No one can serve two epistemic masters

Philosophical Studies 175 (10):2389-2398 (2018)
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Abstract

Consider two epistemic experts—for concreteness, let them be two weather forecasters. Suppose that you aren’t certain that they will issue identical forecasts, and you would like to proportion your degrees of belief to theirs in the following way: first, conditional on either’s forecast of rain being x, you’d like your own degree of belief in rain to be x. Secondly, conditional on them issuing different forecasts of rain, you’d like your own degree of belief in rain to be some weighted average of the forecast of each. Finally, you’d like your degrees of belief to be given by an orthodox probability measure. Moderate ambitions, all. But you can’t always get what you want.

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Author's Profile

J. Dmitri Gallow
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (PhD)

References found in this work

Epistemology of disagreement: The good news.David Christensen - 2007 - Philosophical Review 116 (2):187-217.
Humean Supervenience Debugged.David Lewis - 1994 - Mind 103 (412):473--490.
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.

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