EditorialA retrospective on Isaac Levi: June 30, 1930 – December 25, 2018
Section snippets
Early years
Levi's parents were Canadians by birth. (Their parents had emigrated from Lithuania and Galicia.) Levi's father was a Rabbi, who trained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. That is where Isaac was born (June 30, 1930). The family moved frequently, as his father was a somewhat itinerant Rabbi: Birmingham, Alabama; Auburn, New York; and in 1941 the family moved to Sydney, Australia, prior to the Pearl Harbor attack. In 1942, still in Australia, Levi's father joined the US Army,
Acceptance as a cognitive decision
In two early works [7] (1960) Must the Scientist Make Value Judgments? and [8] (1962) On the Seriousness of Mistakes, Levi argues (contra R. Rudner) that the values reflected in statistical type-1 and type-2 errors may formalize distinct cognitive, scientific values that are not to be conflated with economic, ethical, or political values. Belief acceptance – a voluntary act to adopt a new, full belief B in answer to a well posed “which?” question – is Levi's account of how to apply common
Fallible versus corrigible full belief
But this epistemic story is sorely lacking if there is no guidance about how to correct error. The agent may create a contradiction in her/his corpus by a routine expansion. For remedying that, Levi distinguishes between the certainty and the corrigibility of a full belief. Chapter 1-3 in Levi's 1980 book, The Enterprise of Knowledge, emphasizes the importance of this distinction.
A rational agent's full beliefs serve as an epistemic resource by contributing to the framing of serious
Social agents
In a 1982 essay, Conflict and Social Agency, Levi advocates for recognition of social agents. But the common economic view is that a social agent – thought of as a corporate entity composed of individual agents – cannot satisfy the same standards of economic rationality as that is required of an individual agent. One can read the second half of Savage's (1954) classic, [28] The Foundations of Statistics, as an attempt to find a suitable weakening of his theory of individual rationality that
Statistical inference
Levi's treatment of chance (i.e., objective probability) makes him a pluralist regarding the semantics of mathematical probability: The mathematical theory of probability is used both in his theory of credence for an agent, and in his account of chance. In Levi's approach, each of (determinate) credence and chance is a disposition predicate involving probabilities.
Using ideas presented a 1964 collaboration with S. Morgenbesser, [26] Belief and Dispositions, in chapter 11 of his [12] book, Levi
Concluding remarks
There is much more to Levi's Pragmatism: a wealth of useful distinctions that are not touched in this summary. He is not shy about tackling some of the eternal, big problems in Philosophy where those intersect his program. For one such example, I point the reader to Levi's discussion of the old question of free-will versus foreknowledge of one's own choices. The problem was live for W. James in his [4] Dilemma of Determinism. James asks, can there be chance present in the world (which for James
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