Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
7-2025
Abstract
Consider the following claims: 1. Rational credences are real-valued. 2. A rational agent is more confident in than in just in case appropriate set-theoretic relations between the relevant events and/or appropriate inequalities between her numerical credences, whether conditional or not, hold. 3. If a rational agent’s conditional credence in, given, is greater than her conditional credence in, given, then she is more confident in than in. 4. There are two distinct and particular ways of ordering the events in a lottery over the naturals, for each of which there exists a rational agent whose comparative confidence ordering corresponds to that ordering. Versions of the first three claims have been defended by various authors, though not necessarily in conjunction, and I claim that the fourth is at least plausible. In this paper, I show that the conjunction of these four claims is inconsistent. Thus, at least one claim must be rejected.
Keywords
Bayesian epistemology, Primitive conditional probabilities, Rational credences, Regularity
Discipline
Epistemology | Philosophy
Research Areas
Humanities
Publication
Synthese
Volume
206
First Page
1
Last Page
26
ISSN
0039-7857
Identifier
10.1007/s11229-025-05115-2
Publisher
Springer
Embargo Period
7-21-2025
Citation
THONG, Joshua.(2025). Not staying regular?. Synthese, 206, 1-26.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/4246
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-025-05115-2