Abstract
According to the preference-centric approach to understanding partial belief, the connection between partial beliefs and preferences is key to understanding what partial beliefs are and how they’re measured. As Ramsey put it, the ‘degree of a belief is a causal property of it, which we can express vaguely as the extent to which we are prepared to act on it’ (in: Braithwaite (ed) The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays, Routledge, Oxon, pp 156–198, 1931). But this idea is not as popular as it once was. Nowadays, the preference-centric approach is frequently dismissed out-of-hand as behaviouristic, unpalatably anti-realist, and/or prone to devastating counterexamples. Cases like Eriksson and Hájek’s (Stud Log 86(2):183–213, 2007) preferenceless Zen monk and Christensen’s (Philos Sci 68(3):356–376, 2001) other roles argument have suggested to many that any account of partial belief that ties them too closely to preferences is irretrievably flawed. In this paper I provide a defence of preference-centric accounts of partial belief.
Highlights
The topic of this paper is the metaphysics of partial belief, and in particular the relationship between partial beliefs and preferences
The general approach has been most thoroughly criticised by Eriksson and Hájek (2007), whose preferenceless Zen monk and several closely related counterexamples have suggested to many philosophers that any account of partial beliefs and their measurement that ties them too closely to preferences is irredeemably flawed
We find versions of preference-centrism in the betting interpretation’s somewhat more general cousins, those accounts of partial belief that relate them in some way to preferences via decision-theoretic representation theorems (e.g., Ramsey 1931; Savage 1954; Anscombe and Aumann 1963; Cozic and Hill 2015; see Fishburn 1967)
Summary
The topic of this paper is the metaphysics of partial belief, and in particular the relationship between partial beliefs and preferences. The general approach has been most thoroughly criticised by Eriksson and Hájek (2007), whose preferenceless Zen monk and several closely related counterexamples have suggested to many philosophers that any account of partial beliefs and their measurement that ties them too closely to preferences is irredeemably flawed. There’s a lot to be said in favour of the preference-centric approach to partial belief, and too much of the critical discussion so far has focussed on simplistic caricatures of the views that its advocates endorse. I will explicitly discuss two of them: first, Eriksson and Hájek’s Zen monk example; and second, an important issue raised by Christensen (2001) in what I’ll call his other roles argument. 5 I will argue that the generalised Zen monk problem is of only limited concern to some varieties of preference-centrism.
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