Off-campus access
Using PhilPapers from home?
Click here to configure this browser for off-campus access.
- Richard Bradley (2007). The Kinematics of Belief and Desire. Synthese 156 (3):513-535.Richard Jeffrey regarded the version of Bayesian decision theory he floated in ‘The Logic of Decision’ and the idea of a probability kinematics—a generalisation of Bayesian conditioning to contexts in which the evidence is ‘uncertain’—as his two most important contributions to philosophy. This paper aims to connect them by developing kinematical models for the study of preference change and practical deliberation. Preference change is treated in a manner analogous to Jeffrey’s handling of belief change: not as mechanical outputs of combinations of intrinsic desires plus information, but as a matter of judgement and of making up one’s mind. In the first section Jeffrey’s probability kinematics is motivated and extended to the treatment of changes in conditional belief. In the second, analogous kinematical models are developed for preference change and in particular belief-induced change that depends on an invariance condition for conditional preference. The two are the brought together in the last section in a tentative model of pratical deliberation.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
| Export citation | Other links: eprints.lse.ac.uk springerlink.com springer.com jstor.org | Scholar | At my library 
Similar books and articles
This paper investigates the viability of the Bayesian model of belief change. Van Benthem (2003) has shown that a particular kind of information change typical for dynamic epistemic logic cannot be modelled by Bayesian conditioning. I argue that the problems described by van Benthem come about because the information change alters the semantics in which the change is supposed to be modelled by conditioning: it induces a shift in meanings. I then show that meaning shifts can be modelled in terms of conditioning by employing a semantics that makes these changes in meaning explicit, and that the appropriate probability kinematics can be described by Dempster’s rule. The new model thereby facilitates a better understanding between probabilistic epistemology and dynamic epistemic logic.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | More options ...
| | Scholar | More options ... This article examines Becker's thesis that the hypothesis that choices maximize expected utility relative to fixed and universal tastes provides a general framework for the explanation of behaviour. Three different models of preference revision are presented and their scope evaluated. The first, the classical conditioning model, explains all changes in preferences in terms of changes in the information held by the agent, holding fundamental beliefs and desires fixed. The second, the Jeffrey conditioning model, explains them in terms of changes in both the information held by the agent and changes in her prior beliefs, holding her fundamental desires fixed. The final model, that of generalized conditioning, allows for explanations in terms of changes in the values of all three variables. Key Words: preference change • decision theory • probability • desirability • attitude change.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: eprints.lse.ac.uk ppe.sagepub.com lse.ac.uk dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: eprints.lse.ac.uk ppe.sagepub.com lse.ac.uk dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In this paper Richard Jeffrey's 'Logic of Decision' is extended by examination of agents' attitudes to the sorts of possibilities identified by indicative conditional sentences. An expression for the desirability of conditionals is proposed and, along with Adams' thesis that the probability of a conditional equals the conditional probability of its antecedent given its consequent, is defended by informally deriving it from Jeffrey's notion of desirability and some weak constraints on rational preference for conditional possibilities. Finally a statement is given of a representation theorem establishing the conditions under which a rational agent's preferences for conditionals determines the existence of unique measures (up to choice of scale) of her degrees of belief and desire.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: jstor.org eprints.lse.ac.uk journals.uchicago.edu dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: jstor.org eprints.lse.ac.uk journals.uchicago.edu dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: springer.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: springer.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Bayesian, Jeffrey and Field conditionals are compared and it is shown why the last two cannot be reduced to the first. Maximum relative entropy is used in two kinds of justification of the Field conditional and the dispensability of entropy principles in general is discussed.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: jstor.org journals.uchicago.edu dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: jstor.org journals.uchicago.edu dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... This paper provides new foundations for Bayesian Decision Theory based on a representation theorem for preferences defined on a set of prospects containing both factual and conditional possibilities. This use of a rich set of prospects not only provides a framework within which the main theoretical claims of Savage, Ramsey, Jeffrey and others can be stated and compared, but also allows for the postulation of an extended Bayesian model of rational belief and desire from which they can be derived as special cases. The main theorem of the paper establishes the existence of a such a Bayesian representation of preferences over conditional prospects, i.e. the existence of a pair of real-valued functions respectively measuring the agent’s degrees of belief and desire and which satisfy the postulated rationality conditions on partial belief and desire. The representation of partial belief is shown to be unique and that of partial desire, unique up to a linear transformation.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: springer.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: springer.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ... L. J. Savage and I. J. Good have each demonstrated that the expected utility of free information is never negative for a decision maker who updates her degrees of belief by conditionalization on propositions learned for certain. In this paper Good's argument is generalized to show the same result for a decision maker who updates her degrees of belief on the basis of uncertain information by Richard Jeffrey's probability kinematics. The Savage/Good result is shown to be a special case of the more general result.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: jstor.org journals.uchicago.edu dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: jstor.org journals.uchicago.edu dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Dutch Book arguments have been presented for static belief systems and for belief change by conditionalization. An argument is given here that a rule for belief change which under certain conditions violates probability kinematics will leave the agent open to a Dutch Book.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: jstor.org journals.uchicago.edu public.asu.edu dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: jstor.org journals.uchicago.edu public.asu.edu dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... We contrast Bonanno’s ‘Belief Revision in a Temporal Framework’ [15] with preference change and belief revision from the perspective of dynamic epistemic logic (DEL). For that, we extend the logic of communication and change of [11] with relational substitutions [8] for preference change, and show that this does not alter its properties. Next we move to a more constrained context where belief and knowledge can be defined from preferences [29; 14; 5; 7], prove completeness of a very expressive logic of belief revision, and define a mechanism for updating belief revision models using a combination of action priority update [7] and preference substitution [8].
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | More options ...
| | Scholar | More options ... The question of coherence of rules for changing degrees of belief in the light of new evidence is studied, with special attention being given to cases in which evidence is uncertain. Belief change by the rule of conditionalization on an appropriate proposition and belief change by "probability kinematics" on an appropriate partition are shown to have like status.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: jstor.org journals.uchicago.edu dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: jstor.org journals.uchicago.edu dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Richard Bradley, The kinematics of belief and desire
 Back
All discussions
Start a new thread
|
There are no threads in this forum |
Nothing in this forum yet.
