The evidential relevance of self-locating information

Philosophical Studies 166 (1):185-202 (2013)
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Abstract

Philosophical interest in the role of self-locating information in the confirmation of hypotheses has intensified in virtue of the Sleeping Beauty problem. If the correct solution to that problem is 1/3, various attractive views on confirmation and probabilistic reasoning appear to be undermined; and some writers have used the problem as a basis for rejecting some of those views. My interest here is in two such views. One of them is the thesis that self-locating information cannot be evidentially relevant to a non-self-locating hypothesis. The other, a basic tenet of Bayesian confirmation theory, is the thesis that an ideally rational agent updates her credence in a non-self-locating hypothesis in response to new information only by conditionalization. I argue that we can disprove these two theses by way of cases that are much less puzzling than Sleeping Beauty. I present two such cases in this paper

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Kaila Draper
University of Delaware

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References found in this work

The theory of probability.Hans Reichenbach - 1949 - Berkeley,: University of California Press.
Nomic Probability and the Foundations of Induction.John L. Pollock - 1990 - New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
Sleeping beauty: Reply to Elga.David Lewis - 2001 - Analysis 61 (3):171–76.
Some Problems for Conditionalization and Reflection.Frank Arntzenius - 2003 - Journal of Philosophy 100 (7):356-370.

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