Abstract
This paper highlights the role of Lewis’ Principal Principle and certain auxiliary conditions on admissibility as serving to explicate normal informal standards of what is reasonable. These considerations motivate the presuppositions of the argument that the Principal Principle implies the Principle of Indifference, put forward by Hawthorne et al. (British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 68, 123–131, 2017). They also suggest a line of response to recent criticisms of that argument, due to Pettigrew (British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 71, 605–619, 2020) and Titelbaum and Hart (British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 71(2), 621–632, 2020). The paper also shows that related concerns of Hart and Titelbaum (Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, 4(4), 252–262, 2015) do not undermine the argument of Hawthorne et al. (2017).
Highlights
Our personal beliefs should be responsive to our evidence
We pick up on the argument of Hawthorne et al (2017), which shows that, given certain auxiliary conditions about the admissibility of additional information, the Principal Principle implies a version of the Principle of Indifference: it implies that a contingent atomic proposition should be believed to degree
Following Lewis, we have suggested that the Principal Principle and its auxiliary admissibility conditions need to explicate normal informal standards of what is reasonable
Summary
European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2021) 11: 36 confident that it will land heads as tails Bayesian epistemology captures such claims by means of principles of rationality that link degrees of belief to objective probabilities (often called chances). We pick up on the argument of Hawthorne et al (2017), which shows that, given certain auxiliary conditions about the admissibility of additional information, the Principal Principle implies a version of the Principle of Indifference: it implies that a contingent atomic proposition should be believed to degree. We defend the argument of Hawthorne et al, by showing that its auxiliary conditions on admissibility are warranted by precisely the same considerations that warrant David Lewis’ Principal Principle itself: normal informal standards of what is reasonable.
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