Fair Infinite Lotteries, Qualitative Probability, and Regularity.

A number of philosophers have thought that fair lotteries over countably infinite sets of outcomes are conceptually incoherent by virtue of violating countable additivity. In this article, I show that a qualitative analogue of this argument generalizes to an argument against the conceptual coherence...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Philosophy of Science Vol. 89; no. 4; pp. 824 - 845
Autor principal: DiBella, Nicholas
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Cambridge University Press Oct2022
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:A number of philosophers have thought that fair lotteries over countably infinite sets of outcomes are conceptually incoherent by virtue of violating countable additivity. In this article, I show that a qualitative analogue of this argument generalizes to an argument against the conceptual coherence of a much wider class of fair infinite lotteries—including continuous uniform distributions. I argue that this result suggests that fair lotteries over countably infinite sets of outcomes are no more conceptually problematic than continuous uniform distributions. Along the way, I provide a novel argument for a weak qualitative, epistemic version of regularity.