Who's afraid of undermining?

Erkenntnis 57 (2):151-174 (2002)
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Abstract

The Principal Principle (PP) says that, for any proposition A, given any admissible evidence and the proposition that the chance of A is x%, one's conditional credence in A should be x%. Humean Supervenience (HS) claims that, among possible worlds like ours, no two differ without differing in the spacetime-point-by-spacetime-point arrangement of local properties. David Lewis (1986b, 1994a) has argued that PP contradicts HS, and the validity of his argument has been endorsed by Bigelow et al. (1993), Thau (1994), Hall (1994), Strevens (1995), Ismael (1996), Hoefer (1997), and Black (1998). Against this consensus, I argue that PP might not contradict HS: Lewis's argument is invalid, and every attempt – within a broad class of attempts – to amend the argument fails.

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Peter Vranas
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Citations of this work

Two mistakes about credence and chance.Ned Hall - 2004 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (1):93 – 111.
Two mistakes regarding the principal principle.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2010 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (2):407-431.
Three proposals regarding a theory of chance.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2005 - Philosophical Perspectives 19 (1):281–307.
The anatomy of the big bad bug.Rachael Briggs - 2009 - Noûs 43 (3):428-449.

View all 17 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

On the Plurality of Worlds.David K. Lewis - 1986 - Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell.
Laws and symmetry.Bas C. van Fraassen - 1989 - New York: Oxford University Press.
New work for a theory of universals.David K. Lewis - 1983 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (4):343-377.
Philosophical papers.David Kellogg Lewis - 1983 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Supervenience and mind: selected philosophical essays.Jaegwon Kim - 1993 - New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.

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