Online research in philosophy

This paper explores how the Bayesian program benefits from allowing for objective chance as well as subjective degree of belief. It applies David Lewis’s Principal Principle and David Christensen’s principle of informed preference to defend Howard Raiffa’s appeal to preferences between reference lotteries and scaling lotteries to represent degrees of belief. It goes on to outline the role of objective lotteries in an application of rationality axioms equivalent to the existence of a utility assignment to represent preferences in Savage’s famous (...) omelet example of a rational choice problem. An example motivating causal decision theory illustrates the need for representing subjunctive dependencies to do justice to intuitive examples where epistemic and causal independence come apart. We argue to extend Lewis’s account of chance as a guide to epistemic probability to include De Finetti’s convergence results. We explore Diachronic Dutch book arguments as illustrating commitments for treating transitions as learning experiences. Finally, we explore implications for Martingale convergence results for motivating commitment to objective chances. (shrink)

The frame problem was originally a problem for Artificial Intelligence, but philosophers have interpreted it as an epistemological problem for human cognition. As a result of this reinterpretation, however, specifying the frame problem has become a difficult task. To get a better idea of what the frame problem is, how it gives rise to more general problems of relevance, and how deep these problems run, I expound six guises of the frame problem. I then assess some proposed heuristic solutions to (...) the frame problem; I show that these proposals misunderstand, and fail to address, an important aspect of the frame problem. Finally, I argue that though human cognition does not solve the frame problem in its epistemological guise, human cognition avoids some of the epistemological worries. (shrink)

Chow's book should be read only by those who already have a firm enough grasp of the logic of significance testing to separate the few valid, insightful points from the many incorrect statements and misrepresentations.

We argue that Chow's defense of hypothesis-testing procedures attempts to restore an aura of objectivity to the core procedures, allowing these to take on the role of judgment that should be reserved for the researcher. We provide a brief overview of what we call the historical case against hypothesis testing and argue that the latter has led to a constrained and simplified conception of what passes for theory in psychology.

Chow's monograph exhibits four prototypical symptoms of psychology's enduring scientific crisis: (a) it equates empirical science with statistical analysis; (b) it settles for qualitative rather than quantitative theories; (c) it ignores the role of ecological validity in the generalizability of theories; and (d) it puts rigid adherence to arbitrary but documentable rules over critical thinking about the meaning of results.