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The evidential relevance of self-locating information.

Authors :
Draper, Kai
Source :
Philosophical Studies. Oct2013, Vol. 166 Issue 1, p185-202. 18p.
Publication Year :
2013

Abstract

Philosophical interest in the role of self-locating information in the confirmation of hypotheses has intensified in virtue of the Sleeping Beauty problem. If the correct solution to that problem is 1/3, various attractive views on confirmation and probabilistic reasoning appear to be undermined; and some writers have used the problem as a basis for rejecting some of those views. My interest here is in two such views. One of them is the thesis that self-locating information cannot be evidentially relevant to a non-self-locating hypothesis. The other, a basic tenet of Bayesian confirmation theory, is the thesis that an ideally rational agent updates her credence in a non-self-locating hypothesis in response to new information only by conditionalization. I argue that we can disprove these two theses by way of cases that are much less puzzling than Sleeping Beauty. I present two such cases in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
00318116
Volume :
166
Issue :
1
Database :
Academic Search Index
Journal :
Philosophical Studies
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
90272424
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0033-2