Updating as Communication

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (2):225-248 (2012)
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Abstract

Traditional procedures for rational updating fail when it comes to self-locating opinions, such as your credences about where you are and what time it is. This paper develops an updating procedure for rational agents with self-locating beliefs. In short, I argue that rational updating can be factored into two steps. The first step uses information you recall from your previous self to form a hypothetical credence distribution, and the second step changes this hypothetical distribution to reflect information you have genuinely learned as time has passed. While the second step resembles traditional procedures of updating by conditionalization, the first is best understood by analogy to traditional models of how agents transmit self-locating opinions through ordinary interpersonal communication.

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Sarah Moss
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Citations of this work

How I learned to stop worrying and love probability 1.Daniel Greco - 2015 - Philosophical Perspectives 29 (1):179-201.
The Myth of the De Se.Ofra Magidor - 2015 - Philosophical Perspectives 29 (1):249-283.
An Accuracy Based Approach to Higher Order Evidence.Miriam Schoenfield - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 96 (3):690-715.

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References found in this work

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Fact, Fiction, and Forecast.Nelson Goodman - 1965 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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