Goodman's “new riddle”
| Abstract | First, a brief historical trace of the developments in confirmation theory leading up to Goodman’s infamous “grue” paradox is presented. Then, Goodman’s argument is analyzed from both Hempelian and Bayesian perspectives. A guiding analogy is drawn between certain arguments against classical deductive logic, and Goodman’s “grue” argument against classical inductive logic. The upshot of this analogy is that the “New Riddle” is not as vexing as many commentators have claimed (especially, from a Bayesian inductive-logical point of view). Specifically, the analogy reveals an intimate connection between Goodman’s problem, and the “problem of old evidence”. Several other novel aspects of Goodman’s argument are also discussed (mainly, from a Bayesian perspective). | |||||||||
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| 2009-05-15 | |
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Alastair Wilson
University of Birmingham |
Cross-posted from http://mleseminar.wordpress.com/
... You can find the handout for this week here. I thought this was a really good paper, and we didn’t find all that much to criticise in it. It was a bit frustrating not to hear more about Fitelson’s positive story, in particular about the bridge principle that he would endorse instead of the various versions of RTE that he criticises. He’s clearly saving the juicy stuff for his book. In particular, I find it hard to see how he plans to steer a middle ground between the Carnap/Williamson-style ‘a priori priors’ version of objective bayesianism, and the subjective bayesian approach. My naive take on the matter is that you either think that there’s a unique correct set of priors or you don’t. Maybe these priors aren’t a priori knowable (contra the Carnap/Williamson approach), although it seems that a position like this would be committed to complete epistemic rationality being in principle unattainable. I wasn’t sure how strongly Fitelson m ... (read more)
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