametric and strategic choices, fares no better. Although NP is a problem that has been primarily studied for its implications to decision theory, it contains enough game theoretic elements to justify the claim that a juxtaposition of two such problems can be thought of as a strategic game. (shrink)