Bayesian Orgulity

Philosophy of Science 80 (4):483-503 (2013)
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Abstract

A piece of folklore enjoys some currency among philosophical Bayesians, according to which Bayesian agents that, intuitively speaking, spread their credence over the entire space of available hypotheses are certain to converge to the truth. The goals of the present discussion are to show that kernel of truth in this folklore is in some ways fairly small and to argue that Bayesian convergence-to-the-truth results are a liability for Bayesianism as an account of rationality, since they render a certain sort of arrogance rationally mandatory.

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Gordon Belot
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Citations of this work

Being Rational and Being Wrong.Kevin Dorst - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23 (1).
Exploring by Believing.Sara Aronowitz - 2021 - Philosophical Review 130 (3):339-383.
Persistent Disagreement and Polarization in a Bayesian Setting.Michael Nielsen & Rush T. Stewart - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (1):51-78.
Bayesian Epistemology.William Talbott - 2006 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Bayesian humility.Adam Elga - 2016 - Philosophy of Science 83 (3):305-323.

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References found in this work

Scientific reasoning: the Bayesian approach.Peter Urbach & Colin Howson - 1993 - Chicago: Open Court. Edited by Peter Urbach.
Theory and Evidence.Clark N. Glymour - 1980 - Princeton University Press.
The Foundations of Statistics.Leonard J. Savage - 1956 - Philosophy of Science 23 (2):166-166.
The Foundations of Statistics.Leonard J. Savage - 1954 - Synthese 11 (1):86-89.

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