Scoring, truthlikeness, and value.

There is an ongoing debate about which rule we ought to use for scoring probability estimates. Much of this debate has been premised on scoring-rule monism, according to which there is exactly one best scoring rule. In previous work, I have argued against this position. The argument given there was...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Synthese Vol. 199; no. 3/4; pp. 8281 - 8299
Main Author: Douven, Igor
Format: Article
Published: Springer Nature Dec2021
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Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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Summary:There is an ongoing debate about which rule we ought to use for scoring probability estimates. Much of this debate has been premised on scoring-rule monism, according to which there is exactly one best scoring rule. In previous work, I have argued against this position. The argument given there was based on purely a priori considerations, notably the intuition that scoring rules should be sensitive to truthlikeness relations if, and only if, such relations are present among whichever hypotheses are at issue. The present paper offers a new, quasi-empirical argument against scoring-rule monism. This argument uses computational simulations to show that different scoring rules can have different economical consequences, depending on the context of use.