Posted in Puzzles and Paradoxes on Apr 30th, 2009
A friend and colleague of mine recently sent me some thoughts and questions pertaining to Peirce, probabilities, and single cases. I’d be very interested in getting others’ thoughts on this. Thus, here (with his permission) is an excerpt from my friend’s email: I was thinking about the problem of the single case today, and I [...]
Posted in Puzzles and Paradoxes on Apr 27th, 2009
I have recently written up a very short paper, in which I suggest that an old puzzle from the Martin Gardner books, known as the ‘Second Ace’ puzzle, could be used as a counterexample to van Fraassen’s reflection principles and their more recent descendants. The puzzle doesn’t seem to have been widely discussed in the [...]
Posted in News on Apr 26th, 2009
We are pleased to announce that the Special Issue III of ABSTRACTA is now available at http://www.abstracta.pro.br/english/Default.asp. Our third Special Issue is dedicated to a symposium on Reliable Reasoning: Induction and Statistical Learning Theory (MIT Press, 2007) by Gilbert Harman and Sanjeev Kulkarni, both from Princeton University. We are proud to publish this critical discussion [...]
Posted in Causation, Counterfactuals on Apr 24th, 2009
I’ve always thought that causal modeling provided a neat way of cashing out the concept of the selection function in Stalnaker’s semantics for counterfactuals. Suppose the antecedent of a counterfactual is a value assignment to a variable, or a conjunction of value assignments to variables. Then relative to a causal model , the closest worlds [...]
Posted in Social Epistemology on Apr 23rd, 2009
The Condorcet Jury Theorem is often cited in support of the thesis that a group is a better truth-tracker than an individual. In other words, suppose there is a group of people, presented with two options and (one of which is true, while the other is false) and the probability of a single member () [...]
3 Calls for Participation May 2009 Second Formal Epistemology Festival Causal Decision Theory and Scoring Rules May 29-31, 2009 http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ericsw/2fef/ June 2009 Konstanz, June 15, 2009: 4-8pm Luc Bovens (London School of Economics): TBA Commentary by Christoph Schmidt-Petri (Regensburg) Kai Wehmeier (UC Irvine): TBA Commentary by Tobias Rosefeldt (Konstanz) http://www.uni-konstanz.de/philosophie/fe/index.php?article_id=4 July 2009 [...]
Posted in News on Apr 22nd, 2009
The last issue of RSL focuses on formal epistemology: Here is a list of the published articles (and some comments): FORMAL EPISTEMOLOGY, CONTEXT AND CONTENT: INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE ON RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN FORMAL EPISTEMOLOGY HORACIO ARLÓ-COSTA BELIEF-REVISION, THE RAMSEY TEST, MONOTONICITY, AND THE SO-CALLED IMPOSSIBILITY RESULTS: NEIL TENNANT EXPECTED CONTENT: JEFFREY HELZNER CONTEXTUAL LOGIC [...]
Posted in News on Apr 21st, 2009
Formal Methods in the Epistemology of Religion Date: June 10-12 2009 @ KU Leuven (Leuven, Belgium) Organizers: Dr Jake Chandler and Dr Victoria Harrison Conference website: http://formalphilosophy.org/fmer Keynote speakers: Paul Bartha (British Columbia): “Many Gods, Many Wagers” Branden Fitelson & Lara Buckak (Berkeley): TBA Alan Hajek (ANU): “Blaise and Bayes” Tim & Lydia McGrew (Western [...]
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