Abstract
Chalmers (Mind, 125, 499–510, 2016), responding to Braun (Mind, 125, 469–497, 2016), continues arguments from Chalmers (Mind, 120, 587–636, 2011a) for the conclusion that Bayesian considerations favor the Fregean in the debate over the objects of belief in Frege’s puzzle. This short paper gets to the heart of the disagreement over whether Bayesian considerations can tell us anything about Frege’s puzzle and answers, no, they cannot.
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Notes
See Fitts (2014) for more on this.
See, e.g., Frigg and Hartmann (2018).
See Paul (2012) for the persuasive view that metaphysicians also model. More on this in a moment.
For example, while we canonically represent conditionalization as an equation—upon receiving evidence e, an agent should update her credences to cre(⋅) = cr(⋅|e) if defined—we can represent this idea in a multitude of ways, such as the muddy Venn diagram of van Fraassen (1989, p.178).
Eriksson and Hájek (2007) explore the options for what credences are and conclude that we should take them as basic.
See e.g. Chalmers (2011b).
See §11 of Chalmers (2011a) for a probabilistic understanding of scenarios.
Schiffer originally called it this in Schiffer (1978).
This formulation is borrowed form Chalmers (2011c, p.607).
See, especially, the work of Micael Weisberg, e.g., Weisberg (2013).
Or, more technically: a σ-algebra F is a non-empty collection of subsets of X such that
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X ∈ F
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a ∈ F → ac ∈ F
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If {An} is a collection of subsets of F, then \(\bigcup \{A_{n}\}\in F\).
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References
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Fitts, J. Can Bayesianism Solve Frege’s Puzzle?. Philosophia 49, 989–998 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00283-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00283-6