Abstract
Against the contention of David Lewis Philosophy and Public Affairs 8(3), 235–240, (1979) that the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a Newcomb Problem, José Luis Bermúdez Analysis 73, 423–429, (2013) has urged that Lewis’s assimilation removes the very outcome scenarios that make the Dilemma so puzzling. I objected (Walker Philosophia, 42, 841–859, 2014) that this criticism of Lewis presupposes that the Dilemma is harder to resolve than Newcomb’s Problem, in effect challenging Bermúdez to justify this assumption. In his 2015 he takes up the challenge, arguing that while the former presents a problem of strategic choice the latter is problem of parametric choice. I argue here that appeal to the distinction between these two kinds of choice cannot sustain the rejection of Lewis’s view.
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Notes
Naturally, that alone does not settle the matter conclusively, for Lewis might have been wrong to suppose that there can be a fully problematic NP “when the agent thinks that it is little better than chance” that the predictive process is reliable. If that is the issue, however, the onus is on Bermúdez to say why he thinks Lewis is mistaken about the point – especially since, to repeat, Arif Ahmed had already pressed Lewis’s view of the matter against Bermúdez (2013) before the publication of Bermúdez’s reply to my 2014. Granted, there is a sense in which one’s inclination to one-box diminishes as one moves from certainty in the reliability of the predictive process towards judging that there is “little better than chance” that it is reliable, as a referee for this journal noted re. an earlier draft of my current rejoinder. But this in itself seems no more significant than the fact than one’s inclination to bet on a given racehorse diminishes in proportion as its record contains fewer wins. In other words, it seems perfectly compatible with insisting that some such preponderant inclination should remain even at the lowest levels of positive probability; or, more accurately, that anyone disposed to one-box at the top end of the probability scale can be under no obligation to make a different choice at the lower end, until the likelihood becomes less than or equal to 0.5. Conversely, to echo the second of the two objections I made to Bermúdez (2013), we need to know why anyone who (like Lewis) is attracted to two-boxing on casual-decision theoretic grounds at the lowest end of the plus 0.5 scale, may not reasonably remain so attracted as the probability of predictive reliability approaches certainty.
References
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Walker, M. T. (2014). The real reason why the prisoner’s dilemma is not a Newcomb problem. Philosophia, 42, 841–859.
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Walker, M.T. Rejoinder to Bermúdez on Lewis, Newcomb’s Problem and the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Philosophia 43, 795–800 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9633-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9633-3