Updating on the Credences of Others: Disagreement, Agreement, and Synergy

Philosophers' Imprint 16 (11):1-39 (2016)
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Abstract

We introduce a family of rules for adjusting one's credences in response to learning the credences of others. These rules have a number of desirable features. 1. They yield the posterior credences that would result from updating by standard Bayesian conditionalization on one's peers' reported credences if one's likelihood function takes a particular simple form. 2. In the simplest form, they are symmetric among the agents in the group. 3. They map neatly onto the familiar Condorcet voting results. 4. They preserve shared agreement about independence in a wide range of cases. 5. They commute with conditionalization and with multiple peer updates. Importantly, these rules have a surprising property that we call synergy - peer testimony of credences can provide mutually supporting evidence raising an individual's credence higher than any peer's initial prior report. At first, this may seem to be a strike against them. We argue, however, that synergy is actually a desirable feature and the failure of other updating rules to yield synergy is a strike against them.

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Author Profiles

Joel D. Velasco
Texas Tech University
Kenny Easwaran
University of California, Irvine
Luke Fenton-Glynn
University College London
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Citations of this work

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Belief dependence: How do the numbers count?Zach Barnett - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (2):297-319.
Social epistemology.Alvin I. Goldman - 2001 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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References found in this work

The meaning of 'meaning'.Hilary Putnam - 1975 - Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7:131-193.
Epistemology of disagreement: The good news.David Christensen - 2007 - Philosophical Review 116 (2):187-217.
Reflection and disagreement.Adam Elga - 2007 - Noûs 41 (3):478–502.

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