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| A Closer Look at the ‘New’ Principle | |
| Συγγραφέας: Michael Strevens Michael Strevens: A Closer Look at the ‘New’ Principle (pdf, 23 pages) In his 1980 paper ‘A Subjectivist’s Guide to Objective Chance’, David Lewis argued that much of our reasoning about objective probabilities rests on an intuitively compelling rule of inference that Lewis dubbed the ‘Principal Principle’. In its simplest version, the Principal Principle states  that  one  ought  to  set  one’s  subjective  probabilities  equal  to  the corresponding  objective  probabilities,  provided  that  one  has  no ‘inadmissible’  evidence.  (The  principle  will  be  explained  at  greater length below.) At  the  time,  Lewis  announced  that  he  had  one  reservation  about the  Principal  Principle:  it  seemed  to  be  inconsistent  with  the philosophical doctrine of Humean supervenience concerning objective probabilities, or as they are sometimes called, chances. (Again, details will be found below.) In a recent triplet of articles (Lewis 1994, Thau 1994 and Hall 1994), Lewis and two of his associates have concluded that this ‘one reservation’, when examined more closely, is enough to undermine  entirely  the  Principal  Principle  as  we  know  it.  Hall  and Lewis  claim  that  that  principle—now  deemed  the  ‘Old  Principle’—  1  ought  to  be  replaced  with  a  new  rule  they  call  the  ‘New  Principle’. Thau seems to concur. What  we  are  left  with  is  “a  revolutionary  view”,  according  to Thau. The old, intuitive Principal Principle is dead; a new, unfamiliar, yet supposedly more rational principle has taken its place. It is notable, however,  that  none  of  the  three  authors  is  able  to  supply  compelling reasons  to  think  that  the  New  Principle  is  legitimate.  At  best,  the evidence  is  suggestive:  the  New  Principle  does  not  suffer  from  the problems of the old, and it supports approximately the same (intuitive) inferences as the old, in most situations. It is the aim of this paper to supply the necessary justification for the  New  Principle,  though  not  quite  in  accordance  with  the  wishes  of Lewis,  Hall  and  Thau... | |
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