Another Attempt to Put Sleeping Beauty to Rest

Abstract

Sleeping Beauty has become like Newcomb's problem used to be: a puzzle where both intuitions and arguments cluster around two competing responses. In both cases, the real interest is in the frameworks that are constructed to treat the problem: causal vs. evidential decision theory in the case of Newcomb's problem, and different accounts of essentially indexical or self-locating belief in the case of Sleeping Beauty. Many of the arguments about Sleeping Beauty have been carried out in a common framework for representing self-locating belief, with alternative responses agreeing about the presuppositions of that framework. I want to question some of these presuppositions and to set the problem up in a way that is only subtly different from the standard formulation, but different in a way that I think is important.