Hacking’s broad claim in this paper is that there are deep connections between Leibniz’s program for a “new kind of logic” and Carnap’s inductive logic program. His more specific thesis is that inductive logic as Carnap imagined it would only be possible if some theory like Leibniz’s were true. ***You can find the original paper… Continue reading Paper Review: The Leibniz-Carnap Program for Inductive Logic
Tag: probability
Paper Review: New Semantics for Bayesian Inference: The Interpretive Problem
The standard Bayesian story goes something like this: probabilities represent a rational agent's degrees of belief. When the agent learns something new she conditions on it, meaning that she updates her probabilities according to Bayes' rule. Importantly, the interpretation of the probability function is that it represents the agent's degrees of belief about how likely… Continue reading Paper Review: New Semantics for Bayesian Inference: The Interpretive Problem
Can one rationally choose to have a child?
Is it rational for me to want to have a child if I cannot know what it will be like to have a child? Laurie Paul, in her book Transformative Experience, argues that this question poses a significant problem for traditional theories of decision-making. Paul holds that many major life decisions are ones in which… Continue reading Can one rationally choose to have a child?
Paper Review: Subjective Probability and the Theory of Games: Comments on Kadane and Larkey’s Paper
Last week I reviewed Kadane and Larkey's paper. In short, the main claim of their paper was that since the solution concepts used in game theory do not depend on the beliefs of the players they are irrelevant to game theory. Haranyi wrote a response to this paper, which it what I will review today.… Continue reading Paper Review: Subjective Probability and the Theory of Games: Comments on Kadane and Larkey’s Paper
Paper Review: Subjective Probability and the Theory of Games
Game theory is the study of the strategic interaction of rational agents. Decision theory is the study of the decision making of a rational agent. Clearly there is something similar about these two fields. What, exactly, is the relationship though? Do they study different aspects of rational action, or do they overlap? If they overlap,… Continue reading Paper Review: Subjective Probability and the Theory of Games
Paper Review: The Rational Status of Quantum Cognition
We've seen before on this blog that we often take probability theory to be the core of rational belief. What we haven't seen before is that our beliefs tend to violate probability theory not just in random ways, which is what you would expect if you thought we were making random mistakes, but systematically, in… Continue reading Paper Review: The Rational Status of Quantum Cognition
Paper Review: Philosophy and the practice of Bayesian statistics
One of the more interesting things I've learned in my life is that our best account of epistemology is that rational beliefs are governed by the probability axioms. Furthermore, there is a specific way in a rational agent updates her beliefs given new evidence---Bayesian conditionalization. Of course there is disagreement on this. At this point… Continue reading Paper Review: Philosophy and the practice of Bayesian statistics
Paper Review: Unified dynamics for microscopic and macroscopic systems
In the wake of the quantum measurement problem there is a constellation of competing theories of quantum mechanics. Any adequate solution to the measurement problem must make predictions that agree with the observed quantum statistics. In particular, the theory must explain why small particles exhibit counter-intuitive behaviour and why this seems to go away at… Continue reading Paper Review: Unified dynamics for microscopic and macroscopic systems
Paper Review: Objective versus Subjective Probability
Hugh Everett III proposed his many worlds (or as he preferred to call it, relative state) formulation of quantum mechanics back in the mid 50s in order to solve the quantum measurement problem. Although it took a while for the theory to gain traction, it (or some form of it) is one of the more… Continue reading Paper Review: Objective versus Subjective Probability
Paper Review: Nonconglomerability for Countably Additive Measures that are not κ-additive
Probability plays a central role in this blog---many of my posts focus on where probability makes contact with philosophy and physics. However, there is also of course the mathematical theory of probability. The mathematics and the;philosophy interact in many ways, often technical results in the mathematics can be important for our work as philosophers. For… Continue reading Paper Review: Nonconglomerability for Countably Additive Measures that are not κ-additive
The Crow's Nest 