Bayesian Humility.
Say that an agent is epistemically humble if she is less than fully confident that her opinions will converge to the truth, given appropriate evidence. Is such humility rationally permissible? According to Gordon Belot's orgulity argument: the answer is yes, but long-run convergence-to-the-truth the...
| Published in: | Philosophy of Science Vol. 83; no. 3; pp. 305 - 324 |
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| Format: | Article |
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Cambridge University Press
Jul2016
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| Summary: | Say that an agent is epistemically humble if she is less than fully confident that her opinions will converge to the truth, given appropriate evidence. Is such humility rationally permissible? According to Gordon Belot's orgulity argument: the answer is yes, but long-run convergence-to-the-truth theorems force Bayesians to answer no. That argument has no force against Bayesians who reject countable additivity as a requirement of rationality. Such Bayesians are free to count even extreme humility as rationally permissible. Furthermore, dropping countable additivity does not render Bayesianism more vulnerable to the charge that it is excessively subjective. |
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