The value of truth: a reply to Howson

Analysis 75 (3):413-424 (2015)
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Abstract

Colin Howson has recently argued that accuracy arguments for probabilism fail because they assume a privileged ‘coding’ in which TRUE is assigned the value 1 and FALSE is assigned the value 0. I explain why this is wrong by first showing that Howson’s objections are based on a misconception about the way in which degrees of confidence are measured, and then reformulating the accuracy argument in a way that manifestly does not depend on the coding of truth-values. Along the way, I will explain how to formulate the laws of probability and rational expectation in a scale-invariant way, and how to properly understand the values of the credence functions that we use to represent rational degrees of confidence

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James M. Joyce
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Citations of this work

A Representation Theorem for Frequently Irrational Agents.Edward Elliott - 2017 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 46 (5):467-506.
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References found in this work

A nonpragmatic vindication of probabilism.James M. Joyce - 1998 - Philosophy of Science 65 (4):575-603.
Accuracy and Coherence: Prospects for an Alethic Epistemology of Partial Belief.James M. Joyce - 2009 - In Franz Huber & Christoph Schmidt-Petri (eds.), Degrees of belief. London: Springer. pp. 263-297.
What probability probably isn't.Colin Howson - 2015 - Analysis 75 (1):53-59.

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